“Is it so late?” said the young gentleman; “then I am afraid I have missed an appointment already; but the truth is, I am cursedly given to missing of appointments.”

When the grazier and he were gone, Harley turned to the remaining personage, and asked him if he knew that young gentleman.  “A gentleman!” said he; “ay, he is one of your gentlemen at the top of an affidavit.  I knew him, some years ago, in the quality of a footman; and I believe he had some times the honour to be a pimp.  At last, some of the great folks, to whom he had been serviceable in both capacities, had him made a gauger; in which station he remains, and has the assurance to pretend an acquaintance with men of quality.  The impudent dog! with a few shillings in his pocket, he will talk you three times as much as my friend Mundy there, who is worth nine thousand if he’s worth a farthing.  But I know the rascal, and despise him, as he deserves.”

Harley began to despise him too, and to conceive some indignation at having sat with patience to hear such a fellow speak nonsense.  But he corrected himself by reflecting that he was perhaps as well entertained, and instructed too, by this same modest gauger, as he should have been by such a man as he had thought proper to personate.  And surely the fault may more properly be imputed to that rank where the futility is real than where it is feigned:  to that rank whose opportunities for nobler accomplishments have only served to rear a fabric of folly which the untutored hand of affectation, even among the meanest of mankind, can imitate with success.

CHAPTER XX—­HE VISITS BEDLAM.—­THE DISTRESSES OF A DAUGHTER

Or those things called Sights in London, which every stranger is supposed desirous to see, Bedlam is one.  To that place, therefore, an acquaintance of Harley’s, after having accompanied him to several other shows, proposed a visit.  Harley objected to it, “because,” said he, “I think it an inhuman practice to expose the greatest misery with which our nature is afflicted to every idle visitant who can afford a trifling perquisite to the keeper; especially as it is a distress which the humane must see, with the painful reflection, that it is not in their power to alleviate it.”  He was overpowered, however, by the solicitations of his friend and the other persons of the party (amongst whom were several ladies); and they went in a body to Moorfields.

Their conductor led them first to the dismal mansions of those who are in the most horrid state of incurable madness.  The clanking of chains, the wildness of their cries, and the imprecations which some of them uttered, formed a scene inexpressibly shocking.  Harley and his companions, especially the female part of them, begged their guide to return; he seemed surprised at their uneasiness, and was with difficulty prevailed on to leave that part of the house without showing them some others:  who, as he expressed it in the phrase of those that keep wild beasts for show, were much better worth seeing than any they had passed, being ten times more fierce and unmanageable.