even without considering the means by which it is possible such a fortune might have been acquired. In the possession of such overgrown wealth, however attained, there is generally more ostentation than pleasure; more pride than enjoyment: I can but guess at the feelings which accompany it, when reaped from desolated provinces, when covered with the blood of slaughtered myriads.

Z.

No. 45. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 10, 1785.

SIR,

TO THE AUTHOR OF THE LOUNGER.

PERHAPS it is vanity in me to suppose that you have been expecting to hear from me, and it is possible, from my first account of myself, may have supposed that there were very melancholy reasons for my silence. But I am, sir, thank God! returned to my native country in no worse condition with respect to health than when I left it. As to peace and happiness, I can't say; my wife thinks her health much the better for our expedition.

Perhaps, sir, I may in time learn to be reconciled to noise and disturbance, and forget my old habits of quiet and care of my health, which my dear deceased friend Dr. Doddipoll had taught me. And yet I do not find that my journey has reconciled me much to the change, though I have had some practice in the way of bustle and adventure, as you will find from a short account of our excursion.

VOL. I.

BB

As the motive of our journey was professedly the re-establishment of my health, I had reason to imagine that it would be conducted in the manner best suited for that purpose. I had made out a little Pharmacopeia of things necessary to be taken along with us on the road; but would you believe it, sir, our new family-physician declared them altogether unnecessary, and our whole medicine chest was made up of one phial, containing two drachms of spirit of hartshorn, and a bottle holding about as many pounds of French brandy. But my wife found room in the carriage for her favourite maid, her Spanish lap-dog, and three band-boxes. Her monkey, who arrived just before we set out, she was with difficulty prevailed on to leave behind under the care of the housekeeper; an acquaintance, indeed, who met us a few miles out of town on the road to England, rode up to my wife's side of the carriage, said he supposed Mr. Dy-soon was following, and pointing to the corner where I was stuck up among the band-boxes, told her he was glad to find she had taken little master Jackoo along with her.

Though Harrowgate was the place of our destination, yet my wife (who was general of this expedition) thought it might be proper to stop at one of the more private watering-places in Cumberland, to initiate us as it were into that sort of life; as young recruits, I am told, are taught to stand their own fire by first flashing their muskets in the pan. We accordingly made a halt at one of those places, with the intention of staying some weeks; but we were very soon tired of it, as the society was by no means genteel enough for my wife to mix in with any degree of satisfaction.

The only people she would allow us to consort with were the family of Sir David Dumplin, a

London merchant, who had been knighted for his eminence in commerce, who had arrived a few days before us with his lady and three daughters, and a captain in the army, who had come thither to recover the fatigues he had suffered during the siege of Gibraltar, and whom Mrs. Dy-soon took great delight in hearing recount his adventures. We amused ourselves during our stay by making the other members of the party ridiculous, though they did not want for jokes against us too. They called me and my wife Death and Sin;' the first I could understand, from my feebleness and bad health; but how they applied the second, neither the captain nor I could ever comprehend ;-they had several jests equally low and unjust against the family of Sir David Dumplin, who they pretended was only a sugar-boiler in Wapping, and had been knighted on occasion of some city address. Sir David himself, to do him justice, behaved in a very civil manner to every body, and, except sometimes when he snored after dinner, never gave the smallest offence to the rest of the company; and as for me, I was always, both in mind and body, inclined to peace and quietness. But Lady Dumplin and her daughters, with my Angelica and the captain, were constantly at war with the other end of the table, which was divided into two hostile and irreconcilable provinces. Their differences might, indeed, have proceeded very disagreeable lengths, had we not contrived to erect a sort of barrier against hostilities, by placing between them Sir David Dumplin on one side, and a Mrs. Dough, wife of a rich baker of Liverpool, on the other, who was naturally of as placid a disposition as Sir David, and had the advantage of being deaf into the bargain. By this politic interposition, the peace was tolerably well preserved; but as the opposite party, the ungenteels, increased daily by new arrivals, and

ours, the genteels, got no accession that we were disposed to allow of, the place became at last so disagreeable, and the laugh so much louder against than for us, that we were obliged to leave it a good deal sooner than we intended, and set off for Harrowgate, in company with our allies, the Dumplin family. The captain found it convenient to remain, having previously deserted from us, on some difference with one of the young ladies, and made his peace with the opposite side, through the mediation of the good-natured Mrs. Dough, with whom (from being used to speak at the siege of Gibraltar I suppose) he contrived frequently to carry on a conversation.

To Harrowgate our gentility attended us; but it was a little unfortunate in not being universally acknowledged. There were some London people of fashion there, who had seen Sir D. Dumplin before, and such as had never seen us did not immediately perceive in Mrs. Dy-soon's face and manner that she had so much good blood in her veins as did actually flow there. This, however, as she was perfectly conscious of it herself, produced numberless bickerings, and at last obliged us to leave the first house we had lodged at, where I had got an excellent quiet apartment, and go to another, where we were much worse accommodated, but where Lady Dumplin and the Hon. Mrs. Dy-soon were the first quality of the set. Here she very fortunately supplied the loss of our Gibraltar Captain, by getting acquainted with an Irish gentleman, Colonel O'Shannon, a relation of ours, our ancestors, as the colonel and Mrs. Dy-soon discovered, having intermarried about the year 1300. The colonel still preserved the kindness of a cousin, attended my wife whereever she went, and made us immediately intimate with all the company in the house. But the kindness had very near proved fatal to me. Between

the bustle of his numerous introductions, the parties he formed for us at home, and the jaunts he made us take to see every thing that was to be seen in the neighbourhood, my poor nerves were perfectly overcome; and though my wife was always telling me it was all for my good, I should have certainly died in their hands, had they not at last discovered, that my wife's seeing the sights and taking the exercise would be as much for the benefit of my health as if I drove about and visited every thing in my own person; and so I verily believe it might, Mr. Lounger, had I been fortunate enough to be left to enjoy quiet, and take care of my health alone. But as my ill stars would have it, I was generally left to the care of a lady, with whom, from her having the same sort of nervous complaints with myself, I had contracted an intimacy, the dowager of an old gentleman, who had, like me, married his wife for a nurse, and who left her after a life of happiness (as she used to tell me) of eighteen months, in possession of his whole fortune. But then her nerves, she said, had been so shattered by his death, that she could find no enjoyment in any thing in this world. The disorder in her nerves, however, was of a kind extremely different from mine. None of that weakness and relaxation which I had experienced from a child; hers, the physicians said, was an extreme tension and irritability. She kept, it seems, a female attendant, who was of the greatest use to her in this complaint: but that attendant had died just before her arrival at Harrowgate, and in this unfortunate interval my acquaintance with her began : so she bestowed all her tension and irritability on me. It makes me quake when I think of her, Mr. Lounger! and yet, though you will call it very silly, I could not for the life of me shake her off. She had become, I don't know how, a sort of cicisbea to

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