It has been the usual custom when old generals have worn out their bodies by the toils of many glorious campaigns, beauties their complexions by the fatigues of exhibiting their persons, or patriots their constitutions by the heat of the house, to send them to some purer air abroad, or to Kensington gravelpits at home but as there is nothing so justly to be dreaded as the chance of surviving good fame, I am for sending all such persons in the zenith of their glory to the fens in Essex.

As it is with man himself, so likewise shall we find it with every thing that proceeds from him. His plans are great, just and noble; worthy the divine image he bears. His progression and execution, to a certain point, answerable to his designs; but beyond it, all is weakness, deformity and disgrace. To be assured of this point, it is as necessary to consult another as the sick man his physician to know the crisis of his distemper: but whom to apply to, is the important question. A friend is of all men living the most unfit, because good counsel and sincere advice are known to produce an immediate dissolution of all social connexions. The necessity of a new office is therefore evident; which office I propose shall be hereafter executed by commission, but first (by way of trial) by a single person, invested with proper powers, and universally acknowledged by the style and title of 'sworn extinguisher.' To explain the functions of this person, I shall relate to you the accident which furnished the first hint for what I am now offering to your perusal.

Whenever I have been so happy as to be master of a candle, I have observed that though it has burned with great brightness to a certain point, yet the moment that the flame has reached that point, it has become less and less bright, rising and falling with great inequalities, until at last it has expired in a most into

lerable stink. In other families, where poverty is not the directress, the candle lives and dies without leaving any ill odour behind it; and this by the welltimed application of a machine called an extinguisher.

It is the use of this machine that I am desirous of extending and what confirmed me in the project was my happening one Sunday to drop into a church, where the top of the pulpit was a deep concave, not very unlike the implement above-mentioned. The sermon, which had begun and proceeded in a regular uniform tenor, grew towards the latter end extremely different; now lofty, now low, now flashy, now dark .....In short, the preacher and his canopy brought so strongly to my mind the expiring candle and its extinguisher, that I longed to have the power of pro perly applying the one to the other; and from that moment conceived a project of suspending hollow cones of tin, brass or wood, over the heads of all pub lic speakers, with lines and pullies to lower them oc casionally.

I carried this project to a certain great man, who was pleased to reject it; telling me of several devices which might answer the purpose better; and instancing, among many other practices, that of the Robin Hood society, where the president performs the of fice of an extinguisher by a single stroke of a hammer. In short, the arguments of this great man prevailed with me to lay aside my first scheme, but furnished me at the same time, with hints for a more extensive one.

At the playhouse the curtain is not only always ready, but capable of extinguishing at once all the persons of the drama. How many new tragedies might be saved for the future, if the curtain was to drop by authority as soon as the hero was dead! or how happily might the languid, pale and putrid flames

of a whole fifth act be extinguished by the establishment of such an office.

In applying it to epic poetry, I could not but felicitate the author of the Iliad. The extinguisher of the Eneid deserves the highest encomiums.........Happy Virgil! but O wretched Milton! more unhappy in the blindness of thy commentators, than in thy own! who, to thy eternal disgrace, would preserve thy two concluding lines, with the same superstition with which the Gebers venerate the snuff of a candle, and cry out sacrilege if you offer to extinguish it!

I perceive I shall want room to explain my method of extinguishing talkers in private companies; but that I may not appear to you like those quacks who boast of more than they can perform, let me convince you that the attempt is not impracticable, by reminding you of Apelles, who standing behind one of his pictures, listened with great patience while a shoemaker was commending the foot; but the moment the mechanic was passing on to the leg, stepped from his hiding-place, and extinguished him at once with the famous proverb in use at this day....... "The shoemaker must not go beyond his last."

But whenever this office is put into commission, I propose, for this last-mentioned branch, to take in a proper number of ladies; I mean such as dress in the height of the mode; who being equipped with hoops in the utmost extent of the fashion, are always provided with an extinguisher ready for immediate use. By the application of this machine to the above-mentioned purpose, I shall have the farther satisfaction of vindicating the ladies from the unjust imputation of bearing about them any thing useless. And as the Chinese knew gunpowder, the ancients the load-stone, and the moderns electricity, many years before they were applied to the benefit of mankind, it will not appear strange if a noble use be at length found for the

hoop, which has, to be sure, till now afforded mere matter of speculation.

I now extinguish, myself,

And am, Sir,

P. S. If the above project meets with your approbation, I shall venture to communicate another of a nature not very unlike the foregoing, and in which the public is at, least equally interested.

Galenical medicines, from the quantity with which the patient was to be drenched, have excited of late years so universal a loathing, that the faculty must have lost all their practice, if they had not hit upon the method of contracting the whole force and spirit of their prescriptions into one chemical drop or pill. From this hint I would propose to erect a new chamber, with powers to abridge all arts and sciences, history, poetry, oratory, essays, &c. into the substance of a maxim, apothegm, spirit of history, or epigram. And as a proof of the practicability of this project, I will make yourself the judge, whether last paper on hearers may not be fully comprized in the following four lines.

I

Your

Our sires kept a fool, a poor hireling for state, 30 50
To enliven dull pride with his jesting and prate
But fashion capriciously changing its rule,
Now my lord is the wit, and his hearer the fool.

YOUR paper upon hearers gave me that pleasure which a series of truths must always afford, to him who can witness for every one of them.

I was born and brought up in the principality of Wales, which from time immemorial must have been productive of the most thoroughbred, seasoned and stanch hearers, since every gentleman of that country holds and asserts his right to be a talker by privilege of birth. I would not have you conclude from what I have said above, that I am not as good a gentleman as the best (I mean of as good a family) though poverty and ill-fortune have doomed me to be for ever a hearer.

I was left an orphan in my earliest years; but I am not going to trouble you with the many misfortunes which attended me to the age of forty; at which time I was a schoolmaster, without boys to teach, or bread to eat. At this period of my life I was advised by the parson of our parish to go and enter myself in some large and wealthy family to be an uncle; which is a known and common term in Wales, of like signification with hearer in England; the duties and requisite qualifications being nearly the same, as will appear from the following short instructions given me by my adviser; viz. Never to open my lips, except for the well-timed utterance of indeed!.... surprising!....prodigious!....most amazing! But these only to be used at the proper intervals of the talker's fetching his breath, coughing, or at other pauses; and