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"Come, sir, I conjure you, as I am one of his majes ty's justices of the peace, to tell me your name.""My name, an't please you, is Watson."- —“ O ho, sir! Watson! mighty well! Take sp from it, and it is Ill man, and put K to it, and it is Kill-man: away with him, constable; his very name will hang him."

Let us now consider a new case; as, for instance, "The Church of England as by Law established." Put a T before it, and it is Test-ablished: take away the Test, and put in o, and it is A-bolished.

How much was the late ingenious author of Parson Alberoni obliged to it, in that very natural story which he framed concerning the preacher; where he tells you, one of the congregation called the Minister an Humba's sandor for an Ambassador.*

* The story here alluded to is told in a pamphlet, entitled, "A modest Apology for Parson Alberoni, Governor to King Philip, a Minor, and universal Curate of the whole Spanish Monarchy, &c. by Thomas Gordon, Esq. 1719;" and is as follows: "There is, in a cer tain diocese in this nation, a living worth about six hundred pounds a year. This, and two or three more preferments, maintain the doctor in becoming ease and corpulency. He keeps a chariot in town, and a journeyman in the country; and his curate and his coach-horses are his equal drudges, saving that the four-legged cattle are better fed, and have sleeker cassocks, than his spiritual drayhorse. The doctor goes down once a year, to sheer his flock, and fill his pockets; or, in other words, to receive the wages of his embassy; and then, sometimes in an afternoon, if his belly do not happen to be too full, he vouchsafes to mount the pulpit, and to instruct his people in the greatness of his character and dullness. This composes the whole parish to rest; but the doctor one day denouncing himself the Lord's Ambassador with greater fire and loudness than could have been reasonably expected from him, it roused a clown of the congregation, who waked his next neighbour, with, Dost hear, Tom, dost hear?'-'Ay,' says Tom, yawning, 'what does he say ?' Say?" answered the other; 'he says a plaguy lie, to be sure; he says as how he is my Lord's Humbassandor; but I think he is more rather the Lord's Receiver General, for he never comes but to take money." Six hundred pounds a year is, modestly speaking, a competent fee for lulling the largest

Give me leave, courteous reader, to recommend to your perusal and practice this most excellent Rule, which is of such universal use and advantage to the learned world, that the most valuable discoveries, both as to antiquities and etymologies, are made by it; nay, farther, I will venture to say, that all words which are introduced to enrich and make a language copious, beautiful, and harmonious, arise chiefly from this Rule. Let any man but consult Bentley's Horace, and he will see what useful discoveries that very learned gentleman has made by the help of this Rule; or indeed poor Horace would have lain under the eternal reproach of making "a for eat oats," had not the learned doctor, with great judgment and penetration, found out nitedula to be a blunder of the librarians for vulpecula; which nitedula, the doctor says, signifies a grass-mouse, and this clears up the whole matter, because it makes the story hang well together: for all the world knows, that weazles have a most tender regard and affection to grass mice, whereas they hate foxes as they do firebrands. In short, all various lections are to be attributed to this

congregation in England asleep once in a twelvemonth. Such tithes are the price of napping; and such mighty odds there are between a curtain lecture and a cushion lecture." See the collection of Tracts by Gordon and Trenchard, vol. 1. p. 130.—Mr. Gordon was a Scotchman, and came to London very young in order to seek his fortune. He was soon taken notice of by Mr. Trenchard, and, in conjunction 'with him, wrote Cate's Letters, and many political and other pamphlets On Mr. Trenchard's death, he married his widow; and some time after he received a great addition to his fortune, by a very considerable bequest made to him by the will of a country physician, to whom he was only known by his writings. He was many years a writer in defence of the measures of Sir Robert Walpole, afterward Lord Orford. To this minister he dedicated his Translation of Tacitus, and was by him appointed one of the Commissioners of the Wine License Office, a place which he held at the time of his death, which happened July 28, 1750. N.

Rule: so are all the Greek dialects; or Homer would have wanted the sonorous beauty of his oios. But the greatest and best masters of this Rule, without dispute, were the Dorians, who made nothing of saying tin for soi, tenos for ekcinos, surisdomes for surizomen, &c. From this too we have our quasis in Lexicons. Was it not by Rule the 34th, that the Samaritan, Chaldec, Ethiopic, Syriac, Arabic, and Persian languages were formed from the original Hebrew? for which I appeal to the Polyglott. And among our modern languages, are not the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, derived and formed from the Latin by the same power? How much poets have been obliged to it, we need no farther proof than the figures prothesis, epenthesis, apocope, paragoge, and ellipsis, trimming and fitting of words to make them more agreeable to our ears: Dionysius Halicarnassensis has taken notice of it in his book "De Compositione Vocum," where he pleasantly compares your polite reformers of words to masons with hammers, who break off rugged corners of stones, that they may become more even and firm in their places.

But, after all, give me leave to lament, that I cannot have the honour of being the sole inventor of this incomparable Rule: though I solemnly protest, upon the word of an author (if an author may have credit) that r never had the least hint toward it, any more than the ladies' letters and young children's pronunciation, till a year after I had proposed this Rule to Dr.

who

was an excellent judge of the advantage it might be to the public; when, to my great surprise, tumbling over the third tome of Alstedius, p. 71, right loth to believe my eyes, I met with the following passage: "Ambigua

multum faciunt ad hanc rem, cujusmodi exempla plurima reperiuntur apud Plautum, qui in ambiguis crebro ludit. Joci capiantur ex permutatione syllabarum et vocum. ut pro Decretum, Discretum; pro Medicus, Mendicus et Merdicus: pro Polycarpus, Polycopros. Item ex Syllabarum ellipsi, ut ait Althusisus, cap. iii. civil. convers. pro Casiniirus, J'rus. ; pro Marcus, Arcus; ro Vinosus, Osus; pro Sacerdotium, Otium. Sic, additione literæ, pro Urbanus, Turbanus." Which exactly corresponded to every branch and circumstance of my Rule. Then, indeed, I could not avoid breaking out into the following exclamations, and that after a most pathetic mauner:

Wretched Tom Pun-Sibi! Wretched indeed! Are all thy nocturnal lucubrations come to this? Must another, for being a hundred years before thee in the world, run away with the glory of thy own invention? It is true, Ire must. Happy Alstedius! who, I thought, would have stood me in all stead, upon consulting thy method of joking! All's tedious to me now, since thou hast robbed me of that honour which would have set me above all writers of the present age. And why not happy, Tom Pun-sibi? did we not jump together like true wits? But, alas! thou art on the safest side of the bush; my credit being liable to the suspicion of the world, because you wrote before me. Ill-natured critics, in spite of all my protestations, will condemn me, right or wrong, for a plagiary. Henceforward never write any thing of thy own; but pillage and trespass upon all that ever wrote before thee; search among dust and moths for things new to the learned. Farewell, Study; from this moment I abandon thee: for, wherever I can get a paragraph upon any subject whatsoever ready

done to my hand, my head shall have no farther trouble than to see it fairly transcribed!"—And this method, I hope, will help me to swell out the Second Part of this work.

THE END OF THE FIRST PART.

ADVERTISEMENT.

THE Second Part of this Work will be published, with all convenient expedition: to which will be added, A small Treatise of CONUNDRUMS, CARRIWHICHITS, and LONGE-PETITES; together with the WINTER-FIRE'S Diversion: The Art of making REBUSES: The Antiquity of HOOP PETTICOATS, proved from Adams's two Daughters, Calmana and Delbora, &c. &c. &c.

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