Thus qualified, the young man in due time went up to London. In the great metropolis he soon divested himself of the rusticity of his manners, and after some few failures in the first instance, for want of knowing the proper knack of writing, he soon acquired a tolerable facility, and absolutely once wrote something that was talked about. From that moment he never saw two people talking together in a bookseller's shop, without fancying that they were talking about Zephaniah Pringle. He took great pains to imitate Dr Johnson; but his literary companions detected him and laughed at him. He had but a slender frame and a slender voice; and when he attempted the oracular and the pompous style, it was like playing the Hallelujah Chorus on a fife. He could not adopt the doctor's Jacobitism, but he took instead of that a double extra super-Eldon high Toryism. And in religion, not that he ever went to church, he was decidedly of opinion that all dissenters and Roman Catholics were convinced that the church of England was the only true church, but that they would not conform merely out of spite. It was his opinion that the Duke of Wellington would never have driven the French out of Spain, had he not always made a point of hearing all his soldiers every day say the church catechism. He had a praiseworthy and prodigious horror of gymnastics; they came from Greece, and the ancient Greeks were republicans. In his notion of mechanics' institutes he was exceedingly ungrateful to Mr Kipperson, who patronized him and them too; and when Mr Kipperson once proposed to establish a mechanics' institute at Smatterton for the benefit of the agricultural operatives, this Zephaniah Pringle had the impudence to write him a long letter on the subject, accusing him of a design to subvert the established church, and convert England into a republic. Mr Kipperson gave up the scheme, not because of this letter, but because, when he assembled the people of the village in one of his barns to read them a lecture on hydrostatics, every soul of them fell fast asleep. There was another subject on which Mr Zephaniah Pringle had very strong opinions,--viz. West India slavery. He very properly laughed at the absurdity of supposing that negroes have the slightest objection to be flogged to death; and he knew that the only object which the abolitionists had in view, was to overturn the established church.