THE OLD YEAR being dead, and the NEW YEAR coming of age, wh: he does by Calendar Law, as soon as the breath is out of the old gentleman’s body, nothing would serve the young spark but he must give a dinner upon the occasion, to wh: all the Days in the year were invited. […]

The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend. To these two original diversities may be reduced all those impertinent classifications of Gothic and Celtic tribes, white men, black men, red men. All the dwellers upon […]

In Mr. Lamb’s “Works,” published a year or two since, I find a magnificent eulogy on my old school,[1] such as it was, or now appears to him to have been, between the years 1782 and 1789. It happens, very oddly, that my own standing at Christ’s was nearly corresponding with his; and, with all […]

Casting a preparatory glance at the bottom of this article–as the wary connoisseur in prints, with cursory eye (which, while it reads, seems as though it read not,) never fails to consult the quis sculpsit in the corner, before he pronounces some rare piece to be a Vivares, or a Woollet–methinks I hear you exclaim, […]

Reader, in thy passage from the Bank–where thou hast been receiving thy half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean annuitant like myself)–to the Flower Pot, to secure a place for Dalston, or Shacklewell, or some other thy suburban retreat northerly,–didst thou never observe a melancholy looking, handsome, brick and stone edifice, to the left–where Threadneedle-street […]

Still-born Silence! thou that artFlood-gate of the deeper heart!Offspring of a heavenly kind!Frost o’ the mouth, and thaw o’ the mind!Secrecy’s confident, and heWho makes religion mystery!Admiration’s speaking’st tongue!Leave, thy desert shades among,Reverend hermits’ hallowed cells,Where retired devotion dwells!With thy enthusiasms come,Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb![1] Reader, would’st thou know what true peace […]

I have no ear.– Mistake me not, reader,–nor imagine that I am by nature destitute of those exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments, and (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the human capital. Better my mother had never borne me.–I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those conduits; and I feel no disposition to […]

The compliments of the season to my worthy masters, and a merry first of April to us all! Many happy returns of this day to you–and you–and you, Sir–nay, never frown, man, nor put a long face upon the matter. Do not we know one another? what need of ceremony among friends? we have all […]

“A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game.” This was the celebrated wish of old Sarah Battle (now with God) who, next to her devotions, loved a good game at whist. She was none of your lukewarm gamesters, your half and half players, who have no objection to take a hand, […]

I am arrived at that point of life, at which a man may account it a blessing, as it is a singularity, if he have either of his parents surviving. I have not that felicity–and sometimes think feelingly of a passage in Browne’s Christian Morals, where he speaks of a man that hath lived sixty […]

We are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross for fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. But […]

I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and sympathized with all things, I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncracy in any thing. Those national repugnancies do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch.–Religio Medici. That the author of the Religio Medici, mounted upon the […]

My reading has been lamentably desultory and immethodical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In every thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure […]

At the north end of Cross-court there yet stands a portal, of some architectural pretensions, though reduced to humble use, serving at present for an entrance to a printing-office. This old door-way, if you are young, reader, you may not know was the identical pit entrance to old Drury–Garrick’s Drury–all of it that is left. […]

The custom of saying grace at meals had, probably, its origin in the early times of the world, and the hunter-state of man, when dinners were precarious things, and a full meal was something more than a common blessing; when a belly-full was a windfall, and looked like a special providence. In the shouts and […]

I was born, and passed the first seven years of my life, in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said–for in those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places?–these are of my oldest recollections. I […]

In comparing modern with ancient manners, we are pleased to compliment ourselves upon the point of gallantry; a certain obsequiousness, or deferential respect, which we are supposed to pay to females, as females. I shall believe that this principle actuates our conduct, when I can forget, that in the nineteenth century of the era from […]

Bridget Elia has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have obligations to Bridget, extending beyond the period of memory. We house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness; with such tolerable comfort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go […]

Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great […]

I like to meet a sweep–understand me–not a grown sweeper–old chimney-sweepers are by no means attractive–but one of those tender novices, blooming through their first nigritude, the maternal washings not quite effaced from the cheek–such as come forth with the dawn, or somewhat earlier, with their little professional notes sounding like the peep peep of […]