signify much to me when I was dead, I was rebuked
with 'Don't talk in that shocking way, Frederick, as if you were a
heathen, in your situation, and I hearing you your collect every Sunday,
besides Mrs. Hannah More, who might have been a saint if ever there was
one, or anything else she liked, with her talents, only she was too
good for this wicked world, and so she went to a better, and wrote that
charming book _Colebs_ ~157~~_in Search of a Wife_'.--Oh! my poor dear
mother's queer sentences! I was becoming shockingly tired of my own
company, when it occurred to me that it would be the correct thing to
carve my name on the Newgate stone _a la_ Jack Sheppard; and I was
just putting a few finishing strokes to the N of Coleman, wherewith,
in characters at least six inches long, I had embellished a very
conspicuous spot over the chimney-piece, when I was surprised 'with my
chisel so fine, tra la,' (i.e., with a red-hot poker, which I had been
obliged to put up with instead, it being the only implement attainable,)
by the officials, who came to summon me, and who did not appear in the
slightest degree capable of appreciating the beauties of my performance.
By them I was straightway conducted into the awful presence of sundry
elderly gentlemen, rejoicing in heads all more or less bald, and faces
expressing various degrees of solemn stupidity, who in their proper
persons constituted 'the bench'. Before these grave and reverend
signiors did Master Dullmug and his satellites

"'Then and there,
Rehearse and declare'

all my heinous crimes, offences and misdemeanours; whereupon the
aforesaid signiors did solemnly shake their bald heads, and appear
exceedingly shocked and particularly puzzled. Well, at last I was called
upon for my defence, and, having made up my mind for some time what line
I would take, I cut the matter very short, by owning to have assisted
in ringing the bells, which I confessed was an act of folly, but nothing
more, and that the idea of its constituting an offence punishable by law
was absurd in the extreme. This sent them to book, and, after turning
over sundry ponderous tomes, and consulting various statutes of all
sorts and sizes, besides whispering together, and shaking their
heads once and again, till I began to fear that their necks would
be dislocated, they arrived at the conclusion that I was right, or
thereabouts. This fact the eldest, most bald, and most stupid of
the party, ch