court of females, in council assembled, that the rage of public amusements is grown to such a height among our loving subjects, that the London ladies run away to them before they are entirely dressed ; we do hereby order, that such females be subjected to the penalties of the vagrant act. As it is the na

ture of fashion to familiarise us gradually to the most frightful innovations, and to carry us step by step into the most indecorous habitudes, we shall shortly publish, with the stamp and seal of our authority, a scale of dress, adjusted to the thermometer, from the freezing point up to blood heat. We shall hereby provide, that in the sultriest weather the British ladies never uncover below a certain point, or let the Zephyr on any account imprint a kiss upon their bosoms; for we judge it not only perilous to our own sex, but unjust towards the other, to overheat the gentlemen in cooling ourselves. We have, moreover, taken into our most serious consideration the disorder and disorganization that has taken place in the different parts of our dress, which has of late years occasioned strange deficiencies and redundancies, in contradiction to, or in exaggeration of, nature's benign institutions. To restore the necessary equilibrium, we we shall take very summary measures to call up all the constituent parts of dress into their proper places, so that every lady may appear with the form that Nature has bestowed upon her, and not outrage her work by coarse attempts to correct it. We cannot but consider the sex, at present, to be in the condition of other bodies, whose equilibrium of electrical fire being destroyed, are ready for explosion as soon as they come into contact with a proper conductor. Thus their bosoms are charged with negative, and their waists with positive electricity-a state as dangerous as can well be imagined to the tranquillity of

their minds and safety of their persons. We do therefore enact, by virtue of our sovereign authority, that all females in England, in our dominion of Wales, and town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, do implicitly and reverently comport themselves in strict observance of this our scale of dress, after the 6th day of May next. Given at our Court, the 21st day of April, 1793."

I cannot help thinking that my mother's apprehensions on my account, now that I am exposed to these surrounding temptations, have accelerated the publication of this wise proclamation.

N° 55. SATURDAY, JUNE 1.

Τα ἡγεμονικα αυτων διαβλεπε, και τες φρόνιμες, δια μεν φεύγεσιν, δια δε διωκεσιν.

ANTONIN. PIUS.

Examine the constitution of their minds, and the nature of their pursuits, the grounds and objects of their disgusts and affections.

I HAVE been now three days in the capital; and every hour's experience confirms me in the conviction, that I was not born to make any considerable figure within the bills of mortality. It is not that my coat is so out of the fashion, though I confess that even there I am not in all the severity of the mode; but there is a certain incorrigible indocility in the turn of my mind, which

makes it slow in adopting what has nothing to recommend it but change, and dull in comprehending the value of inconvenience, and the wisdom of incumbrance. I carry about with me a formal cast of thinking, which fastens upon a set of principles, that refuse to be disciplined by the world, or modified by its customs. My pleasures too are still of a more unaccommodating nature, and will not be tutored into that line of enjoyment which fashion has prescribed to its votaries. Being thus, in a manner, abandoned to my own counsels, I am determined upon making the best of my bargain; and as I observe that it is among the secret maxims of every man's bosom, when he finds himself in an error, to invent a system to countenance and support it, rather than confess his fallibility; and that, when a philosopher is wrong, his way is not to seek to correct himself, but to prove himself right: so it shall be my business to fortify myself in my singularities of opinion, by building up a system around them.

Preparatory to a business of such magnitude, it will be necessary to remove all interruptions and impediments that may rise in my way from former systems, and to make, as other great philosophers do, a general clearance, to all of whom the old proverb may be very properly applied, "That new brooms sweep clean." I give notice, therefore, that I have it in contemplation to astonish the world with a new list of vulgar errors, or pseudodoxia epidemica; a short specimen of which I shall here subjoin:

A fine coat makes, proves, or discovers the gentleman; A red coat, the soldier;

A tight pair of breeches,
A snuff-box,
An eye-glass,

a fellow of ease;

a connoisseur;

a short-sighted man;

All these opinions, and a thousand more, equally established, I shall endeavour to remove, before I come forward with my new system, to which I am

resolved, in imitation of other great philosophers, to make every thing a victim that opposes it, if, to clear the way for it, I am forced to pull down the very pillars of fashionable orthodoxy, and blaspheme the sanctity of dulness at its very shrine. I cannot answer for the extraordinary lengths to which my systematizing fury may transport me: possibly it may lead me on to maintain that, to be a thorough gentleman, one must be a christian, at least in practice, and that our appearance in the next world is of more consequence than our figure in this. For such heresies as these, I can expect no toleration in the hierarchy of fashion; yet am I resolved to buckle to my tenets till the last extremity, though the inquisition of the beau monde, in the plenitude of its cruelty, should condemn me to be "married, and settled in the country."

One of the most cheerful hopes with which my mind amused itself, in forming the plan of this visit to the metropolis, was that of finding, in this great field of human character, a truly polite man, and such a one as my fancy had often pictured to itself, in my moon-light walks through the chesnut groves of my neighbour Blunt. I despair, however, in the course of the short time I have yet to dedicate to the search, of finding my man; I shall therefore describe this creature of my fancy, as accurately as I remember -it, that if, perchance, he should be met any where by any of my readers, or if haply he should be among my readers, he may know that, in an obscure town in Northamptonshire, there lives an odd little old man, whose pulse would beat like a drum, and whose bosom would glow with delight, to behold, ere he sinks into the tomb of his ancestors, the original of that copy with which his dreams have presented him.

He is a person of a settled and composed carriage,