Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: wind more lenient than for a man to be ungrateful. Thy sire was old surly M, the unapproachable churchwarden of Bishopsgate. He knew not what he did, when he begat thee, like spring, gentle offspring of blustering winter: ? only unfortunate in thy ending, which should have been mild, conciliatory, swan-like. Much remains to sing. Many fantastic shapes rise up, but they must be mine in private: ?already I have fooled the reader to the top of his bent;?else could I omit that strange creature Woollet, who existed in trying the question, and bought litigations 1?and still stranger, inimitable, solemn Hepworth, from whose gravity Newton might have deduced the law of gravitation. How profoundly would he nib a pen?with what deliberation would he wet a wafer! But it is time to close?night’s wheels are rattling fast over me?it is proper to have done with this solemn mockery. Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this while ? peradventure the very names, which I have summoned up before thee, are fantastic?insubstantial? like Henry Pimpernel, and old John Naps of Greece: Be satisfied that something answering to them has had a being. Their importance is from the past. OXFORD IN THE VACATION. Casting a preparatory glance at the bottom of this article? as the wary connoisseur in prints, with cursory eye (which, while it reads, seems as though it reads not), never fails to consult the quis sculpsit in the corner, before he pronounces some rare piece to be a Vivares, or a Woollet methinks I hear you exclaim, Reader, who is Elia ? Because in my last I tried to divert thee with some half- forgotten humours of some old clerks defunct, in an old house of business, long since gone to decay, doubtless you have already set me down in your mind as one of the …
