This unctuous address to "my lion-hearted boy" is equalled in drollery by many passages of the work itself, which (in the language of the title-page) "contains all most worthy the attention of a Traveller--also a dissertation on the Art of Pleasing, with the most interesting observations on the Force of Prejudice; numberless adventures, as well amongst nuns and friars as with persons in high life; with a description of a great variety of the most admirable relations, which, though told in his well-known peculiar manner, each one is strictly true, and within the Chevalier's own observations and knowledge." Apart from the bombast of his style, the Chevalier's "well-known peculiar manner" was remarkable for little besides tautology and a fantastic arrangement of words. In his orations, when he aimed at sublimity, he indulged in short sentences each of which commenced with a genitive case followed by an accusative; after which came the verb succeeded by the nominative. Thus, at such crises of grandiloquence, instead of saying, "I will lecture on the wonders of the eye," he would invert the order to, "Of the eye on the wonders lecture will I." By doing this, he maintained that he surpassed the finest periods of Tully! There is a letter in Nichols's "Literary Anecdotes," in which a lecture given by this mountebank at Northampton is excellently described. "The doctor," says the writer, "appeared dressed in black, with a long light flowing ty'd wig; ascended a scaffold behind a large table raised about two feet from the ground, and covered with an old piece of tapestry, on which was laid a dark-coloured cafoy chariot-seat with four black bunches (used upon hearses) tyed to the corners for tassels, four large candles on each side of the cushion, and a quart decanter of drinking water, with a half-pint glass, to moisten his mouth." The fellow boasted that he was the author of forty-five works in different languages. Once he had the audacity to challenge Johnson to talk Latin with him. The doctor responded with a quotation from Horace, which the charlatan took to be the doctor's own composition. "_He said a few words well enough_," Johnson said magnanimously when he repeated the story to Boswell. "Taylor," said the doctor, "is the most ignorant man I ever knew, but sprightly; Ward, the dullest."