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will be as immediately hurt by the idea of giving uneasiness by his own behaviour, as of suffering uneasiness from the behaviour of another.

No. 92. SATURDAY, March 25, 1780.

LOOKING from the window of a house where I was visiting some mornings ago, I observed on the opposite side of the street, a sign-post, ornamented with some little busts and bronzes, indicating a person to live there, by trade a figure-maker. On remarking to a gentleman who stood near me, that this was a profession I did not recollect having heard of before, my friend, who has a knack of drawing observations from trifles, and, I must confess, is a little inclined to take things on their weak side, replied, with a sarcastic smile, that it was one of the most common in life. While he spoke, a smart young man, who has lately set up a very showy equipage, passed by in his carriage at a brisk trot, and bowed to me, who have the honour of a slight acquaintance with

him, with that air of civil consequence which puts one in mind of the notice a man thinks himself intitled to. "That young gentleman," said my friend, " is a figure-maker, and the chariot he drives in is his sign-post. You might trace the brethren of this trade through every street, square, and house in town. Figure-making is common to all ranks, ages, tempers, and situations: there are rich and poor, extravagant and narrow, wise and foolish, witty and ridiculous, eloquent and silent, beautiful and ugly figure-makers, In short, there is scarce any body such a cypher from nature, as not to form some pretensions to making a figure in spite of her.

"The young man who bowed to you is an extravagant figure-maker, more remarkable from being successor to a narrow one. I knew his father well, and have often visited him in the course of money transactions, at his office, as it was

called, in the garret-story of a dark airless house, where he sat like the genius of Lucre, brooding in his hole over the wealth his parsimony had acquired him. The very ink with which he wrote was adulterated with water, and he delayed mending his pen till the characters it formed were almost illegible. Yet he too had great part of his enjoyment from the opinion of others, and was not insensible to the pleasures of figure-making. I have often seen him in his threadbare brown coat, stop on the street, to wait the passing of some of his well-dressed debtors, that he might have the pleasure of insulting them with the intimacy to which their situations intitled him; and I once knew him actually lend a large sum, on terms less advantageous than it was his custom to insist upon, merely because it was a peer who wanted to borrow, and that he had applied in vain to two right honourable relations of immense fortune.

"His son has just the same desire of shewing his wealth that the father had; but he takes a very different method of displaying it. Both, however, display, not enjoy, their wealth, and draw equal satisfaction from the consequence derived from it in the opinion of others. The father kept guineas in his coffers which he never used; the son changes, indeed, the species of property, but has just as little the power of using it. He keeps horses in his stable, mistresses in lodgings, and servants in livery, to no better purpose than his father did guineas. He gives dinners, at which he eats made dishes that he detests, and drinks Champaigne and Burgundy, instead of his old beverage of port and punch, till he is sick, because they are the dishes and drink of great and rich men. The son's situation has the advantage of brilliancy, but the father's was more likely to be permanent; he was daily growing richer with the aspect of

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