Page:The Garden of Romance - 1897.djvu/137

Rh Though not very offensively, for it was at two inches, at least, and a half's distance from and below the concluding line of the sermon, at the very extremity of the page, and in that right hand corner of it which, you know, is generally covered with your thumb; and, to do it justice, it is wrote besides with a crow's quill, so faintly, in a small Italian hand, as scarcely to solicit the eye towards the place, whether your thumb is there or not, so that, from the manner of it, it stands half excused, and being wrote moreover with very pale ink, diluted almost to nothing—'tis more like a ritratto of the shadow of Vanity than of Vanity herself—of the two; resembling rather a faint thought of transient applause, secretly stirring up in the heart of the composer, than a gross mark of it coarsely obtruded upon the world.

With all these extenuations, I am aware that, in publishing this, I do no service to Yorick's character as a modest man; but all men have their failings! and what lessens this still farther, and almost wipes it away, is this, that the word was struck through some time afterwards (as appears from a different tint of the ink) with a line quite across it, in this manner, Bravo! as if he had retracted, or was ashamed of the opinion he had once entertained of it.

These short characters of his sermons were always written, excepting in this one instance, upon the first leaf of his sermon, which served as a cover to it, and usually upon the inside of it, which was turned towards the text; but at the end of his discourse, where, perhaps, he had five or six pages, and sometimes, perhaps, a whole score to turn himself in, he took a larger circuit, and indeed a much more mettlesome one, as if he had snatched the