LET us go back to the ******——in the last chapter.
It is a singular stroke of eloquence (at least it was so, when
eloquence flourished at _Athens_ and _Rome_, and would be so now, did
orators wear mantles) not to mention the name of a thing, when you had
the thing about you _in petto_, ready to produce, pop, in the place you
want it. A scar, an axe, a sword, a pink’d doublet, a rusty helmet, a
pound and a half of pot-ashes in an urn, or a three-halfpenny pickle
pot—but above all, a tender infant royally accoutred.—Tho’ if it was
too young, and the oration as long as _Tully_’s second _Philippick_—it
must certainly have beshit the orator’s mantle.—And then again, if too
old,—it must have been unwieldly and incommodious to his action—so as
to make him lose by his child almost as much as he could gain by
it.—Otherwise, when a state orator has hit the precise age to a
minute——hid his BAMBINO in his mantle so cunningly that no mortal could
smell it——and produced it so critically, that no soul could say, it
came in by head and shoulders—Oh Sirs! it has done wonders—It has
open’d the sluices, and turn’d the brains, and shook the principles,
and unhinged the politicks of half a nation.
These feats however are not to be done, except in those states and
times, I say, where orators wore mantles——and pretty large ones too, my
brethren, with some twenty or five-and-twenty yards of good purple,
superfine, marketable cloth in them—with large flowing folds and
doubles, and in a great style of design.—All which plainly shews, may
it please your worships, that the decay of eloquence, and the little
good service it does at present, both within and without doors, is
owing to nothing else in the world, but short coats, and the disuse of
_trunk-hose._—We can conceal nothing under ours, Madam, worth shewing.