Sir Roger de Coverly’s country seat--yes, for I hate
long speeches--Query, if a good Christian may be a
conjurer--Childermas day, salt cellar, house-dog, screech-owl,
cricket--Mr. Thomas Inkle of London, in the good ship called
the Achilles--Yarico--=Aehrescitque medendo=--Ghosts--The
Lady’s Library--Lion by trade a tailor--Dromedary called
Bucephalus--Equipage the Lady’s =summum bonum=--Charles Lillie to
be taken notice of--Short face a relief to envy--Redundancies in
three professions--King Latinus a recruit--Jew devouring a ham
of bacon--Westminster Abbey--Grand Cairo--Procrastination--April
fools--Blue boars, red lions, hogs in armor--Enter a king and
two fiddlers =soius=--Admission into the Ugly Club--Beauty how
improvable--Families of true and false humor--The parrot’s
school-mistress--Face half Pict half British--No man can be a hero of
a tragedy under six foot--Club of Sighers--Letters from flower-pots,
elbow chairs, tapestry-figures, lion, thunder--The bell rings to
the puppet-show--Old woman with a beard married to a smock-faced
boy--My next coat to be turned up with blue--Fable of tongs and
gridiron--Flower dyers--The soldier’s prayer--Thank ye for nothing,
says the gallipot--Pactolus in the stockings with golden clocks to
them--Bamboos, cudgels, drum-sticks--Slip of my landlady’s eldest
daughter--The black mare with a star in her forehead--The barber’s
pole--Will Honeycomb’s coat-pocket--Caesar’s behavior and my own
in parallel circumstances--Poems in patchwork--=Nulli gravi est
percussus Achilles=--The female conventicler--The ogle-master.
The reading of this paper made the whole coffee house very merry;
some of them concluded it was written by a mad man, and others by
somebody that had been taking notes out of the _Spectator_. One, who
had the appearance of a very substantial citizen, told us, with several
political winks and nods, that he wished there was no more in the
paper than what was expressed in it: that for his part, he looked upon
the dromedary, the gridiron, and the barber’s pole, to signify more
than was usually meant by those words: and that he thought that the
coffee man could not do better than to carry the paper to one of the
secretaries of state. He farther added, that he did not like the name
of the outlandish man with the golden clock in his stockings. A young
Oxford scholar who chanced to be with his uncle at the coffee house,
discovered to us who this Pactolus was: and by that means turned the
whole scheme of this worthy citizen into ridicule. While they were
making their several conjectures upon this innocent paper, I reached
out my arm to the boy as he was coming out of the pulpit, to give it to
me; which he did accordingly. This drew the eyes of the whole company
upon me; but after having cast a cursory glance over it, and shook my
head twice or thrice at the reading of it, I twisted it into a kind
of match, and lighted my pipe with it. My profound silence, together
with the steadiness of my countenance, and the gravity of my behavior
during this whole transaction, raised a very loud laugh on all sides of
me; but as I had escaped all suspicion of being the author, I was very
well satisfied, and applying myself to my pipe and the Postman, took no
further notice of anything that passed about me.
* * * * *
In No. 9, March 19, 1710, we find an account of a Social Club formed by
a few in a certain ale house. It is of a lower social strata.
_Rules to be observed in the Two-Penny Club erected in this place
for the preservation of friendship and good neighborhoods._