Imagine to yourself a little squat, uncourtly figure of a Doctor Slop , of about four feet and a half perpendicular height, with a breadth of back, and a sesquipedality of belly, which might have done honour to a serjeant in the horse-guards.
Such were the outlines of Dr. Slop’s figure, which,—if you have read Hogarth’s analysis of beauty, and if you have not, I wish you would;⸺you must know, may as certainly be caricatured, and conveyed to the mind by three strokes as three hundred.
Imagine such a one,⸺for such, I say, were the outlines of Dr. Slop’s figure, coming slowly along, foot by foot, waddling thro’ the dirt upon the vertebrae of a little diminutive pony, of a pretty colour⸺but of strength,⸺alack!⸺scarce able to have made an amble of it, under such a fardel, had the roads been in an ambling condition.⸺They were not.⸺Imagine to yourself, Obadiah mounted upon a strong monster of a coach-horse, pricked into a full gallop, and making all practicable speed the adverse way.
Pray, Sir, let me interest you a moment in this description.
Had Dr. Slop beheld Obadiah a mile off, posting in a narrow lane directly towards him, at that monstrous rate,—splashing and plunging like a devil thro’ thick and thin, as he approached, would not such a phænomenon, with such a vortex of mud and water moving along with it, round its axis,—have been a subject of juster apprehension to Dr. Slop in his situation, than the worst of Whiston’s comets?—To say nothing of the Nucleus ; that is, of Obadiah and the coach-horse.—In my idea, the vortex alone of ’em was enough to have involved and carried, if not the doctor, at least the doctor’s pony, quite away with it. What then do you