English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism; Great Britain -- Intellectual life -- 18th century
unwearied, and the mere titles of his efforts in this way occupy four
columns of Messrs. Stephen and Lee's great dictionary. He wrote on the
Naturalization of the Jews; he wrote on Vails-Giving, on the American
War, on Pure Bread, on Solitary=
```* 'Good housewives all the winter's rage despise,
```Defended by the riding-hood's disguise:
```Or underneath th' umbrella's oily shed,
```Safe thro' the wet, on clinking pattens tread.'
`````Gay's Trivia, 1716, i. 209-212.=
Confinement; he wrote 'Earnest Advice' and 'Moral Reflections' to
Everybody on Everything. To misuse Ben Jonson's words of Shakespeare,
'He flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should
be stopped.' One entire pamphlet on bread was dictated in the space of
a forenoon, says his secretary and biographer Pugh. When it is further
explained that it consisted of two hundred law sheets, or ninety octavo
pages, it is obvious that the excellent author's powers as a pamphleteer
must have been preternatural. But it is hardly surprising to find even
his admirer admitting that his ideas were not well arranged, and that
his style was undeniably diffuse.
This latter quality is aptly illustrated by a volume which lies before
us, being in fact the identical record of those travels in England by
which Johnson asserted that Mr. Hanway had lost the celebrity he had
acquired by his 'Travels in Persia.' The very title of the book--a
privately printed quarto--is as long as that of 'Pamela.' It runs
thus,--'A Journal of Eight Days Journey from Portsmouth to Kingston
upon Thames; through South-am ton, Wiltshire, etc. With Miscellaneous
Thoughts, Moral and Religious; in a Series of Sixty-four Letters:
Addressed to two Ladies of the Partie. To which is added, An Essay on
tea, considered as 'pernicious to Health, obstructing Industry, and
impoverishing the Nation: With an Account of its Growth, and great
Consumption in these Kingdoms. With several political Reflections; and
Thoughts on Public Love. In Twenty-five Letters to the same Ladies. By
a Gentleman of the Partie. London: H. Woodfall, 1756.' The 'Partie,' by
the way, if we are to trust Wale's emblematic frontispiece, must have
been limited to the writer and these two ladies, discreetly disguised in
the 'Contents' as 'Mrs. D.' and 'Mrs. O.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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