sovereign, Mrs. Wing, you smirked for this
effigy! My friend, I consecrate this sip
of grog to the joyous memories of our
bachelorhood. No man was louder in
praise of that blest condition than yourself.
In the very act of exulting over a fallen
brother, whit! your foot slipped, and you
vanished over the dizzy precipice, with
Sibyl Greatheed of the Grange.

John Adolphus Burkemyoung Parfitt (b.
1789, m. 1830) it is my painful duty to
pass upon you the severest sentence in my
power to award. Convicted on the clearest
evidence, your marriage certificate, of two
offences of the highest class — treason, sir,
and perjury — forgetful of your own voluntary
vow that nothing should induce you to
marry, you deserted the ranks of bachelorhood
upon the merest provocation. Life's
battle, sir, had hardly begun, when you,
unhappy man, incited by one Agnes Heckstetter
Williamson, of Scarborough, Yorkshire,
Spinster, withdrew precipitately to the
rear, and were heard of no more. You
are hung, sir, well hung (light from the
left), and may you be as happy as you don't
deserve!

Philip Bamstead (b. 1800, m. much
regretted, 1821), tender years recommend to
mercy only when accompanied by the weakness
and instability incident to youth. You
fell in love, young sir, at seventeen. Four
years were allotted you for reflection and
repentance. In vain. On the day you came
of age, you married. Human depravity — I
cannot trust myself to speak. A baronet of
my acquaintance, Sir Peter Teazle, has
sagaciously remarked that certain
marriages are crimes that bring their own
punishment. You were a grandfather at forty!

And now, Tom Burkemyoung, the
younger, "What shall I say to thee, Lord
Scrope?" Friend of my youth, I knew thee,
and that there was, in thy whole composition,
not love enough to stir the soul of a flea.
Had I been inquired of, by cynic, what
man is safe? I should have unhesitatingly
replied "Tom. Tom Burkemyoung." To
do you justice, however, you practised no
deceit or perfidy. The woman does not
breathe who shall taunt you with broken
vows. Tom lost everything he possessed,
and very considerably more, through the
sudden dissolution of the Universal Starch
and Stucco Company. Comprehending at
one glance his position, Tom put himself
up for sale. "My reserved price," avowed
the frank, handsome fellow, "is two
hundred thousand, fifty down." He was
bought by Mrs. Curwig, widow of the
eminent broker, the mark of whose honoured
head, against his favourite pillar in the
Stock Exchange, is still pointed out to new
comers with pride and emotion. "Sic
stabat Curwig" was to have been inscribed
over the spot he had abandoned for another,
where time-bargains are no more, but a
brother magnate of the 'Change having
declared that he, for one, would not " stab
at " the memory of his old friend, the idea
was prudently relinquished. Tom, old boy,
health to you, and resignation. I salute
you.

After all (this is first-rate 'baccy), after
all, my suffering souls, I have not touched
upon the worst of your condition. You
remind me of the metamorphosed kings in
Circe's palace. You were once men. You
sank into husbands, from thence you
degenerated into sires. In this moral
decrepitude, you received the ironical title
of "governor," your gubernatorial functions
being, in many cases, expressly restricted
to the forking out of cash.

Your case, my worthy things, is hopeless.
Man's growing wisdom has greatly
facilitated the cheaply and expeditiously
getting rid of wives. But with your
offspring the matter is different. The law of
England, like a benevolent grandmother,
adopts both parties, and, for a certain period,
compels the satisfactory fulfilment of those
functions you assumed with the honorary
title above referred to.

Right you are, my excellent creatures,
to adapt yourselves to uncontrollable
circumstances; but the forced exultation
under which you strive to conceal your
disgrace is transparent to the (bachelor)
friends who love you. Humbling is it to
witness the first feeble efforts of some hero
of fifty fields, to control the struggles of
that formless dab of humanity he styles his
"son!" Melancholy, indeed, is the
spectacle of a man whose glowing pen has
moved the social world, accosting his first-
born as topsy-mopsy-wocums! It seems
like a grotesque and horrible dream,
begotten of German sausage and lager beer,
that I once surprised an individual whose
poems have been translated into sundry
European tongues, entertaining his tyrant-
baby with a lyric whose concluding lines
are burned into my memory, to this effect:

Shim-sham paradiddle marabona ting-tang—
Rigdum bulladigm ky me.

Tears gather in my eyes as I pen these
unforgotten words! I will pay one hundred
pounds to any individual who will lessen