His lady sent for the family doctor,--a humorist, gentlemen. 'Ah!' * cried Mr. Galen, 'the old complaint, a coagulation in the lungs. Let me feel your pulse. In a high fever! Show me your tongue. Ay, as white as a curd. Open your mouth, wider, Mr. Deputy--you caw open it wide enough _sometimes!_--wider still. Good heavens! what do. I see here?'--'Oh! my stars!' screamed the Deputy's wife, 'What, my dear doctor, do you--see?'--'Why, madam, I see the leg of a turkey, and a tureen of oyster-sauce!' 'Ha! ha! ha!--gluttons all; gluttons all!' [Illustration: 0154]. “A pise on Benjamin Bosky! the cunning Lauréat, having a visitation from sundry relatives of his cousin's wife's uncle's aunt's sister, hath enjoined me the penance, _malgré moi-même!_ of playing showman to them among the Lions of London. Now I have no antipathy to poor relations--your shabby genteel--provided that, while they eat and drink at my expense, they will not fail to contradict ** me stoutly when they think I am in the wrong; but your purse-proud, half-and-half, * When Justice Shallow invited Falstaff to dinner, he issued the following orders:--“Some pigeons, Davy; a couple of short-legged hens; a joint of mutton; and any pretty little tiny kickshaws, tell William Cook.” This is a modest bill of fare. What says Massinger of City feasting in the olden time? “Men may talk of Country Christmasses, Their thirty-pound butter'd eggs, their pies of carp's tongue, Their pheasants drench'd with ambergris, the carcases Of three fat wethers bruised for gravy, to Make sauce for a single peacock; yet their feasts were fasts, compared with the City's.” ** A friend of Addison's borrowed a thousand pounds of him, which finding it inconvenient to repay, he never upon any occasion ventured to contradict him. One day the hypocrisy became so offensively palpable, that Addison, losing all patience, exclaimed, “For heaven's sake contradict me, sir, or pay me my thousand pounds!” Brummagem gentlefolks, shabby, without being-genteel!--your pettifoggers in small talk and etiquette, that know everything and nothing--listening to and retailing everybody's gossip, meddling with everybody's business,--and such are the Fubsys, Muffs, and Flumgartens,--are sad provocatives to my splenetic vein. His spirits rallied when the talk was of Chaucer, whose memory we drank in a cup of sack prepared, as mine host assured us, from a recipe that had belonged to the house as an heir-loom, time out of mind, and of which Dick Tarlton had often tasted. “Dick Tarlton, Uncle Timothy,--was not he one of the types of Merrie England?”