Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/148

 will never do. We find them and their schemes of diversion well described in Rabelais, book v. chap. xxii.

"How Queen Whim's Officers were employed, and how the said Lady retained us among her Abstractors.

"I then saw a great number of the Queen's officers, who made blackamoors white, as fast as hops, just rubbing their bellies with the bottom of a pannier.

"Others, with three couples of foxes in one yoke, ploughed a sandy shore, and did not lose their seed.

"Others washed burnt tiles, and made them lose their colour.

"Others extracted water out of pumice-stones, braying them a good while in a mortar, and changed their substance.

"Others sheered asses, and thus got long fleece wool.

"Others gathered off of thorns grapes, and figs off of thistles.

"Others stroked he-goats by the dugs, and saved their milk, and much they got by it.

"Others washed asses' heads, without losing their soap.

"Others taught cows to dance, and did not lose their fiddling.

"Others pitched nets to catch the wind, and took cock lobsters in them.

"Others out of nothing made great things, and made great things return to nothing.

"Others made a virtue of necessity, and the best of a bad market; which seemed to me a very good piece of work.

"I saw two Gibroins by themselves, keeping watch on the top of a tower; and we were told they guarded the moon from the wolves."

The war has cost the country five or six hundred millions of money. This has not been a nominal expence, a playing at ducks and drakes with the King's picture on the water, or a manufacturing of bank-notes, and then lighting our pipes with them, but a real bona fide waste of the means, wealth, labour, produce, or resources of the country, in the carrying on of the war. About