“Why, my l_a_rd, as I was going past the Royal Exchange I meets Billy. ‘Billy,’ says I, ‘will you sky a copper?’ ‘Done,’ says he; ‘Done,’ says I; and done and done’s enough between two jantlemen. With that I ranged them fair and even with my hook-em-snivey--up they go. ‘Music!’ says he--‘Skulls!’ says I; and down they come, three brown mazards. ‘By the holy! you flesh’d ‘em,’ says he. ‘You lie,’ says I. With that he ups with a lump of a two year old, and lets drive at me. I outs with my bread-earner, and gives it him up to Lamprey in the bread-basket.” To make this intelligible to the English, some comments are necessary. Let us follow the text, step by step, and it will afford our readers, as Lord Kames says of Blair’s Dissertation on Ossian, a delicious morsel of criticism. _As I was going past the Royal Exchange I meets Billy._ In this apparently simple exordium, the scene and the meeting with Billy are brought before the eye by the judicious use of the present tense. _Billy, says I, will you sky a copper?_ A copper! genus pro specie! the generic name of copper for the base individual halfpenny. _Sky a copper._ _To sky_ is a new verb, which none but a master hand could have coined: a more splendid metonymy could not be applied upon a more trivial occasion; the lofty idea of raising a metal to the skies is substituted for the mean thought of tossing up a halfpenny. Our orator compresses his hyperbole into a single word. Thus the mind is prevented from dwelling long enough upon the figure to perceive its enormity. This is the perfection of the art. Let the genius of French exaggeration and of eastern hyperbole hide their diminished heads--Virgil is scarcely more sublime. “Ingrediturque solo, et caput inter nubila condit.” “Her feet on earth, her head amidst the clouds.” Up they go, continues our orator. _Music! says he--Skulls! says I._ Metaphor continually: on one side of an Irish halfpenny there is a harp; this is expressed by the general term music, which is finely contrasted with the word skull. _Down they come, three brown mazards._ Mazards! how the diction of our orator is enriched from the vocabulary of Shakspeare! the word head, instead of being changed for a more general term, is here brought distinctly to the eye by the term mazard, or face, which is more appropriate to his majesty’s profile than the word skull or head. _By the holy! you flesh’d ‘em, says he_.