Tes. Well, well-as you please :-I leave the arrangement of our plagues to you ;—as to the plagues themselves, I am secure enough of my full share-and so I hope you have no more last words," for I can't stay to hear them. DIALOGUE THE SIXTH. MISERIES OF TRAVELLING. Testy, Senior and Junior-Sensitive. Testy. So! here we are at last, with a private house over our heads, and the free use of our own feet again, for a twelvemonth at least, I hope -bidding a long adieu (or rather a-diable,) to Bedlam, in the shape of an inn-flying fields and trees, under the fine name of prospects-wild beasts with saddles clapped on their backs, and so called Horses—and a travelling trap for a sitting room!-I shall really almost think, for a day or two to come, that there is some pleasure in being at home. Sen. Why, as in the one case your Miseries come to you, while, in the other, you go to them, you are so far right, at least, as you prefer the least troublesome mode of being unhappy :-For myself, however, I confess I do not find my feelings quite so accommodating. At home, to be sure, we are ;—yet what is home, but a torment divided into three shares; one consisting of the recollected Miseries of the last journey-another, of the anticipated horrors of the next — and a third, of the stationary stumbling-blocks peculiar to itself. Tes. Well, Sensitive, I must repeat my old confession, that you are a more dextrous grumbler, where Mind is most concerned, than myself; for my part, if my journey, when it is over, would let Body alone, I think I could manage my spiritual part tolerably well;-but here am I, you see, with a sort of traveller's lumbago upon me, from sitting ten or twelve hours on a stretch, (or rather with no stretch at all) doubled up in a dancing box of about two feet and a half square, day after day, and week after week. I verily believe all the bones in my body have shifted places within the last month; and I don't find that the rheumatism which I caught in my last damp bed but one, seems to have shuffled them into their old quartersand still less, the kick of a horse, which, no later than yesterday, took me across the ribs, by way of welcome, at my own door! I have a long account, too, to settle with my Eyes, which were never worth a halfpenny, and don't seem much mended by a hot sun, which took advantage of my having left my green spectacles at one of the inns, to look in upon me all day long, at one window or another, at every twist of the road.-But come! what are you thinking of? It is high time to begin;-you have not served your memoran→ dum-book as I did my glasses, it's to be hoped? Sen. Alas! but I have-and I have also lost many links of the sad chain of mischances which you seem to have been relating, by endeavouring in vain to recollect where I left it: but it matters not; my memory, which never fails me in a bad cause, will serve as well; nay, so deep is the impression which my late travels have left upon my imagination, that I would undertake to record them faithfully at a deferred conference, an hundred years hence. As you appear to have a peculiar kindness for Inns, I will treat you with a choice sample of satisfactions in that walk of enjoyment. -- GROAN 1. (S.) In the room of an inn to which you are confined by sudden indisposition the whole day, finding yourself reduced to the following delassements de cœur ;—and first for the Morning :-examining the scrawled window-panes, in hopes of curious verses, and finding nothing more piquant than "I love pretty Sally Appleby of Chipping Norton."-Sweet Dolly Meadows!"-" A. B. G. M. T. S. &c. &c. dined here July the 4th 1739.”—“I am very unhappy. Sam. Jennings." "Life at best is but a jest."-" Wm. Wilkins is a fool;"-with "So are you," written |