every where victorious, and the Gulls were deprived of nearly the whole of their conquests; but disunion soon proved, as it had always been, the ruin of the cause of the confederates: the Bearskins and the Gormands disagreed, and separated, and the Gulls, profiting by their folly, regained great part of the ground which they had lost.

Freeland Frederic, although he had been so roughly handled before, had not the wisdom of Parolles to give up soldiering, and exclaim:

"A plague of all drums---I'll no more drumming." In spite of the ingratitude of his old friends, the Bighose, he wished to befriend them, even against their will, and marched some Freeland and Bearskin warriors to clear their territories from the Gulls. Victory hovered over him, and was ready to drop the laurel crown on his head; but having sacrificed the moment to some trifling and absurd étiquette, the coy goddess, who must be closely pursued to obtain her favours, flew indignantly away from the cucumber Frederic, and bestowed the palm on the enemy. Frederic was glad to retreat with much loss of men and more of military honour. Although the Free

VOL. II.

landers could not allow that he was a proper person to take the command of troops, yet they acknowledged that he would have made a most excellent drill-serjeant.

The Bantam returned in the very nick of time (for he despised étiquette of every kind) to remedy the late disasters of the Gulls; and he had no sooner securely placed his own yoke upon their neck than, to gain credit for a moderation which he never possessed, he wrote a letter to the Lord of Freeland, containing a wish for a pacification. This communication was a breach of etiquette, as the respective stewards or secretaries of each manor had always been accustomed to interchange all correspondence on business. As the Bantam, however, was but very young in his new grandeur, the error was condescendingly passed over, with a gentle hint of its impropriety; but he was informed, that the restoration of the late Lord's family to their rank was the only basis. on which a permanent peace could be grounded. The Bantam, instead of resigning so easily the staff which he had got in his hands, began to lay it about the ears of the Gormands, and, in a very short space of time, cudgelled them into

another peace, the terms of which he himself dictated, and they were more galling than the former ones.

The Bantam had also the art to persuade Mad Paul that the Freelanders and Gormands had only made a cats-paw of him, and that it would be more for his interest to see Freeland destroyed, in which case he, among the rest, would share in her immense trade, than to assist in raising her grandeur, and enabling her to monopolize the whole of the trade round about. He also sent a very handsome mistress to Mad Paul, who soon tickled him into all the Bantam's purposes; and a confederacy was soon formed against Freeland between the Bearskins, and two other powers, who were jealous of the prosperous trade of Freeland. Thus so crooked a path is policy, that the Freelanders had not only to contend against old and new focs, but with their former friends!

In this critical and alarming posture of affairs, Vortex unexpectedly resigned his stewardship. It was supposed at the time, and it was afterwards evident enough, that his resignation was intended to have been only for a time, and for a

temporary purpose. He had discovered from the breaking out of the insurrection of the Gulls, so much acrimony against them, that it began to be looked upon as almost impossible that he could conclude a peace with them. He was, therefore, to retire behind the curtain, and put forward some puppet in his stead, whose jaws and limbs he might move with a string, as the reader has, without doubt, seen practised in Bartholomew or some other fair. The difficulty was where to find a person to act the puppet, as flesh and blood are not quite so tractable as wood, and every man, although he has not sense enough to manage his own petty private affairs, conceits that he can direct those of the public. Any man, who doubts this, has only to step into the first public-house he meets with, to be convinced of the fact. He will hear some tinman making more noise in a debate on politics than any parliamentary Senator; some barber shaving off the excrescences of sinecures; some dustman sweeping the enemy out of the field; or some bankrupt laying down a sure mode of paying the national debt. Vortex wanted a soft, pliable, easy-to-be-led-by-the-nose man, who had very

little of this conceit, and who was not one of those clowns whom Shakespeare reprehends for saying more than was set down for them. It was long before Vortex could find a man without this "pitiful ambition;" but in one of his walks round the mansion house, he was seen to start and heard to exclaim :

"I do remember an Apothecary,

And hereabouts he dwells, whom late I noted
In tatter'd weeds, with overwhelming brows,
Culling of simples: Meagre were his looks;
Sharp misery had worn him to the bones;
And in his needy shop a tortoise hung,
An alligator stuff'd, and other skins
Of ill-shap'd fishes; and about his shelves.
A beggarly account of empty boxes;

Green earthen pots, bladders, and musty seeds,
Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses,
Were thinly scatter'd to make up a show.
Noting this penury, to myself I said

An' it a man did need a tool now".

-Why, I want one.

His choice was fixed, and the object of it (a Mr. ADDLETON) having undertaken to play the part, he was accordingly put upon the Money Bench. In order to obtain the end for