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ANECDOTES AND CONVERSATIONS 



Of the Reverend THOMAS BOTHEHDM, S.T.P., Archdeacon of Leatherhead, Rector of 

 Braiutown Parva, cum Mucklepudding, F.A.S., <fec. &c.<fec. 



" Cos! sen vanno 1'arti, e i magisteri, 

 Tutti in rovina, e non 6, clii sollcvi 

 Chiuro ingegno, di cui faoia si sped." ARIOSTO, SATIRE. 



" Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus 

 Tarn can capitis. Hon. 



IT is now many years since I first promised myself the pleasure of 

 committing to paper those passages in the life of an ever-to-be-lamented 

 friend, which came within my own notice, and thus preserving for pos- 

 terity a slight sketch of the domestic hahits and table-conversations of a 

 great man. But procrastination (it has been well observed) is the thief 

 of time ; and the numerous memoranda 1 collected in those happy times, 

 " 0A, nodes ccen&que deum") in which he was yet among us, have for 

 some years lain untouched in the drawers of my bureau. I take shame 

 to myself for this neglect, and the more so when I reflect that in these 

 degenerate days, in which steam-engines have taken precedence of clas- 

 sical lore, and " rude unwashed mechanicals" hold their heads above the 

 doctors in the faculty, the reverence for illustrious public characters has so 

 much diminished. If a " great man's memory in these times may out- 

 live his life," it certainly is not by " building churches :" t( virtus lau- 

 datur et alget ;" and popery and dissent o'erspread the land. At the 

 eleventh hour, therefore, I take up the pen ; and while every paltry play- 

 wright and actor is permitted to thrust forward his two octavo volumes of 

 auto- biography, I shall, ere I descend to the grave, consign to the press, 

 the precious record of the gesta et dicta of Archdeacon Botherum ; and 

 leave behind me, for the benefit of my children, a monument of that 

 intercourse, which, like the friendship of Sir P. Sydney, may be a boast 

 and an ornament to the end of time. I was but seven years old, when 

 the decease of old Zachary Bluebottle prepared the way for Archdeacon 

 Botherum's (he was not then archdeacon) collation to the parish, in 

 which my father had his habitual residence. The presentation to the 

 living is in St. John's College ; and Botherum, who had long had an eye 

 to the mastership, accepted of this collegiate ostracism, I believe, with 

 regret. When a man has been used to be capped by sizers, and to have 

 his jokes laughed at by complaisant fellow-commoners, the obscurity of a 

 remote countrv village is any thing but flattering. Botherum had likewise 

 inveterate college habits ; and was so unprepared for house-keeping, that, 

 (as he used himself facetiously to repeat,) when he left the college gate, 

 one fine summer's morning, to take possession, having four shirts, a pair of 

 black small clothes, and a set of sermons strapped in a portmanteau behind 

 the saddle of his dapple mare, he cried out to the Dean, " mea omnia 

 mecum porto." 



The arrival of the new rector was a great event in our parish. A merry 

 peal was rung from the steeple ; and it was upon this occasion that the 

 curate, who was about to be dismissed, vented his spleen, by giving utter- 

 ance to a joke, afterwards embodied in a Cambridge epigram: for the 

 squire riding into the town, and asking what the meaning of all this noise 



