CHAPTER X.

THE SQUIRE PATRONIZES THE ANCIENT AND MO. DERN ARTS AND SCIENCES; EXAMPLES OF IT IN ARCHITECTURE, POETRY, RHETORIC, CHARIOTEERING, RACING, BOXING, AND DRINKING.A WORD OR TWO CONCERNING HIS NEXT BROTHER, MASTER AUTHOR COMMENCES DRAMA

FREDERIC.-THE

TIST FOR A WHILE.

OUR Squire ranged himself in the centre of the circle of fashion, and patronized all the modern elegant and fashionable arts and sciences, and it must be acknowledged too that he did not neglect the ancient ones. To encourage architecture, for instance, he purchased an old house, and laid out ten times more to repair it than the building of an entire new one would have cost him, and, at the best, it was but a bungling job. The term of house would be unapplicable to it, as it never was finished; but the Squire digmified it with the title of Snarldown House.

This was his town residence; but as Mrs. Fitzwaddle could not expect to be received as a modest female by others of that description, within the circle of the mansion-house, he purchased several buildings at a watering-place which he began to repair, and denominated it The Pagoda. Here Mrs. Fitzwaddle figured away like an eastern goddess! The Squire also set on foot a subscription for decayed Authors, which, critically speaking, is an improper term, as, from Homer down to the present age, not ten of the whole tribe have ever been able to draw on any other bank than that of Fame. As they have, therefore, never flourished, they conse quently cannot be said to have decayed. We have, indeed, been told of a satire written in

Latin prose, entitled "A poet has bought

a house." The plot is as follows: The poet having bought a house, the matter was immediately laid before a parliament of poets, assembled on that important occasion, as a thing unheard-of, as a very bad precedent, and of most pernicious tendency; and accordingly a very severe sentence was passed upon the buyer. When the members came to give their votes,

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it appeared that there was not a single person in the assembly, who, through the favour of powerful patrons, or their own happy genius, was worth so much as to enable him to purchase a house, or who had had the good fortune to inherit one: all of them, neglecting their private fortunes, confessed that they lived in lodgings. The poet was, therefore, ordered to sell his house immediately, to buy wine with the money for their entertainment, in order to make some atonement for his enormous crime, and to teach him to live unsettled, and without care, like a true poet.-We have never heard that the Squire's institution revived the art of poetry, or we must have seen his virtues celebrated in some heroic verses. We, alone, have endeavoured to supply this want of gratitude or inattention of the Parnassian tribe.

That the Squire was not insensible to the powers of rhetoric, will be gathered from his attachment to Brush, Merryman, Quirke, and Hareskin; but he never suffered them to talk him out of the one-thousandth part of what he lavished on actresses and opera singers, who gratified his taste for pleasure in a double sense.

It has been observed that the patronage of Lælius and Scipio did not enable Terence even to rent a house. Brush, Merryman, and Quirke, never arrived to that height, till they were afterwards provided with habitations at the public expence, and they might have said to the Squire, as the philosopher Anaxagoras replied to Pericles, who had suffered him to fall into extreme want :- "Those who use a lamp, should take care to feed it with oil."-Hareskin, indeed, was rather more of the tortoise kind, and, thanks to his profession, had a shell to creep into.

Then as for the modern arts and sciences; the Squire was as good a whip as any hackneycoachman about town, or any mail-coach driver on the road. He was, moreover, hailed as chief by all the blacklegs at Newmarket, and he kept the most numerous and famous stud of any of them whence, and from the multitude of his debts so soon accumulated, we may naturally infer that he bled freely at every pore.

It is remarked by the Connoisseur, that it is one of the greatest advantages of education, that it encourages an ingenuous spirit, and cul

tivates a liberal disposition. We do not wonder that a lad who has never been sent to school, and whose faculties have never been suffered to rust at the alehouse, should form too close an intimacy with his best friends, the groom, and the game-keeper; but it would amaze us to see a boy, well educated, cherish this ill-placed pride of being, as it is called, the head of the company.-Now, our Squire had received a most liberal, or at least a most expensive education, but it did not keep him from cherishing this ill-placed pride.

This whole tribe of gamesters, says the same Essayist, may be ranked under two divisions: every man who makes carding, dicing, and betting his daily practice, is either a dupe or a sharper; two characters equally the object of envy and admiration. The dupe is generally a person of great fortune, and weak intellects,—

"Who will as tenderly be led by th' nose,

As asses are."

He plays, not that he has any delight in cards and dice, but because it is the fashion ; and if whist or hazard are proposed, he will