Johnson says he never found them agreeing upon it. Most persons however are agreed in thinking, that when anything disagreeable must be done, the sooner it is done the better. Who but a child ever holds a dose of physic in his hand,—rhubarb to wit,—or Epsom salts—delaying as long as possible to take the nauseous draught? Who ever, when he is ready for the plunge, stands lingering upon the side of the river, or the brink of the cold bath?—Who that has entered a shower-bath and closed the door, ever hesitates for a moment to pull the string? It was upon a false notion of humanity that the House of Commons proceeded, when it prolonged the interval between the sentence of a murderer and the execution. The merciful course in all cases would be, that execution should follow upon the sentence with the least possible delay. “Heaven help the man, says a goodnatured and comely reader who has a ring on the fourth finger of her left hand,—Heaven help the man! Does he compare marriage to hanging, to a dose of physic, and to a plunge over head and ears in cold water?” No madam, not he: he makes no such unseemly comparisons. He only means to say that when any great change is about to take place in our circumstances and way of life,—any thing that is looked on to with anxiety and restlessness, any thing that occasions a yeasty sensation about the pericardium,—every one who is in that state wishes that the stage of fermentation were past,—that the transition were over. I have said that little preparation was needed for a marriage which gave little employment to the upholsterers, less to the dress-makers, and none to the lawyers. Yet there was something to be done. Some part of the furniture was to be furbished, some to be renewed, and some to be added. The house required papering and painting, and would not be comfortably habitable while the smell of the paint overpowered or mingled with the odour of the shop. Here then was a cause of unavoidable delay; and time which is necessarily employed, may be said to be well employed, though it may not be upon the business which we have most at heart. If there be an impatient reader, that is to say an unreasonable one, who complains that instead of passing rapidly over this interval or parenthesis (as aforesaid), I proceed in such a manner with the relation, that many of my chapters are as parenthetical as the Euterpe of Herodotus, which whole book as the present Bishop Butler used to say, is one long parenthesis, and the longest that ever was written;—if, I say, there be so censorious a reader, I shall neither contradict him, nor defend myself, nor yet plead guilty to the fault of which he accuses me. But I will tell him what passed on a certain occasion, between Doctor, afterwards Archbishop, Sharp, when he was Rector of St. Giles's, and the Lord Chancellor Jefferies.