The Committee-man hath a sideman, or rather a setter, hight a Sequestrator, of whom you may say, as of the great Sultan’s horse, where he treads the grass grows no more.  He is the State’s cormorant, one that fishes for the public but feeds himself; the misery is he fishes without the cormorant’s property, a rope to strengthen the gullet and to make him disgorge.  A sequestrator!  He is the devil’s nut-hook, the sign with him is always in the clutches.  There are more monsters retain to him than to all the limbs in anatomy.  It is strange physicians do not apply him to the soles of the feet in a desperate fever, he draws far beyond pigeons.  I hope some mountebank will slice him and make the experiment.  He is a tooth-drawer once removed; here is the difference, one applauds the grinder the other the grist.  Never till now could I verify the poet’s description, that the ravenous harpy had a human visage.  Death himself cannot quit scores with him; like the demoniac in the gospel, he lives among tombs, nor is all the holy water shed by widows and orphans a sufficient exorcism to dispossess him.  Thus the cat sucks your breath and the fiend your blood; nor can the brotherhood of witchfinders, so sagely instituted with all their terror, wean the familiars.

But once more to single out my embossed committee-man; his fate (for I know you would fain see an end of him) is either a whipping audit, when he is wrung in the withers by a committee of examinations, and so the sponge weeps out the moisture which he had soaked before; or else he meets his passing peal in the clamorous mutiny of a gut-foundered garrison, for the hedge-sparrow will be feeding the cuckoo till he mistake his commons and bites off her head.  Whatever it is, it is within his desert, for what is observed of some creatures that at the same time they trade in productions three stories high, suckling the first, big with the second, and clicketing for the third:  a committee-man is the counterpoint, his mischief is superfoetation, a certain scale of destruction, for he ruins the father, beggars the son, and strangles the hope of all posterity.

THE CHARACTER OF A DIURNAL-MAKER.

A diurnal-maker is the sub-almoner of history, Queen Mab’s register, one whom, by the same figure that a north country pedlar is a merchantman, you may style an author.  It is like overreach of language, when every thin tinder-cloaked quack must be called a doctor; when a clumsy cobbler usurps the attribute of our English peers, and is vamped a translator.  List him a writer and you smother Geoffrey in swabber-slops; the very name of dabbler oversets him; he is swallowed up in the phrase, like Sir S.L. [Samuel Luke] in a great saddle, nothing to be seen but the giddy feather in his crown.  They call him a Mercury, but he becomes the epithet like the little negro mounted upon an elephant, just such another blot rampant.  He has not stuffings sufficient for the reproach of