vehicle of instruction. It luxuriated in a
hundred forms, and on every passing subject. He wrote verses for great
women, and for those who sold oysters and herrings, as well as apples
and oranges. The flying leaves, so common at that time, contained a
great variety of squibs and parodies written by him. Here, for instance
is a travesty of Ambrose Philips' address to Miss Carteret--

"Happiest of the spaniel race
Painter, with thy colours grace,
Draw his forehead large and high,
Draw his blue and humid eye,
Draw his neck, so smooth and round,
Little neck, with ribbons bound,
And the spreading even back,
Soft and sleek, and glossy black,
And the tail that gently twines
Like the tendrils of the vines,
And the silky twisted hair
Shadowing thick the velvet ear,
Velvet ears, which hanging low
O'er the veiny temples flow ..."

He could scarcely stay at an inn without scratching something humorous
on the window pane. At the Four Crosses in the Wading Street Road,
Warwickshire, he wrote--

"Fool to put up four crosses at your door
Put up your wife--she's crosser than all four."

On another, he deprecated this scribbling on windows, which, it seems,
was becoming too general--

"The sage, who said he should be proud
Of windows in his breast
Because he ne'er a thought allowed
That might not be confessed;
His window scrawled, by every rake,
His breast again would cover
And fairly bid the devil take
The diamond and the lover."

The members of the Kit Kat club used to write epigrams in honour of
their "Toasts" on their wine glasses.[6]

He sometimes amused himself with writing ingenious riddles. Additional
grace was added to them by giving them a poetic form. They differ from
modern riddles, which are nearly all prose, and turn upon puns. They
more resemble the old Greek and Roman enigmas, but have not their
obscurity or simplicity. Most of them are long, but the following will
serve as a specimen--

"We are little airy creatures
All of different voice and features;
One of us in glass is set,
One of us you'll find in jet
T'other you may see in tin,
And the fourth a box within
If the fifth you should pursue,
It can never fly from you."

This may have suggested to Miss C. Fanshawe her celebrated enigma on the
letter H.

The humorous talent possessed by the Dean made him a great acquisition
in society, and, as it appears, somewhat too fascinating