privilege of the ignorant, our undoubted right, and what you can never lay claim to.
I am quite angry with your servant, for not acquainting you I was at your door. I greatly commend both your economy and the company you admit at your table. I am told your wine is excellent. The additional groat is, I hope, for suet to your pudding. I fancy I am as old an acquaintance as most you have in this kingdom; though it is not my happiness to be so qualified as to merit that intimacy you profess for a few. It is now to little purpose to repine; though it grieves me to think I was a favourite of dean Aldrich, the greatest man who ever presided in that high post; that over Virgil and Horace, Rag[1] and Phillips smoked many a pipe, and drank many a quart with me, beside the expense of a bushel of nuts, and that now I am scarce able to relish their beauties. I know it is death to you to see either of them mangled; but a scrap of paper I design to enclose, will convince you of the truth. It was in joke to an old woman of seventy, who takes the last line so heinously, that, thanks to my stars, she hates me in earnest. So I devote myself to ladies of fewer years, and more discretion.
This, and such other innocent amusements, I devote myself to in my retirement. Once in two years I appear in the anus of the world, our metropolis. His grace, my old acquaintance, told me, I began to contract strange old fashioned rust, and advised me to burst out of my solitude, and refit myself for the publick; but my own notion of the world, for
- ↑ Meaning the celebrated Edmund Smith, usually called Rag Smith.
