I refrained from weeping, and incontinently I fell to musing: “If this man had been rich, a Cresus, a Crassus, or as rich as Whittington, what pompe, charge, lavish cost, expenditure, of rich buriall, ceremoniall-obsequies, obsequious ceremonies, had been thought too good for such an one; what store of panegyricks, elogies, funeral orations, &c. some beggarly poetaster, worthy to be beaten for his ill rimes, crying him up, hee was rich, generous, bountiful, polite, learned, a Mæcenas, while as in very deede he was nothing lesse ; what weeping, sighing, sorrowing, honing, complaining kinsmen, friends, relatives, fourtieth cousins, poor relatives, lamenting for the deceased; hypocriticall heirs, sobbing, striking their breasts ; (they care not if he had died a year ago); so many clients, dependants, flatterers, parasites, cunning Gnathoes, tramping on foot after the hearse, all their care is, who shall stand fairest with the successour ; he meantime (like enough) spurns them from him, spits at them, treads them under his foot, will have nought to do with any such cattle. I think him in the right : Hæc sunt majora gravitate Heracliti. These follies are enough to give crying Heraclitus a fit of the spleene."

MR. H

A FARCE-IN TWO ACTS,

AS IT WAS PERFORMED AT DRURY LANE THEATRE,

DECEMBER, 1806.

“Mr. H, thou wert DAMNED. Bright shone the morning on the play oills that announced thy appearance, and the streets were filled with the buzz of persons asking one another if they would go to see Mr. H-, and answer ing that they would certainly; but before night the gayety, not of the author, but of his friends and the town, was eclipsed, for thou wert damned! Hadst thou been anonymous, thou haply mighist have lived. But thou didst come to an untimely end for thy tricks, and for want of a better name to pass them off.”—Theatrical Examiner.

PROLOGUE.

SPOKEN BY MR. ELLISTON

Ir we have sinn'd in paring down a name,
All civil, well-bred authors do the same.
Survey the columns of our daily writers-
You'll find that some Initials are great fighters.
How fierce the shock, how fatal is the jar,
When Ensign W. meets Lieutenant R.
With two stout seconds, just of their own gizzard,
Cross Captain X. and rough old General Izzard !
Letter to letter spreads the dire alarms,
Till half the alphabet is up in arms.
Nor with less lustre have Initials shone,
To grace the gentler annals of Crim. Con.,
Where the dispensers of the public lash
Soft penance give; a letter and a dash-
Where vice reduced in size shrinks to a failing,
And loses half her grossness by curtailing.
Faux pas are told in such a modest way-
The affair of Colonel B. with Mrs. A.-
You must forgive them-for what is there, say,
Which such a pliant vowel must not grant
To such a very pressing consonant?
Or who poetic justice dares dispute,
When mildly melting at a lover's suit.
The wife's a liquid, her good man a inute ?
Even in the homelier scenes of honest life,
The coarse-spun intercourse of man and wife,
Initials, I am told, have taken place
Of deary, spouse, and that oldfashioned race
And Cabbage, ask'd by Brother Snip to tea,
Replies, “ I'll come-but it don't rest with me
I always leaves them things to Mrs. C.”
Oh should this mincing fashion ever spread
From names of living heroes to the dead,
How would ambition sigh, and hang the head,
As each loved syllable should melt away-
Her Alexander turned into Great A.-
A single C. her Cesar to express
Her Scipio shrunk into a Roman S.-
And nick'd and dock'd to these new modes of speech.
Great Hannibal himself a Mr. H.