was a person disordered in her senses, under | for ever!" This acclamation, however, was the care and tuition of a widow lady her relation, and that in a day or two they should pursue their journey northward to the place of her habitation.

Which may serve to show that true patriot- know the names and characters of the com

boon, sir knight, and thy compliance I demand, before the peacock and the ladies."

Sir Launcelot, astonished at this address, replied, in a lofty strain,-" Valiant squire, thy boon is granted, provided it doth not contravene the laws of the land, and the constitutions of chivalry." Then I crave leave," answered Crabshaw, "to challenge and defy to mortal combat that caitif barber who hath left me in this piteous condition; and I vow by the peacock, that I will not shave my beard, until I have shaved his head from his shoulders: so may I thrive in the occupation of an arrant squire."

Before his master had time to inquire into particulars, they were joined by a decent man in boots, who was likewise a traveller, and had seen the rise and progress of Timothy's disaster. He gave the knight to understand, that Crabshaw had sent for a barber, and already undergone one half of the operation, when the operator received the longexpected message from both the gentlemen who stood candidates at the election. The double summons was no sooner intimated to him, than he threw down his bason, and retired with precipitation, leaving the squire in the suds. Timothy, incensed at this desertion, followed him with equal celerity into the street, where he collared the shaver, and insisted upon being entirely trimmed, on pain of the bastinado. The other, finding himself thus arrested, and having no time to spare for altercation, lifted up his fist, and discharged it upon the snout of Crabshaw, with such force that the unfortunate aggressor was fain to bite the ground, while the victor hastened away, in hope of touching the double wages of corruption.

the mayor, who was himself a manufacturer, had received a very considerable order for exportation, in consequence of which it was believed he would support Mr Vanderpelft with all his influence and credit.

Sir Launcelot, roused at this intelligence, called for his armour, which being buckled on in a hurry, he mounted his steed, attended by Crabshaw on Gilbert, and rode immediately into the midst of the multitude by which the hustings were surrounded, just as Sir Valentine Quickset began to harangue the people from an occasional theatre, formed of a plank supported by the upper board of the public stocks, and an inferior rib of a wooden cage pitched also for the accommodation of petty delinquents.

Though the singular appearance of Sir Launcelot at first attracted the eyes of all the spectators, yet they did not fail to yield attention to the speech of his brother knight, Sir Valentine, which ran in the following strain:-"Gentlemen vreeholders of this here county, I shan't pretend to meake a vine vlourishing speech-I'm a plain spoken man, as you all know. I hope I shall always speak my maind without vear or vavour, as the zaying is. "Tis the way of the Quicksetswe are no upstarts, no vorreigners, nor have we any Jewish blood in our veins; we have lived in this here neighbourhood time out of mind, as you all know; and possess an estate of vive thousand clear, which we spend at whoam, among you, in old English hospitality.-All my vorevathers have been parliament-men, and I can prove that ne'er a one o'um gave a zingle vote for the court since the revolution. Vor my own peart, I value not the ministry three skips of a louse, The knight being informed of these circum- as the zaying is—Í ne'er knew but one stances, told Timothy with a smile, that he minister that was an honest man; and vor should have liberty to defy the barber; but, in all the rest, I care not if they were hanged the mean time, he ordered him to saddle as high as Haman, with a pox tu'on-J_am, Bronzomarte, and prepare for immediate thank God, a vree-born, true-hearted Engservice. While the squire was thus em-lishman, and a loyal, thof unworthy son of ployed, his master engaged in conversation with the stranger, who happened to be a London dealer travelling for orders, and was well acquainted with the particulars which our adventurer wanted to know.

the church-vor all they have done vor Hr, I'd vain know what they have done vor the church, with a vengeance-vor my own peart, I hate all vorreigners, and vorreign measures, whereby this poor nation is It was from this communicative tradesman broken-backed with a dismal load of debt; he learned, that the competitors were Sir and taxes rise so high that the poor cannot Valentine Quickset and Mr Isaac Vander- get bread. Gentlemen vreeholders of this pelft; the first a mere fox-hunter, who de-county, I value no minister a vig's end, d'ye pended for success in this election upon his interest among the high-flying gentry; the other a stock-jobber and contractor, of foreign extract, not without a mixture of Hebrew blood, immensely rich, who was countenanced by his grace of and supposed to have distributed large sums in securing a majority of votes among the yeomanry of the country, possessed of small freeholds, and copyholders, a great number of which last resided in this borough. He said these were generally dissenters and weavers; and that

see; if you will vavour me with your votes and interest, whereby I may be returned, I'll engage one half of my estate that I never cry yea to vour shillings in the pound, but will cross the ministry in every thing, as in duty bound, and as becomes an honest vreeholder in the ould interest-but, if you sell your votes and your country for hire, you will be detested in this here world, and damned in the next to all eternity; so I leave every man to his own conscience."

This eloquent oration was received by his

own friends with loud peals of applause: | the high court of parliament. This is your which, however, did not discourage his com- birthright, inherited from your ancestors, petitor, who, confident of his own strength, ascended the rostrum, or, in other words, an old cask, set upright for the purpose. Having bowed all round to the audience, with a smile of gentle condescension, he told them how ambitious he was of the honour to represent this county in parliament; and how happy he found himself in the encouragement of his friends, who had so unanimously agreed to support his pretensions. He said, over and above the qualification he possessed among them, he had fourscore thousand pounds in his pocket, which he had acquired by commerce, the support of the nation, under the present happy establishment, in defence of which he was ready to spend the last farthing. He owned himself a faithful subject to his majesty king George, sincerely attached to the protestant succession, in detestation and defiance of a popish, an abjured, and outlawed pretender; and declared that he would exhaust his substance and his blood, if necessary, in maintaining the principles of the glorious revolution. "This," cried he, "is the solid basis and foundation upon which I stand."

These last words had scarce proceeded from his mouth, when the head of the barrel or puncheon on which he stood, being frail and infirm, gave way: so that down he went with a crash, and in a twinkling disappeared from the eyes of the astonished beholders. The fox-hunters, perceiving his disaster, exclaimed, in the phrase and accent of the chase," Stole away! stole away!" and, with hideous vociferation, joined in the syivan chorus which the hunters halloo when the hounds are at fault.

The disaster of Mr Vanderpelft was soon repaired by the assiduity of his friends, who disengaged him from the barrel in a tricehoisted him on the shoulders of four strong weavers, and, resenting the unmannerly exultation of their antagonists, began to form themselves in order of battle.

An obstinate fray would have undoubtedly ensued, had not their mutual indignation given way to their curiosity, at the motion of our knight, who had advanced into the middle between the two fronts, and waving his hand as a signal for them to give attention, addressed himself to them, with graceful demeanour, in these words,-"Countrymen, friends, and fellow-citizens, you are this day assembled to determine a point of the utmost consequence to yourselves and your posterity a point that ought to be determined by far other weapons than brutal force and factious clamour. You, the freemen of England, are the basis of that excellent constitution which hath long flourished the object of envy and admiration. To you belongs the inestimable privilege of choosing a delegate properly qualified to represent you in

obtained by their courage, and sealed with their blood. It is not only your birthright which you should maintain, in defiance of all danger, but also a sacred trust, to be executed with the most scrupulous care and fidelity. The person whom you trust ought not only to be endued with the most inflexible integ rity, but should likewise possess a fund of knowledge that may enable him to act as a part of the legislature. He must be well acquainted with the history, the constitution, and the laws of his country; he must understand the forms of business, the extent of the royal prerogative, the privilege of parliament, the detail of government, the nature and regulation of the finances, the different branches of commerce, the politics that prevail, and the connections that subsist among the different powers of Europe; for on all these subjects the deliberations of a house of commons occasionally turn: but these great purposes will never be answered by electing an illiterate savage, scarce qualified, in point of understanding, to act as a country justice of peace; a man who has scarce ever travelled beyond the excursion of a foxchase, whose conversation never rambles farther than his stable, his kennel, and his barn-yard; who rejects decorum as degeneracy; mistakes rusticity for independence; ascertains his courage by leaping over gates and ditches, and founds his triumph on feats of drinking: who holds his estate by a factious tenure: professes himself the blind slave of a party, without knowing the principles that gave it birth, or the motives by which it is actuated; and thinks that all patriotism consists in railing indiscriminately at ministers, and obstinately opposing every measure of the administration. Such a man, with no evil intentions of his own, might be used as a dangerous tool in the hands of a desperate faction, by scattering the seeds of disaffection, embarrassing the wheels of gov ernment, and reducing the whole kingdom to anarchy."

Here the knight was interrupted by the shouts and acclamations of the Vanderpelfites, who cried aloud,"Hear him! hear him! long life to the iron-cased orator." This clamour subsiding, he prosecuted his harangue to the following effect:

"Such a man as I have described may be dangerous from ignorance; but is neither so mischievous nor so detestable as the wretch who knowingly betrays his trust, and sues to be the hireling and prostitute of a weak and worthless minister: a sordid knave, without honour or principle; who belongs to no family, whose example can reproach him with degeneracy, who has no country to command his respect, no friends to engage his affection, no religion to regulate his morals, no conscience to restrain his iniquity,

and who worships no god but Mammon; an insinuating miscreant, who undertakes for the dirtiest work of the vilest administration: who practises national usury, receiving by wholesale the rewards of venality, and distributing the wages of corruption by retail."

In this place our adventurer's speech was drowned in the acclamations of the fox-hunters, who now triumphed in their turn, and hoicksed the speaker, exclaiming,-" Well opened Jowler-to'un, to'un again, Sweetlips! hey, Merry, Whitefoot!" After a short interruption, he thus resumed his dis

course:

tians, as free-born Britons and fellow-citizens; but I perceive you are a pack of venal, infamous scoundrels, and I will treat you accordingly." So saying, he brandished his lance, and riding into the thickest of the concourse, laid about him with such dexterity and effect, that the multitude was immediately dispersed, and he retired without further molestation.

CHAPTER X.

Which showeth that he who plays at bowls will sometimes meet with rubbers.

The same good fortune did not attend Squire Crabshaw in his retreat. The ludicrous singularity of his features, and the half mown crop of hair that bristled from one side of his countenance, invited some wags to make merry at his expense; one of "When such a caitiff presents himself to them clapped a furze-bush under the tail of you, like the devil, with a temptation in his Gilbert, who, feeling himself thus stimulated hand, avoid him as if he were in fact the a posteriori, kicked, and plunged and capered devil-it is not the offering of disinterested in such a manner, that Timothy could hardly love; for what should induce him, who has keep the saddle. In this commotion he lost no affections, to love you, to whose persons his cap and his periwig, while the rabble he is an utter stranger! Alas! it is not a pelted him in such a manner, that before he benevolence, but a bribe. He wants to buy could join his master, he looked like a pillar, you at one market, that he may sell you at or rather a pillory of mud. another. Without doubt his intention is to make an advantage of his purchase; and this aim he cannot accomplish, but by sacrificing, in some sort, your interest, your independency, to the wicked designs of a minister, as he can expect no gratification for the faithful discharge of his duty. But, even if he should not find an opportunity of selling you to ad- SIR LAUNCELOT, boiling with indignation vantage, the crime, the shame, the infamy, at the venality and faction of the electors, will still be the same in you, who, baser than whom he had harangued to so little purpose, the most abandoned prostitutes, have sold retired with the most deliberate disdain toyourselves and your posterity for hire-for a wards one of the gates of the town, on the paltry price, to be refunded with interest by outside of which his curiosity was attracted some minister, who will indemnify himself by a concourse of people, in the midst of out of your own pockets; for, after all, you whom stood Mr Ferret, mounted upon a are bought and sold with your own money-stool with a kind of satchel hanging round the miserable pittance you may now receive, is no more than a pitcher full of water thrown to moisten the sucker of that pump which will drain you to the bottom. Let me therefore advise and exhort you, my countrymen, to avoid the opposite extremes of the ignorant clown and the designing courtier, and choose a man of honesty, intelligence, and moderation, who will"

The doctrine of moderation was a very unpopular subject in such an assembly; and accordingly they rejected it as one man. They began to think the stranger wanted to set up for himself; a supposition that could not fail to incense both sides equally, as they were both zealously engaged in their respective causes. The whigs and the tories joined against this intruder, who, being neither, was treated like a monster or chimera in politics. They hissed, they hooted and they hallooed; they annoyed him with missiles of dirt, sticks, and stones; they cursed, they threatened and reviled, till at length his patience was exhausted.

his neck, and a phial displayed in his right hand, while he held forth to the audience in a very vehement strain of elocution.

Crabshaw thought himself happily de. livered when he reached the suburbs, and proceeded without halting; but his master mingled with the crowd, and heard the orator express himself to this effect.

"Very likely you may undervalue me and my medicine, because I don't appear upon a stage of rotten boards, in a shabby velvet coat and tie-periwig, with a foolish fellow in a motley coat, to make you laugh by making wry faces: but I scorn to use these dirty arts for engaging your attention. These paltry tricks ad captandum vulgus can have no effect but on ideots; and if you are ideots, I do'nt desire you should be my customers. Take notice, I don't address you in the style of a mountebank, or a high German doctor; and yet the kingdom is full of mountebanks, empirics, and quacks. We have quacks in religion, quacks in physic, quacks in law, quacks in politics, quacks in patriotism, "Ungrateful and abandoned miscreants!" quacks in government: High-German quacks, he cried, "I spoke to you as men and chris-that have blistered, sweated, bled, and purged

the nation into an atrophy. But this is not illiterate vagabond, that from idleness turns all; they have not only evacuated her into a quack, and advertises his nostrum in the consumption, but they have intoxicated her public papers. I am neither a felonious drybrain, until she is become delirious; she can salter returned from exile, an hospital stumpno longer pursue her own interest, or indeed turner, a decayed staymaker, a bankrupt rightly distinguish it. Like the people of printer, or insolvent debtor, released by act Nineveh, she can hardly tell her right hand of parliament. I did not pretend to adminfrom her left; but, as a changeling, is daz-ister medicines without the least tincture of zled and delighted by an ignis fatuus, a Will-letters, or suborn wretches to perjure themo'-the-wisp, an exhalation from the vilest selves in false affidavits of cures that were materials in nature, that leads her astray never performed; nor employ a set of ledthrough Westphalian bogs and deserts, and captains to harangue in my praise at all will one day break her neck over some bar- public places. I was bred regularly to the ren rocks, or leave her sticking in some profession of chemistry, and have tried all H- -n pit or quagmire. For my part, if the processes of alchemy; and I may venyou have a mind to betray your country, I ture to say, that this here elixir is, in fact, have no objection. In selling yourselves and the chruseon pepuromenon ek puros, the your fellow-citizens, you only dispose of a visible, glorious, spiritual body, from whence pack of rascals who deserve to be sold-if all other beings derive their existence, as you sell one another, why should I not sell proceeding from their father the sun, and this here elixir of long life, which, if properly their mother the moon; from the sun, as used, will protract your days till you shall from a living and spiritual gold, which is have seen your country ruined? I shall not mere fire, consequently the common and unipretend to disturb your understandings, which versal first created mover, from whence all are none of the strongest, with a hotchpotch moveable things have their distinct and parof unintelligible terms, such as Aristotle's ticular motions; and also from the moon, as four principles of generation, unformed from the wife of the sun, and the common matter, privation, efficient and final causes. mother of all sublunary things. And for as Aristotle was a pedantic blockhead, and still much as man is and must be the compremore knave than fool. The same censure hensive end of all creatures, and the microwe may safely put on that wiseacre Dios- cosm, he is counselled in the Revelation to corides, with his faculties of simples, his buy gold that is thoroughly fired, or rather seminal, specific, and principal virtues? and pure fire, that he may become rich and like that crazy commentator Galen, with his four the sun; as, on the contrary, he becomes elements, elementary qualities, his eight poor when he abuses the arsenical poison; complexions, his harmonies and discords. so that his silver, by the fire, must be calNor shall I expatiate on the alkahest of that cined to a caput mortuum, which happens mad scoundrel Paracelsus, with which he when he will hold and retain the menstruum, pretended to reduce flints into salt; nor the out of which he partly exists, for his own archæus or spiritus rector of that visionary property, and doth not daily offer up the Van Helmont, his simple, elementary water, same in the fire of the sun, that the woman his gas, ferments, and transmutations; nor may be clothed with the sun, and become a shall I enlarge upon the salt, sulphur, and sun, and thereby rule over the moon; that oil, the acidum vagum, the mercury of me- is to say, that he may get the moon under tals, and the volatilized vitriol of other his feet. Now this here elixir, sold for no modern chemists, a pack of ignorant, con- more than sixpence a phial, contains the ceited, knavish rascals, that puzzle your weak essence of the alkahest; the archæus, the heads with such jargon, just as a German- catholicon, the menstruum, the sun, the moon, ized mr throws dust in your eyes, by and, to sum up all in one word, is the true, lugging in and ringing the changes on the genuine, unadulterated, unchangeable, imbalance of power, the protestant religion, maculate, and specific chruseon pepuromeand your allies on the continent; acting like non ek puros." the juggler, who picks your pockets, while he dazzles your eyes and amuses your fancy with twirling his fingers, and reciting the gibberish of hocus pocus; for, in fact, the balance of power is a mere chimera. As for the protestant religion, nobody gives himself any trouble about it; and allies on the continent we have none, or at least none that would raise an hundred men to save us from perdition, unless we paid an extravagant price for their assistance. But, to return to this here elixir of long life, I might embellish it with a great many high sounding epithets; but I disdain to follow the example of every

The audience were variously affected by this learned oration. Some of those who favoured the pretensions of the whig candi. date, were of opinion, that he ought to be punished for his presumption, in reflecting so scurrilously on ministers and measures. Of this sentiment was our adventurer, though he could not help admiring the courage of the orator, and owning within himself that he had mixed some melancholy truths with his scurrility.

Mr Ferret would not have stood so long in his rostrum unmolested, had not he cunningly chosen his station immediately with