r shrinks from being the
lord of acres into a pleasant companion or a dull fellow. When a visitor
enters or leaves a room, it is not inquired whether he is rich or poor,
whether he lives in a garret or a palace, or comes in his own or a
hackney coach, but whether he has a good expression of countenance,
with an unaffected manner, and whether he is a man of understanding or
a blockhead. These are the circumstances by which you make a favourable
impression on the company, and by which they estimate you in the
abstract. In the country, they consider whether you have a vote at
the next election or a place in your gift, and measure the capacity of
others to instruct or entertain them by the strength of their pockets
and their credit with their banker. Personal merit is at a prodigious
discount in the provinces. I like the country very well if I want to
enjoy my own company; but London is the only place for equal society,
or where a man can say a good thing or express an honest opinion without
subjecting himself to being insulted, unless he first lays his purse on
the table to back his pretensions to talent or independence of spirit. I
speak from experience.(5)

NOTES to ESSAY IV.

(1) It is not very long ago that I saw two Dissenting Ministers (the
_Ultima Thud_ of the sanguine, visionary temperament in politics)
stuffing their pipes with dried currant-leaves, calling it Radical
Tobacco, lighting it with a lens in the rays of the sun, and at every
puff fancying that they undermined the Boroughmongers, as Trim blew up
the army opposed to the Allies! They had _deceived the Senate._ Methinks
I see them now, smiling as in scorn of Corruption.

Dream on, blest pair:
Yet happier if you knew your happiness,
And knew to know no more!

The world of Reform that you dote on, like Berkeley's material world,
lives only in your own brain, and long may it live there! Those same
Dissenting Ministers throughout the country (I mean the descendants of
the old Puritans) are to this hour a sort of Fifth-monarchy men: very
turbulent fellows, in my opinion altogether incorrigible, and according
to the suggestions of others, should be hanged out of the way without
judge or jury for the safety of church and state. Marry, hang them!
they may be left to die a natural death: the race is nearly extinct of
itself, and can do little more good or harm!

(2) William, our waiter, is dressed neatly in black, takes in the
TICKLER (which many o