A lady loses her muff, her fan, or her lap-dog, and so the silly poet runs home to versify the disaster.' 'That may be the mode,' cried Moses, 'in sublimer compositions; but the Ranelagh songs that come down to us are perfectly familiar, and all cast in the same mold: Colin meets Dolly, and they hold a dialogue together; he gives her a fairing to put in her hair, and she presents him with a nosegay; and then they go together to church, where they give good advice to young nymphs and swains to get married as fast as they can.' 'And very good advice too,' cried I, 'and I am told there is not a place in the world where advice can be given with so much propriety as there; for, as it persuades us to marry, it also furnishes us with a wife; and surely that must be an excellent market, my boy, where we are told what we want, and supplied with it when wanting.' 'Yes, Sir,' returned Moses, 'and I know but of two such markets for wives in Europe, Ranelagh in England, and Fontarabia in Spain.' The Spanish market is open once a year, but our English wives are saleable every night.' 'You are right, my boy,' cried his mother, 'Old England is the only place in the world for husbands to get wives.'-- 'And for wives to manage their husbands,' interrupted I.'It is a proverb abroad, that if a bridge were built across the sea, all the ladies of the Continent would come over to take pattern from ours; for there are no such wives in Europe as our own.

'But let us have one bottle more, Deborah, my life, and Moses give us a good song.

What thanks do we not owe to heaven for thus bestowing tranquillity, health, and competence.

I think myself happier now than the greatest monarch upon earth.

He has no such fire-side, nor such pleasant faces about it.