[Footnote 69: I beg Nathaniel's pardon: he is not a cobbler; 'it' is a 'tailor', but begged Capel Lofft to sink the profession in his preface to two pair of panta--psha!--of cantos, which he wished the public to try on; but the sieve of a patron let it out, and so far saved the expense of an advertisement to his country customers--Merry's "Moorfields whine" was nothing to all this. The "Delia Cruscans" were people of some education, and no profession; but these Arcadians ("Arcades ambo"--bumpkins both) send out their native nonsense without the smallest alloy, and leave all the shoes and small-clothes in the parish unrepaired, to patch up Elegies on Enclosures, and Pæans to Gunpowder. Sitting on a shop-board, they describe the fields of battle, when the only blood they ever saw was shed from the finger; and an "Essay on War" is produced by the ninth part of a "poet;" "And own that 'nine' such poets made a Tate." Did Nathan ever read that line of Pope? and if he did, why not take it as his motto? ['An Essay on War; Honington Green, a Ballad ... an Elegy and other Poems,' was published in 1803.]] [Footnote 70: This well-meaning gentleman has spoiled some excellent shoemakers, and been accessory to the poetical undoing of many of the industrious poor. Nathaniel Bloomfield and his brother Bobby have set all Somersetshire singing; nor has the malady confined itself to one county. Pratt too (who once was wiser) has caught the contagion of patronage, and decoyed a poor fellow named Blackett into poetry; but he died during the operation, leaving one child and two volumes of "Remains" utterly destitute. The girl, if she don't take a poetical twist, and come forth as a shoemaking Sappho, may do well; but the "tragedies" are as ricketty as if they had been the offspring of an Earl or a Seatonian prize poet. The patrons of this poor lad are certainly answerable for his end; and it ought to be an indictable offence. But this is the least they have done: for, by a refinement of barbarity, they have made the (late) man posthumously ridiculous, by printing what he would have had sense enough never to print himself. Certes these rakers of "Remains" come under the statute against "resurrection men." What does it signify whether a poor dear dead dunce is to be stuck up in Surgeons' or in Stationers' Hall? Is it so bad to unearth his bones as his blunders? Is it not better to gibbet his body on a heath, than his soul in an octavo? "We know what we are, but we know not what we may be;" and it is to be hoped we never shall know, if a man who has passed through life with a sort of éclat is to find himself a mountebank on the other side of Styx, and made, like poor Joe Blackett, the laughing-stock of purgatory. The plea of publication is to provide for the child; now, might not some of this 'Sutor ultra Crepidaitis' friends and seducers have done a decent action without inveigling Pratt into biography? And