" A hog's
harslett is "a piece of meat he loves." He cannot ride home
in my Lord Sandwich's coach, but he must exclaim, with
breathless gusto, "his noble, rich coach." When he is bound
for a supper party, he anticipates a "glut of pleasure."
When he has a new watch, "to see my childishness," says he,
"I could not forbear carrying it in my hand and seeing what
o'clock it was an hundred times." To go to Vauxhall, he
says, and "to hear the nightingales and other birds, hear
fiddles, and there a harp and here a Jew's trump, and here
laughing, and there fine people walking, is mighty
divertising." And the nightingales, I take it, were
particularly dear to him; and it was again "with great
pleasure that he paused to hear them as he walked to
Woolwich, while the fog was rising and the April sun broke
through.
He must always be doing something agreeable, and, by
preference, two agreeable things at once. In his house he
had a box of carpenter's tools, two dogs, an eagle, a canary,
and a blackbird that whistled tunes, lest, even in that full
life, he should chance upon an empty moment. If he had to
wait for a dish of poached eggs, he must put in the time by
playing on the flageolet; if a sermon were dull, he must read
in the book of Tobit or divert his mind with sly advances on
the nearest women. When he walked, it must be with a book in
his pocket to beguile the way in case the nightingales were
silent; and even along the streets of London, with so many
pretty faces to be spied for and dignitaries to be saluted,
his trail was marked by little debts "for wine, pictures,
etc.
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