A FANTASTIC

Is one that wears his feather on the inside of his head.  His brain is like quicksilver, apt to receive any impression but retain none.  His mind is made of changeable stuff, that alters colour with every motion towards the light.  He is a cormorant that has but one gut, devours everything greedily, but it runs through him immediately.  He does not know so much as what he would be, and yet would be everything he knows.  He is like a paper-lantern, that turns with the smoke of a candle.  He wears his clothes as the ancient laws of the land have provided, according to his quality, that he may be known what he is by them; and it is as easy to decipher him by his habit as a pudding.  He is rigged with ribbon, and his garniture is his tackle; all the rest of him is hull.  He is sure to be the earliest in the fashion, and lays out for it like the first peas and cherries.  He is as proud of leading a fashion as others are of a faction, and glories as much to be in the head of a mode as a soldier does to be in the head of an army.  He is admirably skilful in the mathematics of clothes, and can tell, at the first view, whether they have the right symmetry.  He alters his gait with the times, and has not a motion of his body that (like a dottrel) he does not borrow from somebody else.  He exercises his limbs like a pike and musket, and all his postures are practised.  Take him altogether, and he is nothing but a translation, word for word, out of French, an image cast in plaster-of-Paris, and a puppet sent over for others to dress themselves by.  He speaks French as pedants do Latin, to show his breeding, and most naturally where he is least understood.  All his non-naturals, on which his health and diseases depend, are stile nuovo, French is his holiday language, that he wears for his pleasure and ornament, and uses English only for his business and necessary occasions.  He is like a Scotchman; though he is born a subject of his own nation, he carries a French faction within him.

He is never quiet, but sits as the wind is said to do when it is most in motion.  His head is as full of maggots as a pastoral poet’s flock.  He was begotten, like one of Pliny’s Portuguese horses, by the wind.  The truth is, he ought not to have been reared; for, being calved in the increase of the moon, his head is troubled with a ——­

N.B.—­The last word not legible.

AN HARANGUER

Is one that is so delighted with the sweet sound of his own tongue, that William Prynne will sooner lend an ear than he to anything else.  His measure of talk is till his wind is spent, and then he is not silenced, but becalmed.  His ears have catched the itch of his tongue, and though he scratch them, like a beast with his hoof, he finds a pleasure in it.  A silenced minister has more mercy on the Government in a secure conventicle than he has on