pany went to bed.

Such were manners six or seven score years ago. I draw no inference from
this queer picture--let all moralists here present deduce their own. Fancy
the moral condition of that society in which a lady of fashion joked with
a footman, and carved a great shoulder of veal, and provided besides a
sirloin, a goose, hare, rabbit, chickens, partridges, black-puddings, and
a ham for a dinner for eight Christians. What--what could have been the
condition of that polite world in which people openly ate goose after
almond pudding, and took their soup in the middle of dinner? Fancy a
colonel in the Guards putting his hand into a dish of _beignets
d'abricot_, and helping his neighbour, a young lady _du monde_! Fancy a
noble lord calling out to the servants, before the ladies at his table,
"Hang expense, bring us a ha'porth of cheese!" Such were the ladies of St.
James's--such were the frequenters of White's Chocolate-house, when Swift
used to visit it, and Steele described it as the centre of pleasure,
gallantry, and entertainment, a hundred and forty years ago!

Dennis, who ran amuck at the literary society of his day, falls foul of
poor Steele, and thus depicts him,--"Sir John Edgar, of the county of ---- in
Ireland, is of a middle stature, broad shoulders, thick legs, a shape like
the picture of somebody over a farmer's chimney--a short chin, a short
nose, a short forehead, a broad, flat face, and a dusky countenance. Yet
with such a face and such a shape, he discovered at sixty that he took
himself for a beauty, and appeared to be more mortified at being told that
he was ugly, than he was by any reflection made upon his honour or
understanding.

"He is a gentleman born, witness himself, of very honourable family;
certainly of a very ancient one, for his ancestors flourished in Tipperary
long before the English ever set foot in Ireland. He has testimony of this
more authentic than the Heralds' Office, or any human testimony. For God
has marked him more abundantly than he did Cain, and stamped his native
country on his face, his understanding, his writings, his actions, his
passions, and, above all, his vanity. The Hibernian brogue is still upon
all these, though long habit and length of days have worn it off his
tongue."(107)

Although this portrait is the work of a man who was neither the friend of
Steele nor of any other man alive, yet there is a dreadful resemblance to
the original in the savage and exagge