does the reader suppose that he would have found Mary Flanders there?  He would certainly have found that highly unobjectionable publication, “Rasselas,” and the “Spectator,” or “Lives of Royal and Illustrious Personages,” but, of a surety, no Mary Flanders; so when Lavengro met with Peter Williams, he would have been unprovided with a balm to cure his ulcerated mind, and have parted from him in a way not quite so satisfactory as the manner in which he took his leave of him; for it is certain that he might have read “Rasselas,” and all other unexceptionable works to be found in the library of Albemarle Street, over and over again, before he would have found any cure in them for the case of Peter Williams.  Therefore the author requests the reader to drop any squeamish nonsense he may wish to utter about Mary Flanders, and the manner in which Peter Williams was cured.

And now with respect to the old man who knew Chinese, but could not tell what was o’clock.  This individual was a man whose natural powers would have been utterly buried and lost beneath a mountain of sloth and laziness, had not God determined otherwise.  He had in his early years chalked out for himself a plan of life in which he had his own ease and self-indulgence solely in view; he had no particular bad passions to gratify, he only wished to live a happy quiet life, just as if the business of this mighty world could be carried on by innocent people fond of ease or quiet, or that Providence would permit innocent quiet drones to occupy any portion of the earth and to cumber it.  God had at any rate decreed that this man should not cumber it as a drone.  He brings a certain affliction upon him, the agony of which produces that terrible whirling of the brain which, unless it is stopped in time, produces madness; he suffers indescribable misery for a period, until one morning his attention is arrested, and his curiosity is aroused, by certain Chinese letters on a teapot; his curiosity increases more and more, and, of course, in proportion as his curiosity is increased with respect to the Chinese marks, the misery in his brain, produced by his mental affliction, decreases.  He sets about learning Chinese, and after the lapse of many years, during which his mind subsides into a certain state of tranquillity, he acquires sufficient knowledge of Chinese to be able to translate with ease the inscriptions to be found on its singular crockery.  Yes, the laziest of human beings, through the Providence of God, a being too of rather inferior capacity, acquires the written part of a language so difficult that, as Lavengro said on a former occasion, none but the cleverest people in Europe, the French, are able to acquire it.  But God did not intend that man should merely acquire Chinese.  He intended that he should be of use to his species, and by the instrumentality of the first Chinese inscription which he translates, the one which first arrested his curiosity, he is taught the duty of hospitality; yes, by means of an