60 



THE MISERIES OF A GRAMMARIAN. 



head and ears in wig, a thing safer than being over head and ears in 

 love, particularly for one who has a call. The doctor's life was as 

 even as his language was correct ; he was virtuous and strictly well- 

 principled, but was generally imposed upon, holding it as a maxim, 

 that the man who fell out about fractions must be a fractious man : 

 in the division of his time he was as regular as a clock, passing from 

 his bed to the breakfast table, and from it to his library, thence to 

 the dinner table and to bed again. In early youth he kept a pony, 

 which had nearly a sinecure place, but he soon grew too corpulent 

 for horse exercise, and parted with his favourite animal to his book- 

 seller. The fatigues of study brought on a kind of daily exhaustion, 

 which he used to correct by the stimulus of a pot of college ale and 

 a bottle of tawney port per diem ; at length the port waged war 

 against his constitution, and he laboured severely under dyspeptia 

 and bile, so that he was (to his great annoyance,) forced from his 

 college and his library into the world. The Bath waters were pre- 

 scribed for him, and he accordingly visited that fashionable place ; 

 but Bath was too dissipated a town for his moral and regular habits. 

 Jle observed that the men lacked honesty, and the women were not 

 (to use his expression,) quite orthodox. He lost his money at whist, 

 and his temper at the tea table. / Now as it was his pride and habit 

 to keep both, the best way he could, with true liberality and charity, 

 he shifted his quarters to Cheltenham ; here he lived alone, and, as 

 he was of a social turn, he sighed for college and the common room, 

 bad puns and honest mirth ; but his health got worse, and he must 

 have the best medical advice. London, therefore, afforded the only 

 resource ; there he hoped to meet with scholars and purity of speech, 

 for the Gloucestershire and Somersetshire dialects set his teeth on 

 edge, and he resolved to get into a respectable boarding house, in 

 order to unbend at dinner time, after the fatigues of morning study, 

 without which he could not exist ; he accordingly got two rooms on 

 a first floor in a comfortable house, where there were a few boarders, 

 and where he expected to enjoy the solace of rational conversation, 

 in which he was well formed to bear his part. His first annoyance, 

 however, was the female servant, whose flippancy of speech, and 

 open w^arfare against grammar, stuck in the doctor's stomach, al- 

 ready deranged by indigestion and bile. 



' Mout I make bold to axe V was her first prefatory address. 



* Thou murderess of plain English,' exclaimed Doctor Qualm, 

 ' axe any thing you please, but pray do not cut up our mother 

 tongue root and branch. I pray thee send thy mistress, and she 

 vi^ill let me know what she wants.' 



