is hoisted into office, and becomes a great man, and a ruler in the land. All this will be clearly illustrated by a sketch of a worthy of the kind, who sprung up under my eye, and was hatched from pollution by the broad rays of popularity, which, like the sun, can "breed maggots in a dead dog.'

Timothy Dabble was a young man of very promising talents; for he wrote a fair hand, and had thrice won the silver medal at a country academy; he was also an orator, for he talked with emphatic volubility, and could argue a full hour without taking either side, or advancing a single opinion; he had still farther requisites for eloquence; for he made very handsome gestures, had dimples in his cheeks when he smiled, and enunciated most harmoniously through his nose. In short, nature had certainly marked him out for a great man; for though he was not tall, yet he added at least half an inch to his stature by elevating his head, and assumed an amazing expression of dignity by turning up his nose and curling his nostrils in a style of conscious superiority. Convinced by these unequivocal appearances, Dabble's friends, in full caucus, one and all, declared that he was undoubtedly born to be a great man, and it would be his own fault if he were not one. Dabble was tickled with an opinion which coincided so happily with his own,-for vanity, in a confidential whisper, had given him the like intimation; and he reverenced the judgment of his friends because they thought so highly of himself;-accordingly he set out with a deter

mination to become a great man, and to start in the scrub race for honour and renown. How to attain the desired prizes was however the question. He knew, by a kind of instinctive feeling, which seems peculiar to grovelling minds, that honour, and its better part, profit, would never seek him out; that they would never knock at his door and crave admittance; but must be courted, and toiled after, and earned. He therefore strutted forth into the highways, the market-places, and the assemblies of the people; ranted like a true cockerel orator about virtue, and patriotism, and liberty, and equality, and himself. Full many a political windmill did he battle with; and full many a time did he talk himself out of breath, and his hearers out of their patience. But Dabble found, to his vast astonishment, that there was not a notorious political pimp at a ward meeting but could out-talk him;-and what was still more mortifying, there was not a notorious political pimp but was more noticed and caressed than himself. The reason was simple enough; while he harangued about principles, the others ranted about men; where he reprobated a political error, they blasted a political character:-they were, consequently, the most useful; for the great object of our political disputes is not who shall have the honour of emancipating the community from the leading strings of delusion, but who shall have the profit of holding the strings and leading the community by the nose.

Dabble was likewise very loud in his professions of integrity, incorruptibility, and disinterested

ness; words, which, from being filtered and refined through newspapers and election hand-bills, have lost their original signification; and in the political dictionary are synonymous with empty pockets, itching palms, and interested ambition. He, in addition to all this, declared that he would support none but honest men; but unluckily as but few of these offered themselves to be supported, Dabble's services were seldom required. He pledged himself never to engage in party schemes or party politics, but to stand up solely for the broad interests of his country; -so he stood alone; and what is the same thing, he stood still; for, in this country, he who does not side with either party is like a body in a vacuum between two planets, and must for ever remain motionless.

Dabble was immeasurably surprised that a man so honest, so disinterested, and so sagacious withal, and one, too, who had the good of his country so much at heart, should thus remain unnoticed and unapplauded. A little worldly advice, whispered in his ear by a shrewd old politician, at once explained the whole mystery. He who would become great," said he, "must serve an apprenticeship to greatness; and rise by regular gradation, like the master of a vessel, who commences by being scrub and cabin-boy. He must fag in the train of great men, echo all their sentiments, become their toad-eater and parasite,laugh at all their jokes; and, above all, endeavour to make them laugh: if you only now and then make a man laugh, your fortune is made. Look but about you, youngster, and you will not see a

single little great man of the day but has his miserable herd of retainers, who yelp at his heels, come at his whistle, worry whoever he points his fingers at, and think themselves fully rewarded by sometimes snapping up a crumb that falls from the great man's table. Talk of patriotism, virtue, and incorruptibility! tut, man! they are the very qualities that scare munificence, and keep patronage at a distance. You might as well attempt to entice crows with red rags and gunpowder. Lay all these scarecrow virtues aside, and let this be your maxim, that a candidate for political eminence is like a dried herring; he never becomes luminous until he is corrupt."

Dabble caught with hungry avidity these congenial doctrines, and turned into his predestined channel of action with the force and rapidity of a stream which has for a while been restrained from its natural course. He became what nature had fitted him to be ;-his tone softened down from arrogant self-sufficiency to the whine of fawning solicitation. He mingled in the causes of the sovereign people; adapted his dress to a similitude of dirty raggedness; argued most logically with those who were of his own opinion; and slandered, with all the malice of impotence, exalted characters whose orbit he despaired ever to approach :-just as that scoundrel midnight thief, the owl, hoots at the blessed light of the sun, whose glorious lustre he dares never contemplate. He likewise applied himself to discharging faithfully the honourable duties of a partisan; he poached about for private slanders, and ribald

anecdotes; he folded hand-bills-he even wrote one or two himself, which he carried about in his pocket and read to everybody; he became a secretary at ward-meetings, set his hand to divers resolutions of patriotic import, and even once went so far as to make a speech, in which he proved that patriotism was a virtue;-the reigning bashaw a great man;—that this was a free country, and he himself an arrant and incontestable buzzard!

Dabble was now very frequent and devout in his visits to those temples of politics, popularity, and smoke, the ward porter-houses; those true dens of equality, where all ranks, ages, and talents, are brought down to the dead level of rude familiarity. 'Twas here his talents expanded, and his genius swelled up to its proper size; like the loathsome toad, which, shrinking from balmy airs, and jocund sunshine, finds his congenial home in caves and dungeons, and there nourishes his venom, and bloats his deformity. 'Twas here he revelled with the swinish multitude in their debauches on patriotism and porter; and it became an even chance whether Dabble would turn out a great man or a great drunkard. But Dabble in all this kept steadily in his eye the only deity he ever worshipped-his interest. Having by this familiarity ingratiated himself with the mob, he became wonderfully potent and industrious at elections; knew all the dens and cellars of profligacy and intemperance; brought more negroes to the polls, and knew to a greater certainty where votes could be bought for beer,

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