Now don’t let us give ourselves a parcel of airs, and pretend that the oaths we make free with in this land of liberty of ours are our own; and because we have the spirit to swear them,⸺imagine that we have had the wit to invent them too.
I’ll undertake this moment to prove it to any man in the world, except to a connoisseur:⸺though I declare I object only to a connoisseur in swearing,⸺as I would do to a connoisseur in painting, etc. , etc. , the whole set of ’em are so hung round and befetish’d with the bobs and trinkets of criticism,⸺or to drop my metaphor, which by the by is a pity,⸺for I have fetch’d it as far as from the coast of Guiney ;—their heads, Sir, are stuck so full of rules and compasses, and have that eternal propensity to apply them upon all occasions, that a work of genius had better go to the devil at once, than stand to be prick’d and tortured to death by ’em.
—And how did Garrick speak the soliloquy last night?—Oh, against all rule, my lord,—most ungrammatically! betwixt the substantive and the adjective, which should agree together in number , case , and gender , he made a breach thus,—stopping, as if the point wanted settling;—and betwixt the nominative case, which your lordship knows should govern the verb, he suspended his voice in the epilogue a dozen times three seconds and three-fifths by a stopwatch, my lord, each time,—Admirable grammarian!⸺But in suspending his voice⸺was the sense suspended likewise? Did no expression of attitude or countenance fill up the chasm?⸺Was the eye silent? Did you narrowly look?⸻I look’d only at the stopwatch, my lord.—Excellent observer!
And what of this new book the whole world makes such a rout about?⸺Oh! ’tis out of all plumb, my lord,⸺quite an irregular