One would have thought these rips were a set of prophets, they were all so busy prophesying, and never any thing good.

They kent (believe them) that we were to be smote hip and thigh; and that to oppose the vile Corsican was like men with strait-jackets out of Bedlam.

They could see nothing brewing around them but death, and disaster, and desolation, and pillage, and national bankruptcy--our brave Highlanders, with their heads shot off, lying on the bloody field of battle, all slaughtered to a man; our sailors, handcuffed and shackled, musing in a French prison on the bypast days of Camperdown, and of Lord Rodney breaking through the line; with all their fleets sunk to the bottom of the salt sea, after being raked fore and aft with chain-shot; and our timber, sugar, tea and treacle merchants, all fleeing for safety and succour down to lodgings in the Abbey Strand, with a yellow stocking on the ae leg and a black one on the other, like a wheen mountebanks.

Little could they foresee, with their spentacles of prophecy, that a battle of Waterloo would ever be fought, to make the confounded fugies draw in their horns, and steek up their scraighing gabs for ever.

Poor fushionless creatures! I do not pretend to be a politician,--having been bred to the tailoring line syne ever I was a callant, and not seeing the Adverteezer Newspapers, or the Edinburgh Evening Courant, save and except at an orra time,--so I shall say no more, nor pretend to be one of the thousand-and- one wise men, able and willing to direct his Majesty's Ministers on all matters of importance regarding Church or State.