jigs into battle, or whether they did not show
more of the melancholy valor of the Spaniard, upon whom they charged;
that deliberate courage which contemplation and sedentary habits
breathe?

Are they often great newsmongers?--I have known some few among them
arrive at the dignity of speculative politicians; but that light and
cheerful every-day interest in the affairs and goings-on of the
world, which makes the barber[1] such delightful company, I think is
rarely observable in them.

[Footnote 1: Having incidentally mentioned the barber in a comparison
of professional temperaments, I hope no other trade will take
offence, or look upon it as an incivility done to them if I say, that
in courtesy, humanity, and all the conversational and social graces
which "gladden life," I esteem no profession comparable to his.
Indeed, so great is the goodwill which I bear to this useful and
agreeable body of men, that, residing in one of the Inns of Court
(where the best specimens of them are to be found, except perhaps at
the universities), there are seven of them to whom I am personally
known, and who never pass me without the compliment of the hat on
either side. My truly polite and urbane friend Mr. A----m, of
Flower-de-luce Court, in Fleet Street, will forgive my mention of him
in particular. I can truly say that I never spent a quarter of an
hour under his hands without deriving some profit from the agreeable
discussions which are always going on there.]

This characteristic pensiveness in them being so notorious, I wonder
none of those writers, who have expressly treated of melancholy,
should have mentioned it. Burton, whose book is an excellent abstract
of all the authors in that kind who preceded him, and who treats of
every species of this malady, from the _hypochondriacal_ or _windy_
to the _heroical_ or _love-melancholy_, has strangely omitted it.
Shakspeare himself has overlooked it. "I have neither the scholar's
melancholy (saith Jaques), which is emulation; nor the courtier's,
which is proud; nor the soldier's, which is politic; nor the lover's,
which is all these:" and then, when you might expect him to have
brought in, "nor the tailor's, which is," so and so, he comes to an
end of his enumeration, and falls to a defining of his own
melancholy.

Milton likewise has omitted it, where he had so fair an opportunity
of bringing it in, in his _Penseroso_.

But the partial omissions of historians proving nothing again