Page:The Garden of Romance - 1897.djvu/135

Rh composed, to chronicle down the time, the place, and the occasion of its being preached: to this he was ever wont to add some short comment or stricture upon the sermon itself,—seldom, indeed, much to its credit. For instance, "This sermon upon the Jewish dispensation—I don't like it at all; though I own there is a world of waterlandish knowledge in it; but 'tis all tritical, and most tritically put together. This is but a flimsy kind of composition. What was in my head when I made it?

"N.B. The excellency of this text is that it will suit any sermon; and of this sermon, that it will suit any text.

"For this sermon I shall be hanged, for I have stolen the greatest part of it. Doctor Paidagunes found me out. Set a thief to catch a thief."

On the back of half-a-dozen I find written, So, so, and no more; and upon a couple moderato; by which, as far as one may gather, from Altieri's Italian Dictionary, but mostly from the authority of a piece of green whipcord, which seemed to have been the unravelling of Yorick's whip-lash, with which he has left us the two sermons marked moderato and the half-dozen of So, so, tied fast together in one bundle by themselves, one may safely suppose he meant pretty nearly the same thing.

There is but one difficulty in the way of this conjecture, which is this, that the moderatos are five times better than the so, so's; show ten times more knowledge of the human heart; have seventy times more wit and spirit in them (and, to rise properly in my climax), discover a thousand times more genius; and, to crown all, are infinitely more entertaining than those tied up with them; for which reason, whenever Yorick's dramatic