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thanks to Heaven that an illiterate peasant could pay

-Or a learned prelate either, said I.

THE CASE OF DELICACY.

WHEN you have gained the top of Mount Taurira, you run presently down to Lyons ;adieu then to all rapid movements!-'tis a journey of caution; and it fares better with sentiments, not to be in a hurry with them; so I contracted with a voiturin to take his time with a couple of mules, and convey me in my own chaise safe to Turin, through Savoy.

Poor, patient, quiet, honest people! fear not; your poverty, the treasury of your simple virtues, will not be envied you by the world, nor will your vallies be invaded by it.-Nature! in the midst of thy disorders, thou art still friendly to the scantiness thou hast created: with all thy great works about thee, little hast thou left to give, either to the scythe or to the sicklebut to that little thou grantest safety and protection; and sweet are the dwellings which stand so sheltered!

Let the way-worn traveller vent his complaints upon the sudden turns and dangers of your roads, your rocks, your precipices; the difficulties of getting up, the horrors of getting down, mountains impracticable, and cataracts, which roll down great stones from their summits, and block up his road. The peasants had been all day at work in removing a fragment of this kind between St Michael and Madane; and, by the time my vioturin got to the place, it wanted full two hours of completing, before a passage could any how be gained. There was nothing but to wait with patience;-'twas a wet and tempestuous night; so that by the delay and that together, the voiturin found himself obliged to put up five miles short of his stage, at a little decent kind of an inn by the road side.

I forthwith took possession of my bedchamber, got a good fire, ordered supper, and was thanking Heaven it was no worse, when a voiturin arrived with a lady in it, and her servantmaid.

As there was no other bedchamber in the house, the hostess, without much nicety, led them into mine, telling them, as she ushered them in, that there was nobody in it but an English gentleman;-that there were two good beds in it, and a closet within the room which held another. The accent in which she spoke of this third bed, did not say much for it;however, she said there were three beds, and but three people, and she durst say the gentleman would do any thing to accommodate matters.I left not the lady a moment to make a conjecture about it, so instantly made a declaration that I would do any thing in my power.

As this did not amount to an absolute surrender of my bed-chamber, I still felt myself so much the proprietor, as to have a right to do the honours of it;-so I desired the lady to sit down, pressed her into the warmest seat, called for more wood, desired the hostess to enlarge the plan of the supper, and to favour us with the very best wine.

The lady had scarce warmed herself five minutes at the fire, before she began to turn her head back and to give a look at the beds: and the oftener she cast her eyes that way, the more they returned perplexed.-I felt for her—and for myself; for in a few minutes, what by her looks, and the case itself, I found myself as much embarrassed as it was possible the lady could be herself.

That the beds we were to lie in were in one and the same room, was enough simply by itself to have excited all this; but the position of them (for they stood parallel, and so very close to each other, as only to allow a space for a small wicker-chair betwixt them) rendered the affair still more oppressive to us ;-they were fixed up, moreover, near the fire, and the projection of the chimney on one side; and a large beam which crossed the room on the other, formed a kind of recess for them that was no way favourable to the nicety of our sensations:

if any thing could have added to it, it was that the two beds were both of them so very small, as to cut us off from every idea of the lady and the maid lying together; which, in either of them, could it have been feasible, my lying beside them, though a thing not to be wished, yet there was nothing in it so terrible which the imagination might not have passed over without torment.

As for the little room within, it offered little or no consolation to us: 'twas a damp, cold closet, with a half dismantled window-shutter, and with a window which had neither glass nor oil-paper in it to keep out the tempest of the night. I did not endeavour to stifle my cough when the lady gave a peep into it; so it reduced the case in course to this alternative,―That the lady should sacrifice her health to her feelings, and take up with the closet herself, and abandon the bed next mine to her maid,—or, that the girl should take the closet, &c.

The lady was a Piedmontese of about thirty, with a glow of health in her cheeks. The maid. was a Lyonoise of twenty, and as brisk and lively a French girl as ever moved. There were difficulties every way,-and the obstacle of the stone in the road, which brought us into the distress, great as it appeared whilst the peasants were removing it, was but a pebble to what lay in our way now-I have only to add, that it did not lessen the weight which hung upon our spirits, that we were both too delicate to communicate what we felt to each other upon the occasion.

We sat down to supper; and, had we not had more generous wine to it than a little inn in Savoy could have furnished, our tongues had been tied up till Necessity herself had set them at liberty;-but the lady having a few bottles of Burgundy in her voiture, sent down her fille de chambre for a couple of them; so that by the time supper was over, and we were left alone, we felt ourselves inspired with a strength of mind sufficient to talk, at least, without reserve upon our situation. We turned it every way, and debated and considered it in all kinds of lights in the course of a two hours' negocia tion; at the end of which the articles were settled finally betwixt us, and stipulated for in form and manner of a treaty of peace,-and, I believe, with as much religion and good faith on both sides, as in any treaty which has yet had the honour of being handed down to posterity.

They were as follows:

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First, As the right of the bed-chamber is in Monsieur, and he thinking the bed next to the fire to be the warmest, he insists upon the concession on the lady's side of taking up with it.

Granted on the part of Madame; with a proviso, That, as the curtains of that bed are of a flimsy transparent cotton, and appear likewise too scanty to draw close, that the fille de chambre shall fasten up the opening, either by corkingpins or needle and thread, in such a manner as shall be deemed a sufficient barrier on the side of Monsieur.

2dly, It is required on the part of Madame, that Monsieur shall lie the whole night through in his robe de chambre.

Rejected in as much as Monsieur is not warth a robe de chambre; he having nothing in his portmanteau but six shirts and a black silk pair of breeches.

The mentioning the silk pair of breeches made an entire change of the article, for the breeches were accepted as an equivalent for the robe de chambre; and so it was stipulated and agreed upon, that I should lie in my black silk breeches all night.

3dly, It was insisted upon, and stipulated for by the lady, that after Monsieur was got to

bed, and the candle and fire extinguished, tha. Monsieur should not speak one single word the whole night.

Granted, provided Monsieur's saying his prayers might not be deemed an infraction of the treaty.

There was but one point forgot in this treaty, and that was the manner in which the lady and myself should be obliged to undress and get to bed ;-there was one way of doing it, and that I leave to the reader to devise, protesting as I do it, that if it is not the most delicate in nature,-'tis the fault of his own imagination,— against which this is not my first complaint. Now, when we were got to bed, whether it was the novelty of the situation, or what it was, I know not, but so it was, I could not shut my eyes; I tried this side and that, and turned and turned again, till a full hour after midnight, when Nature and Patience both wearing out,-O my God! said I.

You have broke the treaty, Monsieur, said the lady, who had no more slept than myself.-I begged a thousand pardons; but insisted it was no more than an ejaculation.She maintained 'twas an entire infraction of the treaty.I maintained it was provided for in the clause of the third article.

The lady would by no means give up the point, though she weakened her barrier by it ; for, in the warmth of the dispute, I could hear two or three corking pins fall out of the curtain to the ground.

-Upon my word and honour, Madame, said I, stretching my arm out of bed by way of asseveration,

(I was going to have added, that I would not have trespassed against the remotest idea of decorum for the world)

-But the fille de chambre hearing there were words between us, and fearing that hostilities would ensue in course, had crept silently out of her closet; and it being totally dark, had stolen so close to our beds, that she had got herself into the narrow passage which separated them, and had advanced so far up as to be in a line betwixt her mistress and me ;

So that, when I stretched out my hand, I caught hold of the fille de chambre's

END OF THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY.

THE

VICAR OF WAKEFIELD.

A TALE.

BY OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

ADVERTISEMENT.

THERE are a hundred faults in this thing, and a hundred things might be said to prove them beauties. But it is needless. A book may be amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity. The hero of this piece unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth ;—he is a priest, a husbandman, and the father of a family. He is drawn as ready to teach, and ready to obey-as simple in affluence, and majestic in adversity. In this age of opulence and refinement, how can such a character please? Such as are fond of high life, will turn with disdain from the simplicity of his country fire-side; such as mistake ribaldry for humour, will find no wit in his harmless conversation; and such as have been taught to deride religion, will laugh at one whose chief stores of comfort are drawn from futurity.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

THE

VICAR OF WAKEFIELD.

A TALE.

CHAP. I.

The description of the Family of Wakefield, in which a kindred likeness prevails as well of minds as of persons.

I was ever of opinion that the honest man, who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population. From this motive, I had scarce taken orders a year, before I began to think seriously of matrimony, and chose my wife as she did her wedding gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well. To do her justice, she was a goodnatured, notable woman; and as for breeding, there were few country ladies who could shew more. She could read any English book without much spelling; but for pickling, preserving, and cookery, none could excel her. She prided herself also upon being an excellent contriver in house-keeping; though I could never find that we grew richer with all her contrivances.

However, we loved each other tenderly, and our fondness increased as we grew old. There was, in fact, nothing that could make us angry with the world, or each other. We had an elegant house, situate in a fine country, and a good neighbourhood. The year was spent in moral or rural amusements, in visiting our rich neighbours, and relieving such as were poor. We had no revolutions to fear, nor fatigues to undergo; all our adventures were by the fire-side, and all our migrations from the blue bed to the brown. As we lived near the road, we often had the traveller or stranger visit us, to taste our gooseberry-wine, for which we had great reputation; and I profess, with the veracity of an historian, that I never knew one of them find fault with it. Our cousins too, even to the fortieth remove, all remembered their affinity, without any help from the heralds' office, and came very frequently to see us. Some of them did us no great honour by these claims of kindred; as we had the blind, the maimed, and the halt, amongst the

number. However, my wife always insisted that
as they were the same flesh and blood, they should
sit with us at the same table: so that if we had
not very rich, we generally had very happy,
friends about us; for this remark will hold good
through life, that the poorer the guest, the bet-
ter pleased he ever is with being treated; and
as some men gaze with admiration at the co-
lours of a tulip, or the wing of a butterfly, so I
was by nature an admirer of happy human faces.
However, when any one of our relations was
found to be a person of a very bad character, a
troublesome guest, or one we desired to get rid
of, upon his leaving my house, I ever took care
to lend him a riding-coat, or a pair of boots, or
sometimes an horse of small value, and I always
had the satisfaction to find he never came back
to return them. By this the house was cleared
of such as we did not like; but never was the
family of Wakefield known to turn the traveller
or the poor dependant out of doors.

Thus we lived several years in a state of much happiness; not but that we sometimes had those little rubs which Providence sends to enhance the value of its favours. My orchard was often robbed by school-boys, and my wife's custards plundered by the cats or the children. The squire would sometimes fall asleep in the most pathetic parts of my sermon, or his lady return my wife's civilities at church with a mutilated curtsey. But we soon got over the uneasiness caused by such accidents, and usually in three or four days began to wonder how they vexed us.

My children, the offspring of temperance, as they were educated without softness, so they were at once well-formed and healthy; my sons hardy and active, my daughters beautiful and blooming. When I stood in the midst of the little circle, which promised to be the supports of my declining age, I could not avoid repeating the famous story of Count Abensberg, who, in Henry II.'s progress through Germany, while other courtiers came with their treasures, brought his thirty-two children, and presented them to his sovereign as the most valuable offering he In this manner, though I had had to bestow.

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