NO. VIII.—SATURDAY, APRIL 18, 1807.

BY ANTHONY EVERGREEN, GENT.

“In all thy humors, whether grave or mellow,

Thou’rt such a touchy, testy, pleasant fellow;

Hast so much wit, and mirth, and spleen about thee,

There is no living with thee—nor without thee.”

“Never, in the memory of the oldest inhabitant, has there been known a more backward spring.” This is the universal remark among the almanac quidnuncs, and weather-wiseacres of the day; and I have heard it at least fifty-five times from old Mrs. Cockloft, who, poor woman, is one of those walking almanacs that foretell every snow, rain, or frost, by the shooting of corns, a pain in the bones, or an “ugly stitch in the side.” I do not recollect, in the whole course of my life, to have seen the month of March indulge in such untoward capers, caprices, and coquetries, as it has done this year; I might have forgiven these vagaries, had they not completely knocked up my friend Langstaff; whose feelings are ever at the mercy of a weathercock, whose spirits sink and rise with the mercury of a barometer, and to whom an east wind is as obnoxious as a Sicilian sirocco. He was tempted some time since, by the fineness of the weather, to dress himself with more than ordinary 165care, and take his morning stroll, but before he had half finished his peregrination, he was utterly discomfited, and driven home by a tremendous squall of wind, hail, rain, and snow, or, as he testily termed it, “a most villainous congregation of vapors.”

This was too much for the patience of friend Launcelot; he declared he would humor the weather no longer in its whimwhams; and, according to his immemorial custom on these occasions, retreated in high dudgeon to his elbow-chair to lie in of the spleen and rail at nature for being so fantastical: “Confound the jade,” he frequently exclaims, “what a pity Nature had not been of the masculine instead of the feminine gender; the almanac-makers might then have calculated with some degree of certainty.”

When Langstaff invests himself with the spleen, and gives audience to the blue devils from his elbow-chair, I would not advise any of his friends to come within gun-shot of his citadel with the benevolent purpose of administering consolation or amusement; for he is then as crusty and crabbed as that famous coiner of false money, Diogenes himself. Indeed his room is at such times inaccessible; and old Pompey is the only soul that can gain admission, or ask a question with impunity; the truth is, that on these occasions there is not a straw’s difference between them, for Pompey is as grum and grim and cynical as his master.

Launcelot has now been above three weeks in this desolate situation, and has, therefore, had but 166little to do in our last number. As he could not be prevailed on to give any account of himself in our introduction, I will take the opportunity of his confinement, while his back is turned, to give a slight sketch of his character—fertile in whimwhams and bachelorisms, but rich in many of the sterling qualities of our nature. Annexed to this article, our readers will perceive a striking likeness of my friend which was taken by that cunning rogue, Will Wizard, who peeped through the keyhole and sketched it off, as honest Launcelot sat by the fire, wrapped up in his flannel robe de chambre, and indulging in a mortal fit of the hyp. Now take my word for it, gentle reader, this is the most auspicious moment in which to touch off the phiz of a genuine humorist.

Of the antiquity of the Langstaff family I can say but little; except that I have no doubt it is equal to that of most families who have the privilege of making their own pedigree, without the impertinent interposition of a college of heralds. My friend Launcelot is not a man to blazon anything; but I have heard him talk with great complacency of his ancestor, Sir Rowland, who was a dashing buck in the days of Hardiknute, and broke the head of a gigantic Dane, at a game of quarter-staff, in presence of the whole court. In memory of this gallant exploit, Sir Rowland was permitted to take the name of Langstoffe, and to assume as a crest to his arms a hand grasping a cudgel. It is, however, a foible so ridiculously common in this 167country for people to claim consanguinity with all the great personages of their own name in Europe, that I should put but little faith in this family boast of friend Langstaff, did I not know him to be a man of most unquestionable veracity.

The whole world knows already that my friend is a bachelor; for he is, or pretends to be, exceedingly proud of his personal independence, and takes care to make it known in all companies where strangers are present. He is forever vaunting the precious state of “single blessedness,” and was, not long ago, considerably startled at a proposition of one of his great favorites, Miss Sophy Sparkle, “that old bachelors should be taxed as luxuries.” Launcelot immediately hied him home, and wrote a tremendous long representation in their behalf, which I am resolved to publish if it is ever attempted to carry the measure into operation. Whether he is sincere in these professions, or whether his present situation is owing to choice or disappointment, he only can tell; but if he ever does tell, I will suffer myself to be shot by the first lady’s eye that can twang an arrow. In his youth he was forever in love; but it was his misfortune to be continually crossed and rivaled by his bosom friend and contemporary beau, Pindar Cockloft, Esq., for as Langstaff never made a confidant on these occasions, his friends never knew which way his affections pointed; and so, between them both, the lady generally slipped through their fingers.

It has ever been the misfortune of Launcelot, that he could not for the soul of him restrain a 168good thing; and this fatality has drawn upon him the ill-will of many whom he would not have offended for the world. With the kindest heart under heaven, and the most benevolent disposition under heaven toward every being around him, he has been continually betrayed by the mischievous vivacity of his fancy, and the good-humored waggery of his feelings, into satirical sallies which have been treasured up by the invidious, and retailed out with the bitter sneer of malevolence, instead of the playful hilarity of countenance which originally sweetened and tempered and disarmed them of their sting. These misrepresentations have gained him many reproaches and lost him many a friend.

This unlucky characteristic played the mischief with him in one of his love affairs. He was, as I have before observed, often opposed in his gallantries by that formidable rival, Pindar Cockloft, Esq., and a most formidable rival he was; for he had Apollo, the nine muses, together with all the joint tenants of Olympus, to back him; and everybody knows what important confederates they are to a lover. Poor Launcelot stood no chance; the lady was cooped up in the poet’s corner of every weekly paper; and at length Pindar attacked her with a sonnet, that took up a whole column, in which he enumerated at least a dozen cardinal virtues, together with innumerable others of inferior consideration. Launcelot saw his case was desperate, and that unless he sat down forthwith, be-cherubimed and be-angeled her to the skies, and put every 169virtue under the sun in requisition, he might as well go hang himself, and so make an end of the business. At it, therefore, he went; and was going on very swimmingly, for in the space of a dozen lines he had enlisted under her command at least three-score and ten substantial housekeeping virtues, when unluckily for Launcelot’s reputation as a poet and the lady’s as a saint, one of those confounded good thoughts struck his laughter-loving brain—it was irresistible; away he went, full sweep before the wind, cutting and slashing, and tickled to death with his own fun; the consequence was, that by the time he had finished, never was poor lady so most ludicrously lampooned since lampooning came into fashion. But this was not half; so hugely was Launcelot pleased with this frolic of his wits, that nothing would do but he must show it to the lady, who, as well she might, was mortally offended, and forbid him her presence. My friend was in despair, but, through the interference of his generous rival, was permitted to make his apology, which, however, most unluckily happened to be rather worse than the original offense; for though he had studied an eloquent compliment, yet, as ill luck would have it, a most preposterous whimwham knocked at his pericranium, and inspired him to say some consummate good things, which, all put together, amounted to a downright hoax, and provoked the lady’s wrath to such a degree, that sentence of eternal banishment was awarded against him.

Launcelot was inconsolable, and determined in 170the true style of novel heroics to make the tour of Europe, and endeavor to lose the recollection of this misfortune amongst the gayeties of France and the classic charms of Italy; he accordingly took passage in a vessel, and pursued his voyage prosperously as far as Sandy Hook, where he was seized with a violent fit of sea-sickness; at which he was so affronted that he put his portmanteau into the first pilot-boat, and returned to town completely cured of his love and his rage for travelling.

I pass over the subsequent amours of my friend Langstaff, being but little acquainted with them; for, as I have already mentioned, he never was known to make a confidant of anybody. He always affirmed that a man must be a fool to fall in love, but an idiot to boast of it; ever denominated it the villainous passion; lamented that it could not be cudgeled out of the human heart; and yet could no more live without being in love with somebody or other than he could without whimwhams.

My friend Launcelot is a man of excessive irritability of nerve, and I am acquainted with no one so susceptible of the petty “miseries of human life;” yet its keener evils and misfortunes he bears without shrinking, and however they may prey in secret on his happiness, he never complains. This was strikingly evinced in an affair where his heart was deeply and irrevocably concerned, and in which his success was ruined by one for whom he had long cherished a warm friendship. The circumstance cut poor 171Langstaff to the very soul; he was not seen in company for months afterward, and for a long time he seemed to retire within himself, and battle with the poignancy of his feelings; but not a murmur or a reproach was heard to fall from his lips, though, at the mention of his friend’s name, a shade of melancholy might be observed stealing across his face, and his voice assumed a touching tone, that seemed to say he remembered his treachery “more in sorrow than in anger.” This affair has given a slight tinge of sadness to his disposition, which, however, does not prevent his entering into the amusements of the world; the only effect it occasions is, that you may occasionally observe him, at the end of a lively conversation, sink for a few minutes into an apparent forgetfulness of surrounding objects, during which time he seems to be indulging in some melancholy retrospection.

Langstaff inherited from his father a love of literature, a disposition for castle-building, a mortal enmity to noise, a sovereign antipathy to cold weather and brooms, and a plentiful stock of whimwhams. From the delicacy of his nerves he is peculiarly sensible to discordant sounds; the rattling of a wheelbarrow is “horrible;” the noise of children “drives him distracted;” and he once left excellent lodgings merely because the lady of the house wore high-heeled shoes, in which she clattered up and down stairs, till, to use his own emphatic expression, “they made life loathsome” to him. He suffers annual martyrdom from the razor-edged zephyrs of our 172“balmy spring,” and solemnly declares that the boasted month of May has become a perfect “vagabond.” As some people have a great antipathy to cats, and can tell when one is locked up in a closet, so Launcelot declares his feelings always announce to him the neighborhood of a broom—a household implement which he abominates above all others. Nor is there any living animal in the world that he holds in more utter abhorrence than what is usually termed a notable housewife; a pestilent being, who, he protests, is the bane of goodfellowship, and has a heavy charge to answer for the many offenses committed against the ease, comfort, and social enjoyments of sovereign man. He told me, not long ago, “that he had rather see one of the weird sisters flourish through his keyhole on a broomstick, than one of the servant-maids enter the door with a besom.”

My friend Launcelot is ardent and sincere in his attachments, which are confined to a chosen few, in whose society he loves to give free scope to his whimsical imagination; he, however, mingles freely with the world, though more as a spectator than an actor; and without an anxiety, or hardly a care to please, is generally received with welcome and listened to with complacency. When he extends his hand, it is in a free, open, liberal style; and when you shake it, you feel his honest heart throb in its pulsations. Though rather fond of gay exhibitions, he does not appear so frequently at balls and assemblies since the introduction of the drum, trumpet, and tambourine; 173all of which he abhors on account of the rude attack they make on his organs of hearing: in short, such is his antipathy to noise, that though exceedingly patriotic, yet he retreats every Fourth of July to Cockloft Hall, in order to get out of the way of the hubbub and confusion which make so considerable a part of the pleasure of that splendid anniversary.

I intend this article as a mere sketch of Langstaff’s multifarious character; his innumerable whimwhams will be exhibited by himself, in the course of this work, in all their strange varieties and the machinery of his mind, more intricate than the most subtile piece of clock-work, be fully explained. And trust me, gentle folk, his are the whimwhams of a courteous gentleman, full of most excellent qualities; honorable in his disposition, independent in his sentiments, and of unbounded good nature, as may be seen through all his works.

ON STYLE.

BY WILLIAM WIZARD, ESQ.

Style, a manner of writing; title; pin of a dial; the pistil of plants.—Johnson.

Style, is ... style.—Linkum Fidelius.

Now I would not give a straw for either of the above definitions, though I think the latter is by far the most satisfactory; and I do 174wish sincerely every modern numskull, who takes hold of a subject he knows nothing about, would adopt honest Linkum’s mode of explanation. Blair’s Lectures on this article have not thrown a whit more light on the subject of my inquiries; they puzzled me just as much as did the learned and laborious expositions and illustrations of the worthy professor of our college, in the middle of which I generally had the ill luck to fall asleep.

This same word Style, though but a diminutive word, assumes to itself more contradictions, and significations, and eccentricities, than any monosyllable in the language is legitimately entitled to. It is an arrant little humorist of a word, and full of whimwhams, which occasions me to like it hugely; but it puzzled me most wickedly on my first return from a long residence abroad, having crept into fashionable use during my absence; and had it not been for friend Evergreen, and that thrifty sprig of knowledge, Jeremy Cockloft the younger, I should have remained to this day ignorant of its meaning.

Though it would seem that the people of all countries are equally vehement in the pursuit of this phantom, style, yet in almost all of them there is a strange diversity in opinion as to what constitutes its essence; and every different class, like the pagan nations, adore it under a different form. In England, for instance, an honest cit packs up himself, his family and his style, in a buggy or tim-whisky, and rattles away on Sunday with his fair partner blooming beside him, like an eastern bride, and two chubby children, squatting 175like Chinese images at his feet. A baronet requires a chariot and pair; a lord must needs have a barouche and four; but a duke—O! a duke cannot possibly lumber his style along under a coach and six, and half a score of footmen into the bargain. In China a puissant Mandarin loads at least three elephants with style; and an overgrown sheep at the Cape of Good Hope, trails along his tail and his style on a wheelbarrow. In Egypt, or at Constantinople, style consists in the quantity of fur and fine clothes a lady can put on without danger of suffocation; here it is otherwise, and consists in the quantity she can put off without the risk of freezing. A Chinese lady is thought prodigal of her charms if she expose the tip of her nose, or the ends of her fingers, to the ardent gaze of bystanders; and I recollect that all Canton was in a buzz in consequence of the great belle, Miss Nangfous, peeping out of the window with her face uncovered! Here the style is to show not only the face, but the neck, shoulders, etc.; and a lady never presumes to hide them except when she is not “at home,” and not sufficiently undressed to see company.

This style has ruined the peace and harmony of many a worthy household; for no sooner do they set up for style, but instantly all the honest old comfortable sans cérémonie furniture is discarded; and you stalk cautiously about, amongst the uncomfortable splendor of Grecian chairs, Egyptian tables, Turkey carpets, and Etruscan vases. This vast improvement in furniture demands 176an increase in the domestic establishment; and a family that once required two or three servants for convenience, now employs half a dozen for style.

Bell Brazen, late favorite of my unfortunate friend Dessalines, was one of these patterns of style; and whatever freak she was seized with, however preposterous, was implicitly followed by all who would be considered as admitted in the stylish arcana. She was once seized with a whimwham that tickled the whole court. She could not lay down to take an afternoon’s loll, but she must have one servant to scratch her head, two to tickle her feet, and a fourth to fan her delectable person while she slumbered. The thing took—it became the rage, and not a sable belle in all Hayti but what insisted upon being fanned, and scratched, and tickled in the true imperial style. Sneer not at this picture, my most excellent townswomen, for who among you but are daily following fashions equally absurd?

Style, accordingly to Evergreen’s account, consists in certain fashions, or certain eccentricities, or certain manners of certain people, in certain situations, and possessed of a certain share of fashion or importance. A red cloak, for instance, on the shoulders of an old market-woman is regarded with contempt; it is vulgar, it is odious: fling, however, its usurping rival, a red shawl, over the fine figure of a fashionable belle, and let her flame away with it in Broadway, or in a ball-room, and it is immediately declared to be the style.

177The modes of attaining this certain situation, which entitle its holder to style, are various and opposite: the most ostensible is the attainment of wealth, the possession of which changes at once the pert airs of vulgar ignorance into fashionable ease and elegant vivacity. It is highly amusing to observe the gradation of a family aspiring to style, and the devious windings they pursue in order to attain it. While beating up against wind and tide, they are the most complaisant beings in the world; they keep “booing and booing,” as M’Sycophant says, until you would suppose them incapable of standing upright; they kiss their hands to everybody who has the least claim to style; their familiarity is intolerable, and they absolutely overwhelm you with their friendship and loving kindness. But having once gained the envied preeminence, never were beings in the world more changed. They assume the most intolerable caprices: at one time, address you with importunate sociability; at another, pass you by with silent indifference; sometimes sit up in their chairs in all the majesty of dignified silence; and at another time bounce about with all the obstreperous ill-bred noise of a little hoyden just broke loose from a boarding-school.

Another feature which distinguishes these new-made fashionables, is the inveteracy with which they look down upon the honest people who are struggling to climb up to the same envied height. They never fail to salute them with the most sarcastic reflections; and like so many worthy hodmen, clambering a ladder, each one looks down 178upon his next neighbor below, and makes no scruple of shaking the dust off his shoes into his eyes. Thus by dint of perseverance, merely, they come to be considered as established denizens of the great world; as in some barbarous nations an oyster shell is of sterling value, and a copper washed counter will pass current for genuine gold.

In no instance have I seen this grasping after style more whimsically exhibited, than in the family of my old acquaintance, Timothy Giblet. I recollect old Giblet when I was a boy, and he was the most surly curmudgeon I ever knew. He was a perfect scarecrow to the small-fry of the day, and inherited the hatred of all these unlucky little shavers: for never could we assemble about his door of an evening to play, and make a little hubbub, but out he sallied from his nest like a spider, flourished his formidable horsewhip, and dispersed the whole crew in the twinkling of a lamp. I perfectly remember a bill he sent in to my father for a pane of glass I had accidentally broken, which came well-nigh getting me a sound flogging; and I remember as perfectly that the next night I revenged myself by breaking half a dozen.

Giblet was as arrant a grubworm as ever crawled; and the only rules of right and wrong he cared a button for, were the rules of multiplication and addition, which he practiced much more successfully than he did any of the rules of religion or morality. He used to declare they were the true golden rules; and he took special 179care to put Cocker’s arithmetic in the hands of his children, before they had read ten pages in the Bible or the Prayer-book. The practice of these favorite maxims was at length crowned with the harvest of success; and after a life of self-denial and starvation, and after enduring all the pounds, shillings, and pence miseries of a miser, he had the satisfaction of seeing himself worth a plum, and of dying just as he had determined to enjoy the remainder of his days in contemplating his great wealth and accumulating mortgages.

His children inherited his money; but they buried the disposition, and every other memorial of their father, in his grave. Fired with a noble thirst for style, they instantly emerged from the retired lane in which themselves and their accomplishments had hitherto been buried; and they blazed, and they whizzed, and they cracked about town, like a nest of squibs and devils in a fire-work. I can liken their sudden eclat to nothing but that of the locust, which is hatched in the dust, where it increases and swells up to maturity, and after feeling for a moment the vivifying rays of the sun, bursts forth a mighty insect, and flutters, and rattles, and buzzes from every tree. The little warblers who have long cheered the woodlands with their dulcet notes, are stunned by the discordant racket of these upstart intruders, and contemplate, in contemptuous silence, their tinsel and their noise.

Having once started, the Giblets were determined that nothing should stop them in their 180career, until they had run their full course, and arrived at the very tip top of style. Every tailor, every shoemaker, every coachmaker, every milliner, every mantuamaker, every paperhanger, every piano teacher, and every dancing-master in the city, were enlisted in their service; and the willing wights most courteously answered their call; and fell to work to build up the fame of the Giblets, as they had done that of many an aspiring family before them. In a little time the young ladies could dance the waltz, thunder Lodoiska, murder French, kill time, and commit violence on the face of nature in a landscape in water-colors, equal to the best lady in the land; and the young gentlemen were seen lounging at corners of streets, and driving tandem; heard talking loud at the theatre, and laughing in church, with as much ease, and grace, and modesty, as if they had been gentlemen all the days of their lives.

And the Giblets arrayed themselves in scarlet, and in fine linen, and seated themselves in high places; but nobody noticed them except to honor them with a little contempt. The Giblets made a prodigious splash in their own opinion; but nobody extolled them except the tailors, and the milliners who had been employed in manufacturing their paraphernalia. The Giblets thereupon being, like Caleb Quotem, determined to have “a place at the review,” fell to work more fiercely than ever; they gave dinners, and they gave balls, they hired cooks, they hired fiddlers, they hired confectioners; and they would have 181kept a newspaper in pay, had they not all been bought up at that time for the election. They invited the dancing-men and the dancing-women, and the gormandizers, and the epicures of the city, to come and make merry at their expense; and the dancing-men and the dancing-women, and the epicures, and the gormandizers did come; and they did make merry at their expense; and they eat, and they drank, and they capered, and they danced, and they—laughed at their entertainers.

Then commenced the hurry and the bustle, and the mighty nothingness of fashionable life; such rattling in coaches! such flaunting in the streets! such slamming of box doors at the theatre! such a tempest of bustle and unmeaning noise wherever they appeared! The Giblets were seen here and there and everywhere; they visited everybody they knew, and everybody they did not know; and there was no getting along for the Giblets. Their plan at length succeeded. By dint of dinners, of feeding and frolicking the town, the Giblet family worked themselves into notice, and enjoyed the ineffable pleasure of being forever pestered by visitors who cared nothing about them; of being squeezed, and smothered, and parboiled at nightly balls and evening tea-parties; they were allowed the privilege of forgetting the very few old friends they once possessed; they turned their noses up in the wind at everything that was not genteel; and their superb manners and sublime affectation at length left it no longer a matter of doubt that the Giblets were perfectly in style.

182——“Being, as it were, a small contentmente in a never contenting subjecte; a bitter pleasaunte taste of a sweete seasoned sower; and, all in all, a more than ordinarie rejoycing, in an extraordinarie sorrow of delyghts.”—

Link. Fidelius.

We have been considerably edified of late by several letters of advice from a number of sage correspondents, who really seem to know more about our work than we do ourselves. One warns us against saying anything more about ’Sbidlikens, who is a very particular friend of the writer, and who has a singular disinclination to be laughed at. This correspondent in particular inveighs against personalities, and accuses us of ill-nature in bringing forward old Fungus and Billy Dimple, as figures of fun to amuse the public. Another gentleman, who states that he is a near relation of the Cocklofts, proses away most soporifically on the impropriety of ridiculing a respectable old family; and declares that if we make them and their whimwhams the subject of any more essays, he shall be under the necessity of applying to our theatrical champions for satisfaction. A third, who, by the crabbedness of the handwriting, and a few careless inaccuracies in the spelling, appears to be a lady, assures us that the Miss Cocklofts, and Miss Diana Wearwell, and Miss Dashaway, and Mrs. ——, Will Wizard’s quondam flame, are so much obliged to us for our notice, that they intend in future to take no 183notice of us at all, but leave us out of all their tea-parties, for which we make them one of our best bows, and say, “thank you, ladies.”

We wish to heaven these good people would attend to their own affairs, if they have any to attend to, and let us alone. It is one of the most provoking things in the world that we cannot tickle the public a little, merely for our own private amusement, but we must be crossed and jostled by these meddling incendiaries, and, in fact, have the whole town about our ears. We are much in the same situation with an unlucky blade of a cockney, who, having mounted his bit of blood to enjoy a little innocent recreation, and display his horsemanship along Broadway, is worried by all those little yelping curs that infest our city, and who never fail to sally out and growl, and bark, and snarl, to the great annoyance of the Birmingham equestrian.

Wisely was it said by the sage Linkum Fidelius, “howbeit, moreover, nevertheless, this thrice-wicked towne is charged up to the muzzle with all manner of ill-natures and uncharitablenesses, and is, moreover, exceedinglie naughte.” This passage of the erudite Linkum was applied to the city of Gotham, of which he was once Lord Mayor, as appears by his picture hung up in the hall of that ancient city; but his observation fits this best of all possible cities “to a hair.” It is a melancholy truth that this same New York, though the most charming, pleasant, polished, and praiseworthy city under the sun, and in a word the bonne bouche of the universe, is most shockingly 184ill-natured and sarcastic, and wickedly given to all manner of backslidings; for which we are very sorry, indeed. In truth, for it must come out like murder, one time or other, the inhabitants are not only ill-natured, but manifestly unjust; no sooner do they get one of our random sketches in their hands, but instantly they apply it most unjustifiably to some “dear friend,” and then accuse us vociferously of the personality which originated in their own officious friendship! Truly it is an ill-natured town, and most earnestly do we hope it may not meet with the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah of old.

As, however, it may be thought incumbent upon us to make some apology for these mistakes of the town; and as our good-nature is truly exemplary, we would certainly answer this expectation, were it not that we have an invincible antipathy to making apologies. We have a most profound contempt for any man who cannot give three good reasons for an unreasonable thing; and will therefore condescend, as usual, to give the public three special reasons for never apologizing: first, an apology implies that we are accountable to somebody or another for our conduct; now, as we do not care a fiddle-stick, as authors, for either public opinion or private ill-will, it would be implying a falsehood to apologize; second, an apology would indicate that we had been doing what we ought not to have done. Now, as we never did and never intend to do anything wrong, it would be ridiculous to make an apology; third, we labor under the same incapacity 185in the art of apologizing that lost Langstaff his mistress; we never yet undertook to make an apology without committing a new offense, and making matters ten times worse than they were before; and we are, therefore, determined to avoid such predicaments in future.

But though we have resolved never to apologize, yet we have no particular objection to explain; and if this is all that’s wanted, we will go about it directly:—allons, gentlemen!—before, however, we enter upon this serious affair, we take this opportunity to express our surprise and indignation at the incredulity of some people. Have we not, over and over, assured the town that we are three of the best-natured fellows living? And is it not astonishing, that having already given seven convincing proofs of the truth of this assurance, they should still have any doubts on the subject? But as it is one of the impossible things to make a knave believe in honesty, so, perhaps, it may be another to make this most sarcastic, satirical, and tea-drinking city believe in the existence of good-nature. But to our explanation. Gentle reader!—for we are convinced that none but gentle or genteel readers can relish our excellent productions—if thou art in expectation of being perfectly satisfied with what we are about to say, thou mayest as well “whistle lillebullero,” and skip quite over what follows; for never wight was more disappointed than thou wilt be, most assuredly. But to the explanation: We care just as much about the public and its wise conjectures, as we do about 186the man in the moon and his whimwhams; or the criticisms of the lady who sits majestically in her elbow-chair in the lobster; and who, belying her sex, as we are credibly informed, never says anything worth listening to. We have launched our bark, and we will steer to our destined port with undeviating perseverance, fearless of being shipwrecked by the way. Good-nature is our steersman, reason our ballast, whim the breeze that wafts us along, and MORALITY our leading star.

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