Maria has grown thin—­Sarah has turned methodist—­and Jenny, who danced with his Excellency the Portuguese Ambassador, who was called angelic by the Right Honourable the Lord Privy Seal, and who moreover refused a man of fortune because he had an ugly name, is going to be married to Lieutenant Stodge, on the half pay of the Royal Marines—­and what then?—­I am sure if it were not for the females of my family I should be perfectly at my ease in my proper sphere, out of which the course of our civic constitution raised me.  It was unpleasant at first:—­but I have toiled long and laboured hard; I have done my duty, and Providence has blessed my works.  If we were discomposed at the sudden change in our station, I it is who was to blame for having aspired to honours which I knew were not to last.  However the ambition was not dishonourable, nor did I disgrace the station while I held it; and when I see, as in the present year, that station filled by a man of education and talent, of high character and ample fortune, I discover no cause to repent of having been one of his predecessors.  Indeed I ought to apologize for making public the weakness by which we were all affected; especially as I have myself already learned to laugh at what we all severely felt at first—­the miseries of a SPLENDID ANNUAL.—­Sharpe’s London Magazine.

* * * * *

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS

* * * * *

A CHAPTER ON HEATHEN MYTHOLOGY

“Ut sunt divorum, Mars, Bacchus, Apollo.”
Latin Grammar.

Did you ever look
In Mr. Tooke,
For Homer’s gods and goddesses? 
The males in the air,
So big and so bare,
And the girls without their bodices.

There was Jupiter Zeus,
Who play’d the deuce,
A rampant blade and a tough one;
But Denis bold,
Stole his coat of gold,
And rigg’d him out in a stuff one,

  Juno, when old,
  Was a bit of a scold,
  And rul’d Jove jure divino;
  When he went gallivaunting,
  His steps she kept haunting,[4]
  And she play’d, too, the devil with Ino.

  Minerva bright
  Was a blue-stocking wight,
  Who lodg’d among the Attics;
  And, like Lady V.
  From the men did flee,
  To study the mathematics.

  Great Mars, we’re told,
  Was a grenadier bold,
  Who Vulcan sorely cuckold;
  When to Rome he went,
  He his children sent
  To a she-wolf to be suckled.

  Midas.

  Sol, the rat-catcher,[5]
  Was a great body-snatcher,
  And with his bow and arrows
  He Burked, through the trees,
  Master Niobes,
  As though they had been cock sparrows.

  Diana, his sister,
  When nobody kiss’d her,
  Was a saint, (at least a semi one,)
  Yet the vixen Scandal
  Made a terrible handle
  Of her friendship for Eudymion.