A fashion of flesh, or rather pink-coloured hose for the ladies, luckily coming up at the juncture, when we were on our probation for the place of Chief Jester to S.’s Paper, established our reputation in that line.  We were pronounced a “capital hand.”  O the conceits which we varied upon red in all its prismatic differences! from the trite and obvious flower of Cytherea, to the flaming costume of the lady that has her sitting upon “many waters.”  Then there was the collateral topic of ancles.  What an occasion to a truly chaste writer, like ourself, of touching that nice brink, and yet never tumbling over it, of a seemingly ever approximating something “not quite proper;” while, like a skilful posture-master, balancing betwixt decorums and their opposites, he keeps the line, from which a hair’s-breadth deviation is destruction; hovering in the confines of light and darkness, or where “both seem either;” a hazy uncertain delicacy; Autolycus-like in the Play, still putting off his expectant auditory with “Whoop, do me no harm, good man!” But, above all, that conceit arrided us most at that time, and still tickles our midriff to remember, where, allusively to the flight of Astraea—­ultima Calestum terras reliquit—­we pronounced—­in reference to the stockings still—­that MODESTY TAKING HER FINAL LEAVE OF MORTALS, HER LAST BLUSH WAS VISIBLE IN HER ASCENT TO THE HEAVENS BY THE TRACT OF THE GLOWING INSTEP.  This might be called the crowning conceit; and was esteemed tolerable writing in those days.

But the fashion of jokes, with all other things, passes away; as did the transient mode which had so favoured us.  The ancles of our fair friends in a few weeks began to reassume their whiteness, and left us scarce a leg to stand upon.  Other female whims followed, but none, methought, so pregnant, so invitatory of shrewd conceits, and more than single meanings.

Somebody has said, that to swallow six cross-buns daily consecutively for a fortnight would surfeit the stoutest digestion.  But to have to furnish as many jokes daily, and that not for a fortnight, but for a long twelvemonth, as we were constrained to do, was a little harder execution.  “Man goeth forth to his work until the evening”—­from a reasonable hour in the morning, we presume it was meant.  Now as our main occupation took us up from eight till five every day in the City; and as our evening hours, at that time of life, had generally to do with any thing rather than business, it follows, that the only time we could spare for this manufactory of jokes—­our supplementary livelihood, that supplied us in every want beyond mere bread and cheese—­was exactly that part of the day which (as we have heard of No Man’s Land) may be fitly denominated No Man’s Time; that is, no time in which a man ought to be up, and awake, in.  To speak more plainly, it is that time, of an hour, or an hour and a half’s duration, in which a man, whose occasions call him up so preposterously, has to wait for his breakfast.