than brutal force and factious clamour. You, the freemen of England, are the basis of that excellent constitution which hath long flourish ed the object of envy and admiration. To you belongs the inestimable privilege of choosing a delegate properly qualified to represent you in the high court of parliament. This is your birth-right, inherited from your ancestors, obtained by their courage, and sealed with their blood. It is not only your birth-right, which you should maintain in defiance of all danger, but also a sacred trust, to be executed with the most scrupulous care and fidelity. The person whom you trust ought not only to be endued with the most inflexible integrity, but should likewise possess a fund of knowledge that may enable him to act as a part of the legislature. He must be well acquainted with the history, the constitution, and the laws of his country; he must understand the forms of business, the extent of the royal prerogative, the privilege of parliament, the detail of government, the nature and regulation of the finances, the different branches of commerce, the politics that prevail, and the connexions that subsist among the different powers of Europe; for on all these subjects the deliberations of a House of Commons occasionally turn; but these great purposes will never be answered by electing an illiterate savage, scarce qualified, in point of understanding, to act as a country justice of peace, a man who has scarce ever travelled be yond the excursion of a fox-chace, whose conversation never rambles farther than his stable, his kennel, and his barn-yard; who rejects de corum as degeneracy; mistakes rusticity for independence; ascertains his courage by leaping over gates and ditches, and founds his triumph on feats of drinking; who holds his estate by a factious tenure; professes himself the blind slave of a party, without knowing the principles that gave it birth, or the motives by which it is actuated; and thinks that all patriotism consists in railing indiscriminately at ministers, and ob stinately opposing every measure of the administration. Such a man, with no evil intentions of his own, might be used as a dangerous tool in the hands of a desperate faction, by scat tering the seeds of disaffection, embarrassing the wheels of government, and reducing the whole kingdom to anarchy."

Here the knight was interrupted by the shouts and acclamations of the Vanderpelfites, who cried aloud, "Hear him! hear him! long life to the iron-cased orator." This clamour subsiding, he prosecuted his harangue to the following effect:

"Such a man as I have described may be dangerous from ignorance; but is neither so mischievous nor so detestable as the wretch who knowingly betrays his trust, and sues to be the hireling and prostitute of a weak and worthless

minister; a sordid knave, without honour or principle; who belongs to no family, whose example can reproach him with degeneracy; who has no country to command his respect; no friends to engage his affection; no religion to regulate his morals; no conscience to restrain his iniquity; and who worships no God but Mammon: an insinuating miscreant, who undertakes for the dirtiest work of the vilest administration; who practises national usury, receiving by wholesale the rewards of venality, and distributing the wages of corruption by retail."

In this place our adventurer's speech was drowned in the acclamations of the fox-hunters, who now triumphed in their turn, and hoicksed the speaker, exclaiming, "Well opened, Jowler to'um, to'um again, Sweetlips! hey, Merry, Whitefoot!" After a short interruption, he thus resumed his discourse:

"When such a caitiff presents himself to you, like the devil, with a temptation in his hand, avoid him as if he were in fact the devil—it is not the offering of disinterested love; for what should induce him, who has no affections, to love you, to whose persons he is an utter stranger? Alas! it is not a benevolence, but a bribe. He wants to buy you at one market, that he may sell you at another. Without doubt his intention is to make an advantage of his purchase; and this aim he cannot accomplish, but by sacrificing, in some sort, your interest, your independency, to the wicked designs of a minister, as he can expect no gratification for the faithful discharge of his duty. But, even if he should not find an opportunity of selling you to advantage, the crime, the shame, the infamy, will still be the same in you, who, baser than the most abandoned prostitutes, have sold yourselves and your posterity for hire for a paltry price, to be refunded with interest by some minister, who will indemnify himself out of your own pockets: for, after all, you are bought and sold with your own money-the miserable pittance you may now receive, is no more than a pitcher full of water thrown in to moisten the sucker of that pump which will drain you to the bottom. Let me therefore advise and exhort you, my countrymen, to avoid the opposite extremes of the ignorant clown and the designing courtier, and choose a man of honesty, intelligence, and moderation, who will—”

The doctrine of moderation was a very unpopular subject in such an assembly; and accordingly they rejected it as one man. They began to think the stranger wanted to set up for himself,-a supposition that could not fail to incense both sides equally, as they were both zealously engaged in their respective causes. The Whigs and the Tories joined against this intruder, who, being neither, was treated like a monster, or chimera in politics. They hissed, they hooted, and they hollowed; they annoyed

him with missiles of dirt, sticks, and stones; they cursed, they threatened, and reviled, till at length his patience was exhausted.

"Ungrateful and abandoned miscreants! (he cried) I spoke to you as men and Christians, as free-born Britions and fellow-citizens; but I perceive you are a pack of venal, infamous scoundrels, and I will treat you accordingly." So saying, he brandished his lance, and, riding into the thickest of the concourse, laid about him with such dexterity and effect, that the multitude was immediately dispersed, and he retired without further molestation.

The same good fortune did not attend 'Squire Crabshaw in his retreat. The ludicrous singularity of his features, and the half-mown crop of hair that bristled from one side of his countenance, invited some wags to make merry at his expense; one of them clapped a furze-bush under the tail of Gilbert, who, feeling himself thus stimulated a posteriori, kicked, and plunged, and capered in such a manner, that Timothy could hardly keep the saddle. In this commotion he lost his cap and his periwig, while the rabble pelted him in such a manner, that, before he could join his master, he looked like a pillar, or rather a pillory, of mud.

CHAP. X.

full of mountebanks, empirics, and quacks. We have quacks in religion, quacks in physic, quacks in law, quacks in politics, quacks in patriotism, quacks in government; High German quacks, that have blistered, sweated, bled, and purged the nation into an atrophy. But this is not all; they have not only evacuated her into a consumption, but they have intoxicated her brain, until she has become delirious; she can no longer pursue her own interest, or indeed rightly distinguish it; like the people of Nineveh, she can hardly tell her right hand from her left; but, as a changeling, is dazzled and delighted by an ignis fatuus, a Will o' the Wisp, an exhalation from the vilest materials in nature, that leads her astray through Westphalian bogs and deserts, and will one day break her neck over some barren rocks, or leave her sticking in some Hn pit or quagmire. For my part, if you have a mind to betray your country, I have no objection. In selling yourselves and your fellow-citizens, you only dispose of a pack of rascals who deserve to be sold-If you sell one another, why should not I sell this here Elixir of Long Life, which, if properly used, will protract your days till you have seen your country ruined! I shall not pretend to disturb your understandings, which are none of the strongest, with a hotch-potch of unintelligible terins, such as Aristotle's four principles of generation, unformed matter, privation, efficient

Which sheweth that he who plays at bowls will and final causes. Aristotle was a pedantic blocksometimes meet with rubbers.

SIR Launcelot, boiling with indignation at the venality and faction of the electors, whom he had harangued to so little purpose, retired with the most deliberate disdain towards one of the gates of the town, on the outside of which his curiosity was attracted by a concourse of people, in the midst of whom stood Mr Ferret, mounted upon a stool, with a kind of satchel hanging round his neck, and a vial displayed in his right hand, while he held forth to the audience in a very vehement strain of elocution.

Crabshaw thought himself happily delivered when he reached the suburbs, and proceeded without halting; but his master mingled with the crowd, and heard the orator express himself to this effect:

"Very likely you may undervalue me and my medicine, because I don't appear upon a stage of rotten boards, in a shabby velvet coat and tye-periwig, with a foolish fellow in a mot ley coat, to make you laugh by making wry faces; but I scorn to use these dirty arts for en gaging your attention. These paltry tricks, ad captandum vulgus, can have no effect but on idiots; and if you are idiots, I don't desire you should be my customers. Take notice, I don't address you in the style of a mountebank, or a High German doctor; and yet the kingdom is

head, and still more knave than fool. The same censure we may safely put on that wiseacre Dioscorides, with his faculties of simples, his seminal, specific, and principal virtues; and that crazy commentator Galen, with his four elements, elementary qualities, his eight complexions, his harmonies, and discords. Nor shall I expatiate on the alkahest of that mad scoundrel Paracelsus, with which he pretended to reduce flints into salt; nor the archæus or spiritus rector of that visionary Van Helmont, his simple, elementary water, his gus, ferments, and transmutations; nor shall I enlarge upon the salt, sulphur, and oil, the acidum vagum, the mercury of metals, and the volatilized vitriol of other modern chemists, a pack of ignorant, conceited, knavish rascals, that puzzle your weak heads with such jargon, just as a Germanized m-r throws dust in your eyes, by lugging in and ringing the changes on the ba lance of power, the protestant religion, and your allies on the continent; acting like the juggler, who picks your pockets while he dazzles your eyes and amuses your fancy with twirling his fingers, and reciting the gibberish of hocus pocus; for, in fact, the balance of power is a mere chimera; as for the protestant religion, nobody gives himself any trouble about it; and allies on the continent we have rione, or at least none that would raise an hundred men to save us from perdition, unless we paid an extrava

gant price for their assistance. But, to return to this here Elixir of Long Life, I might embellish it with a great many high-sounding epithets; but I disdain to follow the example of every illiterate vagabond, that, from idleness, turns quack, and advertises his nostrum in the public papers. I am neither a felonious drysalter returned from exile, an hospital stumpturner, a decayed stay-maker, a bankrupt printer, or insolvent debtor, released by act of parliament. I did not pretend to administer medicines without the least tincture of letters, or suborn wretches to perjure themselves in false affidavits of cures that were never performed; nor employ a set of led-captains to harangue in my praise at all public places. I was bred regularly to the profession of chemistry, and have tried all the processes of alchemy; and I may venture to say, that this here elixir is, in fact, the chruseon pepuromenon ek puros, the visible, glorious, spiritual body, from whence all other beings derive their existence, as proceeding from their father the sun, and their mother the moon; from the sun, as from a living and spiritual gold, which is mere fire; consequently, the common and universal first-created mover, from whence all moveable things have their distinct and particular motions; and also from the moon, as from the wife of the sun, and the common mother of all sublunary things: and, for as much as man is and must be the comprehensive end of all creatures, and the microcosm, he is counselled in the Revelations to buy gold that is thoroughly fired, or rather pure fire, that he may become rich and like the sun; as, on the contrary, he becomes poor when he abuses the arsenical poison; so that his silver, by the fire, must be calcined to a caput mortuum, which happens when he will hold and retain the menstruum, out of which he partly exists, for his own property, and doth not daily offer up the same in the fire of the sun, that the woman may be clothed with the sun, and become a sun, and thereby rule over the moon; that is to say, that he may get the moon under his feet. -Now this here elixir, sold for no more than sixpence a vial, contains the essence of the alkahest, the archæus, the catholicon, the menstruum, the sun, the moon, and, to sum up all in one word, is the true, genuine, unadulterated, unchangeable, immaculate, and specific chruseon pepuromenon ek puros.”

The audience were variously affected by this learned oration. Some of those who favoured the pretensions of the whig candidate, were of opinion that he ought to be punished for his presumption in reflecting so scurrilously on ministers and measures. Of this sentiment was our adventurer, though he could not help admiring the courage of the orator, and owning within himself, that he had mixed some melancholy truths with his scurrility.

Mr Ferret would not have stood so long in

his rostrum unmolested, had not he cunningly chosen his station immediately without the jurisdiction of the town, whose magistrates therefore could not take cognizance of his conduct; but application was made to the constable of the other parish, while our nostrummonger proceeded in his speech, the conclusion of which produced such an effect upon his hearers, that his whole cargo was immediately exhausted.He had just stepped down from his stool, when the constable with his staff arrived, and took him under his guidance. Mr Ferret on this occasion attempted to interest the people in his behalf, by exhorting them to vindicate the liberty of the subject against such an act of oppression; but, finding them deaf to the tropes and figures of his elocution, he addressed himself to our knight, reminding him of his duty to protect the helpless and the injured, and earnestly soliciting his interposition.

Sir Launcelot, without making the least reply to his entreaties, resolved to see the end of this adventure; and, being joined by his 'squire, followed the prisoner at a distance, measuring back the ground he had travelled the day before, until he reached another small borough where Ferret was housed in the common prison.

While he sat a horseback, deliberating on the next step he should take, he was accosted by the voice of Tom Clarke, who called, in a whimpering tone, through a window grated with iron," For the love of God! Sir Launcelot, do, dear sir, be so good as to take the trouble to alight and come up stairs-I have something to communicate of consequence to the community in general, and to you in particular-Fray, do, dear Sir Knight. I beg a boon in the name of St Michael and St George for England."

Our adventurer, not a little surprised at this address, dismounted without hesitation, and be➡ ing admitted to the common gaol, there found not only his old friend Tom, but also the uncle, sitting on a bench with a woollen night-cap on his head, and a pair of spectacles on his nose, reading very earnestly in a book, which he afterwards understood was entitled "The Life and Adventures of Valentine and Orson." The captain no sooner saw his great pattern enter, than he rose and received him with the saluta tion of "What cheer, brother?" and before the knight could answer, added these words = "You see how the land lies-here have Tom and I been fast ashore these four and twenty hours; and this berth we have got by attempting to tow your galley, brother, from the ene my's harbour.-Adds bobs! if we had this here fellow whoreson for a consort, with all our tackle in order, brother, we'd soon shew 'em the topsail, slip our cable, and down with their barricadoes. But, howsomever, it don't signify talking patience is a good stream-anchor, and will hold, as the saying is-but, damn my-as