4X)8 Drearyrvit and his Friends. [ 



him in fit cue for a denunciation of the evils of the body politic, and a 

 patriotic indignation at the tyranny of its rulers. 



It were no marvel if a youth, passed in the first instance through the 

 crucible of a remorseless grandmother, afterwards tried in the furnace 

 of an Earthworm, filtered through the sandy alembic of a Gulph, and 

 finally, rolled out and extended in the mangle of a Millwheel, should 

 have come forth into society a ready-made pattern of perfection, a 

 monstrum sine vitio, or at least, a specimen of that kind of popular 

 virtue which is seldom undermined, or endangered, by a too great sus- 

 ceptibility of feeling, or a superabundant allowance of passion. 



But it was not so, for as it is said; that " what is bred in the bone 

 will never come out of the flesh," so I believe it to be just as true, that 

 a cobbler's lapstone can never be converted into a diamond of the first 

 water,, and, that the volition of a milestone (if it have any), is of rather 

 a sedentary nature. For, be it observed, your comet is hardly to be 

 reasoned with, and your stock of wild oats cannot properly be sown 

 until the waste lands be brought into a little cultivation. This may 

 appear to be very madness, but such wide talk will alone fit the nature 

 of the case, and this Suckfist* mode of ratiocination is the closest argu- 

 ment I can afford upon the present occasion. More intelligibly, how- 

 ever, to speak, " All the fair hopes which Millwheel was to have 

 crowned/'' did the young dog Drearywit, with a capricious gamboling 

 and a juvenile unconcern destroy ; and thus 



It so chanced that the father of the youth, or, as I should now say, 

 the young man, took an opportunity one day of giving up just so much 

 of the ghost as he might be supposed to have possessed. The old fellow 

 had been for a long time in a bad way, and there is no doubt but that 

 half an hour's simmer in the pipkin of Medea would have done him a' 

 world of good ; as it was, he had become very aged, with a frequent 

 oppression and weight upon the chest, only to be likened to the burden 

 of a nightmare with an alderman upon its back, or an elephant standing 

 upon one leg for lack of the other three. The death of this respectable 

 gentleman, if it gave rise to any feeling in the breasts of his friends, was 

 of that especial kind, that " doth lie too deep for tears." We were, 

 certainly, in no condition to prove our lineal descent from Niobe ; for 

 I much misgive me, whether the quantity of moisture mustered over 

 his grave might not have been exceeded by a chymical extract from an 

 ounce of tinder, or by the voluntary exudation of a grain of dust. 



The young gentleman was pleased to call this event a happy release, 

 and truly he appeared to consider himself released from any further 

 payment of deference or respect to his quondam advisers ; for he took 

 the very first opportunity of reviling Earthworm, of abusing Gulph, 

 and of ridiculing Millwheel ; and I verily believe, would have had small 

 scruple in dancing over the grave of his grandmother, had he not been 

 withheld by the dread of her posthumous presence in the form of phan- 

 tom, night hag, or succubus. 



For my part, as I find very little pleasure in winking at a blind 

 horse, in whistling to a dead dog, or in arguing with a deaf man ; and 

 as there is no superfluity of fleece and some waste of trouble in the 

 shearing of swine, I very prudently forbore to interfere between my 

 young friend and his plans. Certain I am, that none are so impatient 



* Rabelais. 



