ner as hath at any time been practised with* these last twenty years.

Moreover, I would provide, that Mann and Day* shall, as at present, have the entire clothing of this new army, so scrupulous am I distressing the administration.

People are generally fond of their own projects, and it may be I look upon this with the partiality of a parent; but I protest I cannot find any one objection to it. It will save an immense expense to the nation, remove the fears that at present disturb the minds of many, and answer every one of the purposes, to which our present army has been applied. The numbers will sound great and formidable abroad; the individuals will be gentle and peaceable at home; and there will be an increase to the public of above 50,000 hands for labour and manufactures, which at present are either idle, or but scurvily employed.

I cannot, I own, help flattering myself, that this scheme will prevail, and the more so from the very great protection and success wax-work has lately met with; which, I imagine, was only as an essay or tentamen to some greater design of this nature. But, whatever be the event of it, this alternative I will venture to assert, that, by the 25th of March next, either the army or another body of men must be of

wax.

* Two very considerable woollen drapers in the Strand. 4 *

THE PRIDE OF BIRTH.

The notion of birth, as it is commonly called and established by custom, is, like duelling, the manifest result of the prejudices of the many, and of the designs of a few. It is the child of Pride and Folly, coupled together by that industrious pander, Self-Love. It is surely the

strongest instance, and the weakest prop, of human vanity. If it means any thing, it means a long lineal descent from a founder, whose industry or good fortune, whose merit, or perhaps whose guilt, has enabled his posterity to live useless to society, and to transmit to theirs their pride and their patrimony. However, this extravagant notion, this chimerical advantage, the effect of blind chance, where prudence and option cannot even pretend to e have the least share, is that FLY, which, by a kind of Egyptian superstition, custom all over Europe has deified, and at whose tawdry shrine good sense, good manners, and good nature, are daily sacrificed.

The vulgar distinction between people of birth and people of no birth will probably puzzle the critics and antiquaries of the thirtieth or fortieth centuries, when, in their judicious or laborious researches into the customs and manners of these present times, they shall have reason to suppose, that, in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the island of Great Britain was inhabited by two

sorts of people, some born, but much the greater part unborn. The fact will appear so incredible, that it will certainly be believed; the only difficulty will be how to account for it; and that, as it commonly does, will engross the attention of the learned. The case of Cadmus's men will doubtless be urged as a case in point, to prove the possibility of the thing; and the truth of it will be confirmed by the records of the university of Oxford, where it will appear that an unborn person, called for that reason Terra Filius, annually entertained that university with an oration in the theatre.

I therefore take with pleasure this opportunity of explaining and clearing up this difficulty to my remotest successors in the republic of letters, by giving them the true meaning of the several expressions of great birth, noble birth, and no birth at all.

Great and illustrious birth is ascertained and authenticated by a pedigree, carefully preserved in the family, which takes at least an hour's time to unroll, and, when unrolled, discloses twenty intermarriages of valiant and puissant Geoffreys and Hildebrands, with as many chaste and pious Blanches and Mauds, before the Conquest, not without here and there a dash of the Plantagenets. But if unfortunately the insolent worms should have devoured the pedigree as well as the persons of the illustrious family that defect may be supplied by the authentic cords of the herald's office, that inestimable:

repository of good sense and useful knowledge. If this great birth is graced with a peerage, so much the better; but if not, it is no great matter; for, being so solid a good in itself, it wants no borrowed advantages, and is unquestionably the most pleasing sentiment that a truly generous mind is capable of feeling.

Noble birth implies only a peerage in the family. Ancestors are by no means necessary for this kind of birth; the patent is the midwife of it, and the very first descent is noble. The family arms, however modern, are dignified by the coronet and mantle; but the family livery is sometimes, for very good reasons, laid aside.

Birth, singly, and without any epithet, extends, I cannot possibly say how far, but negatively it stops where useful arts and industry begin. Merchants, tradesmen, yeomen, farmers, and ploughmen, are not born, or at least in so mean a way as not to deserve that name; and it is perhaps for that reason, that their mothers are said to be delivered, rather thar brought to bed of them. But baronets, knights,

and esquires, have the honour of being born.

I must confess that, before I got the key to this fashionable language, I was a good deal puzzled myself with the distinction between birth and no birth; and, having no other guide than my own weak reason, I mistook the matter most grossly. I foolishly imagined, that well-born meant born with a sound mind in a Bound body; a healthy, strong constitution,

timable advantage, not to be adequately understood but by those who have it.”

My friend was going on, and, to say the truth, growing dull, when I took the liberty of interrupting him, by acknowledging that the cogency of his arguments, and the self-evidence of his facts, had entirely removed all my doubts, and convinced me of the unspeakable advantages of illustrious birth, and unfortunately I added that my own vanity was greatly flattered by it, in consequence of my being lineally descended from the first man. Upon this my friend looked grave, and seemed rather dis pleased; whether from a suspicion that I was jesting, or upon an apprehension that I mean to out-descend him, I cannot determine; for he contented himself with saying, "That is not a necessary consequence, neither, Mr. Fitz-Adam, since I have read somewhere or other of preAdamites; which opinion did not seem to me an absurd one."

Here I took my leave of him, and went home full of reflections upon the astonishing power of self-love, that can extract comfort and pleasure from such groundless, absurd, and extravagant prejudices. In all other respects my friend is neither a fool nor a madman, and can talk very rationally upon any rational subject. But such is the inconsistency both of the human mind and the human heart, that one must not form a general judgment of either, from one glaring error, or one shining excellence.