Page:The English humourists of the eighteenth century. A series of lectures, delivered in England, Scotland, and the United States of America (IA englishhumourist00thacrich).pdf/129

 off his own shoulders; the lords and judges can wag theirs no longer; the bailiff's writs have ceased to run; the honest chairmen's pipes are put out, and with their brawny calves they have walked away into Hades— all as irrecoverably done for as Will Mountford or Captain Coote. The subject of our night's lecture saw all these people—rode in Captain Coote's company of the Guards very probably—wrote and sighed for Bracegirdle, went home tipsy in many a chair, after many a bottle, in many a tavern—fled from many a bailiff.

In 1709, when the publication of the "Tatler" began, our great-great-grandfathers must have seized upon that new and delightful paper, with much such eagerness as lovers of light literature in a later day exhibited when the Waverley novels appeared, upon which the public rushed, forsaking that feeble entertainment of which the Miss Porters, the Anne of Swanseas, and worthy Mrs. Radcliffe herself, with her dreary castles, and exploded old ghosts, had had pretty much the monopoly. I have looked over many of the comic books with which our ancestors amused themselves, from the novels of Swift's coadjutrix, Mrs. Manley, the author of the "New Atlantis," to the facetious productions of Tom Durfey and Tom Brown, and Ned Ward, writer of the "London Spy," and several other volumes of ribaldry. The slang of the taverns and ordinaries, the wit of the Errata