poor Le Fever , wrote out very fairly, as if from a hasty copy.—I take notice of it the more, because it seems to have been his favourite composition⸺It is upon mortality; and is tied lengthways and crossways with a yarn thrum, and then rolled up and twisted round with a half-sheet of dirty blue paper, which seems to have been once the cast cover of a general review, which to this day smells horribly of horse drugs.⸺Whether these marks of humiliation were designed,—I something doubt;⸺because at the end of the sermon (and not at the beginning of it)—very different from his way of treating the rest, he had wrote⸺
Bravo!
⸺Though not very offensively,⸺for it is at two inches, at least, and a half’s distance from, and below the concluding line of the sermon, at the very extremity of the page, and in that right hand corner of it, which, you know, is generally covered with your thumb; and, to do it justice, it is wrote besides with a crow’s quill so faintly in a small Italian hand, as scarce to solicit the eye towards the place, whether your thumb is there or not,—so that from the manner of it , it stands half excused; and being wrote moreover with very pale ink, diluted almost to nothing,—’tis more like a ritratto of the shadow of vanity, than of Vanity herself—of the two; resembling rather a faint thought of transient applause, secretly stirring up in the heart of the composer; than a gross mark of it, coarsely obtruded upon the world.
With all these extenuations, I am aware, that in publishing this, I do no service to Yorick’s character as a modest man;—but all men have their failings! and what lessens this still farther, and almost wipes it away, is this; that the word was struck through sometime afterwards (as appears from a different tint of the ink) with a line quite across it in this manner, bravo ⸺as if he had retracted, or was ashamed of the opinion he had once entertained of it.