dullest dogs that ever sipped ale out of a black
jack; aud when they saw with their own bodily
eyes Joe Miller's Jests on every stall, what a
merry sensation there would be in all the old
actor's old haunts about Drury-lane, and what a
stir among the mighty butchers of Clare Market,
who would spare a shilling, every butcher of
them, to see what it could all mean. Mottley
even sunk his name, assuming that of Mr.
Miller's "lamenting friend and former
companion," Elijah Jenkins, Esq.

Anyhow, it was a bouncing shilling's worth,
and Mr. Read cleared a very handsome profit.
Let us hope that Mr. Read did not forget the
widow. The title-page ran thus:

"Joe Miller's Jests: or, The Wit's
Vade-Mecum. Being a Collection of the most
Brilliant Jests; the Politest Repartees; the most
Elegant Bon-Mots, and most pleasant short
Stories in the English Language.

"First carefully collected in the Company,
and many of them transcribed from the Mouth,
of the Facetious GENTLEMAN whose Name they
bear; and now set forth and published by his
lamentable friend and former companion, Elijah
Jenkins, Esq.

                     Most Humbly Inscribed
             To those CHOICE SPIRITS of the AGE,
            Captain Bodens, Mr. Alexander Pope,
             Mr. Professor Lacy, Mr. Orator Henley,
             and Job Baker, the Kettle-Drummer.
                                    London:
  Printed and Sold by T. Read, in Dogwell Court,
        White Fryars, Fleet-street. MDCCXXXIX.
                          (Price One Shilling.)

So there was laughter all round in the Jubilee
year, seventeen hundred and thirty-nine, when
JOE MILLER'S JESTS, OR THE WIT'S
VADE-MECUM, came from Mr. T. Read's Printing and
Publishing Office, Dogwell-court, Whitefriars,
Price One Shilling.

The public laughed, as those laugh who
love good jokes, brimming measure; and Mr.
T. Read laughed, as those laugh, who win. For,
in the soberest seriousness, we take it that he
went shares with Mottley and the widow, much
in the same manner as the lion in the fable goes
shares with the ass.

The jokes about town at that immediate
period embraced an extraordinarily wide range,
and the pseudo-Jenkins collection abounds in
illustrations of those minuter traits of character,
which lend us, coming afterwards, such an
insight into the men. Here we are presented with
the choicest memorabilia possible concerning
King Charles the Second, of ever-worshipful
remembrance; Mr. Gun Jones; Sir Richard
Steele; the Duchess of Portsmouth, a Country
Clergyman, Mrs.C——m, Sir William Davenant,
Ben Jonson, two Free-thinking Authors, A Very
Modest Young Gentleman ot the County of
Tipperary, Lord R., Tom Burnet, Henry the
Fourth of France, the Emperor Tiberius, and
others too numerous to rehearse.

But — and this has been hitherto a secret
among these gems of wit and humour— there
crept in, unawares, two items, which breathe an
abnormally Christian and reflective spirit, and
which we learn, from sources inaccessible to the
editor of 1739, were Mr. Miller's own
composition. We must, go to the works of some men,
if we wish to understand their true dispositions
and temperaments. Let us, for this purpose,
go to the works of Mr. Miller, luminous, though
not voluminous. The first is moral, the second
philosophical. To begin with the moral (instead
of ending with it):

"Jo Miller, sitting one day in the window of
the Sun Tavern, in Clare-street, a fishwoman
and her maid passing by, the woman said,
'Buy my souls, buy my maids!' 'Ah, you
wicked old creature!' said honest Jo. 'What!
Are you not content to sell your own soul, but
you would sell your maid's too?'"

If this were really a joke made, hibernicè, by
a man whose intelligence was joke-proof, there
would be an end of the jest of imputed authorship;
but it is nothing of the kind. The horrid
cry reached Mr. Miller's ear as a detestable
fact, and he prosed it out to his friends with the
settled conviction that, under pretence of selling
fish, the costerwoman carried on some
other traffic.

This concludes the moral works of Mr. Miller.
The philosophical works now commence, and
into these the sentimental element has
manifestly been infused.

"It is certainly the most transcendent pleasure
to be agreeably surprised with the confession of
love from an adored mistress. A young gentleman,
after a very great misfortune, came to his
mistress, and told her he was reduced even to the
want of five guineas. To which she replied,
'l am glad of it with all my heart.' 'Are you
so, madam?' adds he, suspecting her constancy;
'pray, why so?' 'Because,' said she, 'I can
furnish you with five thousand!'"

This ends the Philosophical and Sentimental
Works of Mr. Miller, heretofore (in common
with the former) undiscerningly printed with all
the editions of the book vulgarly denominated
Joe Miller's Jests.

As to Mr. Mottley, the reduced gentleman
and disappointed candidate for government
patronage, the gout let him live long enough to
see many and many an impression of Joe Miller's
Jests pass from the bookseller's counter to the
always-rightly-appreciating public; but neither
his name nor that of the Widow Miller appeared
after 1739, that we can discover, in the credit,
column of Mr. Read's ledgers. The longevity
of misfortune and misery was exemplified in
Mottley. He kept alive (principally between
blankets) till the year of Joe Miller's Jests,
eleven. In 1750, death took him away. The
hand of the harvest man was quickly cold, and
almost as quickly his name sank put of recollection.
Even the generation of which he was one,
forgot him, perhaps, notwithstanding the place
accorded to him in some of the dictionaries of
the time, and among the neat little memoirs
which supplement Winchope's tragedy of
Scanderbeg. If he were remembered, it was as a
dramatist chiefly. But Mottley's plays have
vanished long since into limbo, and his present
and future claim to notice must rest upon his