half-sheet of dirty
blue paper, which seems to have been once the cast cover of a general
review, which to this day smells horribly of horse drugs.--Whether these
marks of humiliation were designed,--I something doubt;--because at the
end of the sermon (and not at the beginning of it)--very different from
his way of treating the rest, he had wrote--Bravo!

--Though not very offensively,--for it is at two inches, at least, and
a half's distance from, and below the concluding line of the sermon,
at the very extremity of the page, and in that right hand corner of it,
which, you know, is generally covered with your thumb; and, to do it
justice, it is wrote besides with a crow's quill so faintly in a small
Italian hand, as scarce to solicit the eye towards the place, whether
your thumb is there or not,--so that from the manner of it, it stands
half excused; and being wrote moreover with very pale ink, diluted
almost to nothing,--'tis more like a ritratto of the shadow of vanity,
than of Vanity herself--of the two; resembling rather a faint thought of
transient applause, secretly stirring up in the heart of the composer;
than a gross mark of it, coarsely obtruded upon the world.

With all these extenuations, I am aware, that in publishing this, I
do no service to Yorick's character as a modest man;--but all men have
their failings! and what lessens this still farther, and almost wipes it
away, is this; that the word was struck through sometime afterwards (as
appears from a different tint of the ink) with a line quite across it in
this manner, BRAVO (crossed out)--as if he had retracted, or was ashamed
of the opinion he had once entertained of it.

These short characters of his sermons were always written, excepting in
this one instance, upon the first leaf of his sermon, which served as a
cover to it; and usually upon the inside of it, which was turned towards
the text;--but at the end of his discourse, where, perhaps, he had five
or six pages, and sometimes, perhaps, a whole score to turn himself
in,--he took a large circuit, and, indeed, a much more mettlesome
one;--as if he had snatched the occasion of unlacing himself with a
few more frolicksome strokes at vice, than the straitness of the pulpit
allowed.--These, though hussar-like, they skirmish lightly and out of
all order, are still auxiliaries on the side of virtue;--tell me then,
Mynheer Vander Blonederdondergewdenstronke, why they should not be
printed together?