“Pray, sirs, consider, had you been Bred where whole winters nothing’s seen But naked flood for miles and miles, Except a boat the eye beguiles; Or coots, in clouds, by buzzards teaz’d, Your ear with seeming thunder seiz’d From rais’d decoy,--there ducks on flight, By tens of thousands darken light; None to assist in greatest need, Parents but very badly read, No conversation strike the mind, But of the lowest, vulgar kind; Five miles from either church or school, No coming there, but cross a pool; Kept twenty years upon that station, With only six months’ education; Traverse the scene, then weigh it well, Say, _could you better write or spell_?” One extract, in prose, is an example of the disposition and powers of his almost untutored mind, viz. “_No animation without generation_ seems a standing axiom in philosophy: but upon tasting the berry of a plant greatly resembling brooklime, but with a narrower leaf, I found it attended with a loose fulsomeness, very different from any thing I had ever tasted; and on splitting one of them with my nail, out sprang a fluttering maggot, which put me upon minute examination. The result of which was, that every berry, according to its degree of maturity, contained a proportionate maggot, up to the full ripe shell, where a door was plainly discerned, and the insect had taken its flight. I have ever since carefully inspected the herb, and the result is always the same, viz. if you split ten thousand of the berries, you discover nothing but an animated germ. It grows in shallow water, and is frequently accompanied with the water plantain. Its berry is about the size of a red currant, and comes on progressively, after the manner of juniper in the berry: the germ is first discoverable about the middle of July, and continues till the frost subdues it. And my conjectures lead me to say, that one luxurious plant shall be the mother of many scores of flies. I call it the _fly berry plant_.” Thus far the “Sketch.” He seems to have caught the notion of his “Low Fen Journal” from a former fen genius, whose works are become of great price, though it must be acknowledged, more for their quaintness and rarity, than their intrinsic merit. Will. refers to him in the following apologetical lines. “Well, on the earth he knows of none, With a full turn just like his mind; Nor only one that’s dead and gone, Whose genius stood as his inclin’d: No doubt the public wish to know it, _John Taylor_, call’d the _water poet_, Who near two centuries ago Wrote much such nonsense as I do.” The sale of the “Sketch” not answering his expectations, no further symptoms of the “Journal” made their appearance at that time. In the summer of 1815, after forty-three years’ practice as an auctioneer, he announced his retirement by the following laconic farewell.