Shakspeare has not been very courteous towards the _worsted gentry_; had he lived in our times, they might have _worsted_ him for a libel: he says in King Lear, "A base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three suited, hundred pound, filthy, worsted stocking knave."
I asked a poor man, how he did? He said, he was like a washball, always in decay.--_Swift_.
Lady Morgan gives the following anecdote in her _Book of the Boudoir_. "The first day we had the honour of dining at the palace of the Archbishop of Taranto, at Naples, he said to me, you must pardon my passion for cats, (_la mia passione gattesca_) but I never exclude them from my dining-room, and you will find they make excellent company." Between the first and second course the door opened, and several enormously large and beautiful Angola cats were introduced by the names of Pantalone, Desdemona, Otello, &c. They took their places on chairs near the table, and were as silent, as quiet, as motionless, and as well behaved, as the most _bon ton_ table in London could require. On the bishop requesting one of the chaplains to help the Signora Desdemona, the butler stepped up to his lordship, and observed, "My Lord, La Signora Desdemona will prefer waiting for the roast."
There was much sound truth in the speech of a country lad to an idler, who boasted his ancient family: "_So much the worse for you_," said the peasant, as we ploughmen say, "_the older the seed the worse the crop_."
At North Ferryby, in Yorkshire, the following very instructive lines, are inscribed on a handsome tablet to the memory of Sir T. Etherington, an Alderman of Hull, and late a resident in the above place:--
"Taught of God we should view losses, sickness, pain, and death, but as the several trying stages by which a good man, like Joseph, is conducted from a tent to a court; sin his disease, Christ his physician, pain his medicine, the Bible his support, the grave his rest, and death itself an angel expressly sent to relieve the worn out labourer, or crown the faithful soldier!"
Louis XIV. was presented with an epitaph by an indifferent poet, on the celebrated Moliere. "I would to God," said he, "that Moliere had brought me yours."
What an unknown and unspeakable happiness would it be to a man of judgment, and who is engaged in the pursuit of knowledge, if he had but a power of stamping all his own best sentiments upon his memory in some indelible characters; and if he could but imprint every valuable paragraph and sentiment of the most excellent authors he has read, upon his mind, with the same speed and facility with which he read them?--_Watts_.