These are thy pleasures, O London with-the-many-sins! O City abounding
in--, for these may Keswick and her giant brood go hang!
C. L.
[1] Burns.
XXXII.
TO MANNING.
_December_ 27, 1800.
At length George Dyer's phrenitis has come to a crisis; he is raging and
furiously mad. I waited upon the Heathen, Thursday was a se'nnight; the
first symptom which struck my eye and gave me incontrovertible proof of
the fatal truth was a pair of nankeen pantaloons four times too big for
him, which the said Heathen did pertinaciously affirm to be new.
They were absolutely ingrained with the accumulated dirt of ages; but he
affirmed them to be clean. He was going to visit a lady that was nice
about those things, and that's the reason he wore nankeen that day. And
then he danced, and capered, and fidgeted, and pulled up his pantaloons,
and hugged his intolerable flannel vestment closer about his poetic
loins; anon he gave it loose to the zephyrs which plentifully insinuate
their tiny bodies through every crevice, door, window, or wainscot,
expressly formed for the exclusion of such impertinents. Then he caught
at a proof-sheet, and catched up a laundress's bill instead; made a dart
at Bloomfield's Poems, and threw them in agony aside. I could not bring
him to one direct reply; he could not maintain his jumping mind in a
right line for the tithe of a moment by Clifford's Inn clock.
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