1832.] Drearywit and his Friends. 409 



of advice as those who are most in need of it ; and if one's friends will 

 go to the dogs, it is really no business of ours to see the tails of those 

 animals docked, and their quadrupedal vagaries restrained. 



km* .tlqlllr) CHAPTER FIFTH. 



It was shrewdly suspected of Lorenzo de Medicis, that he possessed 

 two souls, so singular an union did he furnish between virtue and vice. 

 A like predication, slightly modified, might have included Drearywit. 

 Never did a man so flagrantly belie the expectations of his friends, and 

 so perversely turn away from the right path into the most crooked 

 byways and tangled brakes. Instead of that sedate deportment hitherto 

 adopted by the young man under the auspices of his elders and his 

 betters, a reckless and wretched levity was substituted, quite subversive 

 of those principles of serious meditation heretofore inculcated, and alto- 

 gether destructive of that elongation of visage which is the necessary 

 result, if not the type and symbol of them. The party to whom he was 

 indebted for his introduction to the great world the piper, as it were, 

 to whose particular tune he was but too willing to dance, even though 

 he were compelled afterwards to pay such piper, was a young fellow 

 calling himself Harebrain. This hopeful youth, this scatterling, having 

 in an incredibly short period run through his paternal estate, now felt 

 himself reduced to the necessity of living upon the small freehold of his 

 wits ; and, to do the boy justice, as he had never been unwilling to 

 maintain his immediate predecessors in the same exigency, he naturally 

 felt, that he had a strong claim upon the next in rotation. Experience, 

 it is said, makes fools wise, but as neither he nor his disciple considered 

 themselves fools, they were quite above taking any unfair advantage of 

 experience. 



Harebrain, indeed, was constitutionally incapable of resisting any- 

 thing that came before him in the questionable shape of speculative 

 philosophy ; and having been hurried and twisted round in the vortex 

 of dissipation and pleasure, brought an acquired giddiness and volatility 

 to the general stock that admirably aided the headlong propensities of 

 his companion. He was acted upon by every impulse of the moment, 

 and transferred to his friend, on the instant, a portion of the same rage, 

 whatever it might be, that, for the time at least, was, by the energy of 

 its action, consuming his very vitals. Thus, an occasional visit to the 

 hairdresser would have suggested the expediency of importing a vast 

 quantity of Polar bears, and the exhibition of a conjurer would have 

 induced the determination of procuring a Lapland witch or two by way 

 of novelty. He had dived into chymistry, and questioned whether 

 moonbeams might not be potted like cucumbers, and rendered service- 

 able at pleasure as tapers ; and he would fain have bottled the lightning. 

 His pen also had been employed upon a " Dissertation on Mares' Nests," 

 and, " The best means of setting the Thames on fire," not to mention 

 some loose hints on the possibility of building castles in the air, with 

 reflections on the art of making bricks without straw, and other matters 

 of less moment, but, as he conceived, of more difficulty and hazard. 



Here, then, was the kind of Mentor to whom my poor Telemachus of 

 a friend committed himself and his fortune ; and it demanded very little 

 sagacity to foretel, and by no means the optical completeness of an 

 Argus to foresee, that this brace of blockheads were going to the devil 

 in the most handsome and liberal manner. But the case became so 



