He had taken been cheated by Rachel of the five guineas. pains to trace her to her own parish: he did not so much value the loss of the money, as he thought it was a duty he owed the public to clear the country of such vermin. Mr. Wilson immediately committed her. She took her trial at the next assizes, when she was sentenced to a year's imprisonment. In the mean time the pawnbroker, to whom she had sold the silver cup, which she had stolen from poor Sally's master, impeached her; and as the robbery was fully proved upon Rachel, she was sentenced, for this crime, to Botany Bay and a happy day it was for the county of Somerset, when such a nuisance was sent out of it. She was transported much about the same time that her husband Giles lost his life in stealing the net from the garden wall, as related in the Second Part of Poaching Giles. : I have thought it my duty to print this little history, as a kind warning to all you young men and maidens, not to have any thing to say to cheats, impostors, cunning women, fortunetellers, conjurers, and interpreters of dreams. Listen to me, your true friend, when I assure you, that God never reveals to weak and wicked women those secret designs of his providence, which no human wisdom is able to foresee. To consult these false oracles is not only foolish, but sinful. It is foolish, because they are themselves as ignorant as those whom they pretend to teach; and it is sinful, because it is prying into that futurity which God, in mercy as well as wisdom, hides from men. God, indeed, orders all things; but when you have a mind to do a foolish thing, do not fancy you are fated to do it. This is tempting Providence, and not trusting him. It is indeed charging God with folly. Prudence is his gift, and you obey him better when you make use of prudence, under the direction of prayer, than when you madly run into ruin, and think you are only submitting to your fate. Never fancy that you are compelled to undo yourself, or to rush upon your own destruction, in compliance with any supposed fatality. Never believe that God conceals his will from a sober Christian who obeys his laws, and reveals it to a vagabond gipsy, who runs up and down breaking the laws both of God and man. King Saul never consulted the witch till he had left off serving God. The Bible will direct us what to do, better than any conjurer; and there are no days unlucky, but those which we make so by our own vanity, sin, and folly. VILLAGE POLITICS, ADDRESSED TO ALL THE MECHANICS, JOURNEYMEN, AND LABORERS, IN GREAT BRITAIN. BY WILL CHIP, A COUNTRY CARPENTER.* It is a privilege to be prescribed to in things about which our minds would otherwise be tossed with various apprehensions. And for pleasure, I shall profess myself so far from doting on that popular idol, Liberty, that I hardly think it possible for any kind of obedience to be more painful than an unrestrained liberty. Were there not true bounds of magistrates, of laws, of piety, of reason in the heart, every man would have a fool, nay, a mad tyrant, to his master, that would multiply him more sorrows than the briers and thorns did to Adam, when he was freed from the bliss at once, and the restraint of paradise, and became a greater slave in the wilderness than in the inclosure. Dr. Hammond's Sermons. A DIALOGUE BETWEEN JACK ANVIL, THE BLACKSMITH, AND TOM HOD, THE MASON. Jack. WHAT'S the matter, Tom? Why dost look so dismal? Tom. Dismal indeed! Well enough I may. Jack. What! is the old mare dead? or work scarce? Tom. No, no, work's plenty enough, if a man had but the heart to go to it. Jack. What book art reading? hang-dog? Why dost look so like a Tom (looking on his book). Cause enough. Why, I find here that I am very unhappy, and very miserable; which I should never have known, if I had not had the good luck to meet with this book. O, 'tis a precious book! Jack. A good sign, tho'-that you can't find out you're unhappy, without looking into a book for it! What is the matter? *This piece, as a pamphlet, was published, and most extensively circulated, in 1793, to counteract the pernicious doctrines, which, owing to the French revolution, were then become seriously alarming to the friends of religion and government in every part of Europe.-ED. Tom. Matter? Why, I want liberty. Jack. Liberty! That's bad, indeed! What! has any one fetched a warrant for thee? Come, man, cheer up, I'll be bound for thee. Thou art an honest fellow in the main, tho' thou dost tipple and prate a little too much at the Rose and Crown. Tom. No, no, I want a new constitution. Jack. Indeed! Why, I thought thou hadst been a desperate healthy fellow. Send for the doctor directly. Tom. I'm not sick; I want liberty and equality, and the rights of man. Jack. O, now I understand thee. leveller and a republican, I warrant? What! thou art a Tom. I'm a friend of the people. I want a reform. Jack. Tom. But I want a general reform. Jack. Then let every one mend one. Tom. Pooh! I want freedom and happiness, the same as they have got in France. Jack. What, Tom, we imitate them! We follow the French! Why, they only began all this mischief at first, in order to be just what we are already; and what a blessed land must this be, to be in actual possession of all they ever hoped to gain by all their hurly-burly! Imitate them, indeed! Why, I'd sooner go to the Negroes to get learning, or to the Turks to get religion, than to the French for freedom and happiness. Tom. What do you mean by that? ar'n't the French free? Jack. Free, Tom! ay, free with a witness. They are all so free, that there's nobody safe. They make free to rob whom they will, and kill whom they will. If they don't like a man's looks, they make free to hang him, without judge or jury, and the next lamp-post serves for the gallows; so then, they call themselves free, because you see they have no law left to condemn them, and no king to take them up and hang them for it. Tom. Ah, but, Jack, didn't their king formerly hang people for nothing, too? and besides, were not they all papists before the revolution? Jack. Why, true enough, they had but a poor sort of religion; but bad is better than none, Tom. And so was the government bad enough too; for they could clap an innocent man into prison, and keep him there too, as long as they would, and never say, with your leave, or by your leave, gentlemen of the jury. But what's all that to us? Tom. To us! Why, don't our governors put many of our poor folks in prison against their will? What are all the jails for? Down with the jails, I say! all men should be free. Jack. Harkee, Tom, a few rogues in prison keep the rest in order, and then honest men go about their business in safety, afraid of nobody; that's the way to be free. And let me tell thee, Tom, thou and I are tried by our peers as much as a lord is. Why, the king can't send me to prison, if I do no harm; and if I do, there's reason good why I should go there. I may go to law with Sir John at the great castle yonder; and he no more dares lift his little finger against me than if I were his equal. A lord is hanged for hanging matter, as thou or I should be; and if it be any comfort to thee, I myself remember a peer of the realm being hanged for killing his man, just the same as the man would have been for killing him.* Tom. A lord! Well, that is some comfort, to be sure.— But have you read the "Rights of Man?" Jack. No, not I; I had rather by half read the “Whole Duty of Man." I have but little time for reading, and such as I should therefore only read a bit of the best. Tom. Don't tell me of those old-fashioned notions. Why should not we have the same fine things they have got in France? I'm for a constitution-and organization-and equalization-and fraternization. Jack. Do be quiet. Now, Tom, only suppose this nonsensical equality was to take place; why, it would not last while one could say Jack Robinson; or suppose it couldsuppose, in the general division, our new rulers were to give us half an acre of ground apiece; we could, to be sure, raise potatoes on it for the use of our families; but as every other man would be equally busy in raising potatoes for his family, why then, you see, if thou wast to break thy spade, I, whose trade it is, should no longer be able to mend it. Neighbor Snip would have no time to make us a suit of clothes, nor the clothier to weave the cloth; for all the world would be gone a digging. And as to boots and shoes, the want of some one to make them for us, would be a still greater grievance than the tax on leather. If we should be sick, there would be no doctor's stuff for us; for doctors would be digging too. And if necessity did not compel, and if no inequality subsisted, we could not get a chimney swept, or a load of coal from pit, for love or money. * Lord Ferrers, hanged, in 1760, for killing his steward. Tom. But still I should have no one over my head. Jack. That's a mistake: I'm stronger than thou; and Standish, the exciseman, is a better scholar; so that we should not remain equal a minute. I should out-fight thee, and he'd out-wit thee. And if such a sturdy fellow as I am, was to come and break down thy hedge for a little firing, or take away the crop from thy ground, I'm not so sure that these new-fangled laws would see thee righted. I tell thee, Tom, we have a fine constitution already, and our forefathers thought so. Tom. They were a pack of fools, and had never read the Rights of Man." 44 Jack. I'll tell thee a story. When Sir John married, my lady, who is little fantastical, and likes to do every thing like the French, begged him to pull down yonder fine old castle, and build it up in her frippery way. No," says Sir John; "what! shall I pull down this noble building, raised by the wisdom of my brave ancestors; which outstood the civil wars, and only underwent a little needful repair at the Revolution; a castle which all my neighbors come to take a pattern by-shall I pull it all down, I say, only because there may be a dark closet, or an awkward passage, or an inconvenient room or two in it? Our ancestors took time for what they did. They understood foundation work; no running up your little slight lath-and-plaster buildings, which are up in a day, and down in a night." My lady mumped and grumbled; but the castle was let stand, and a glorious building it is; tho' there may be a trifling fault or two, and tho' a few decays want stopping; so now and then they mend a little thing, and they'll go on mending, I dare say, as they have leisure, to the end of the chapter, if they are let alone. But no pull-me-down works. What is it you are crying out for, Tom? Tom. Why, for a perfect government. There's Jack. You might as well cry for the moon. nothing perfect in this world, take my word for it tho' Sir John says, we come nearer to it than any country in the world ever did. Tom. I don't see why we are to work like slaves, while others roll about in their coaches, feed on the fat of the land, and do nothing. Jack. My little maid brought home a little story-book from the charity-school t'other day, in which was a bit of a fable about the belly and the limbs. The hands said, "I won't work any longer to feed this lazy belly, who sits in state like VOL. I. 31 |