THE PASSPORT. VERSAILLES.
As the passport was directed to all lieutenant-governors,
governors, and commandants of cities, generals of armies,
justiciaries, and all officers of justice, to let Mr. Yorick the
king's jester, and his baggage, travel quietly along, I own the
triumph of obtaining the passport was not a little tarnish'd by the
figure I cut in it. - But there is nothing unmix'd in this world;
and some of the gravest of our divines have carried it so far as to
affirm, that enjoyment itself was attended even with a sigh, - and
that the greatest THEY KNEW OF terminated, IN A GENERAL WAY, in
little better than a convulsion.
I remember the grave and learned Bevoriskius, in his Commentary
upon the Generations from Adam, very naturally breaks off in the
middle of a note to give an account to the world of a couple of
sparrows upon the out-edge of his window, which had incommoded him
all the time he wrote, and at last had entirely taken him off from
his genealogy.
- 'Tis strange! writes Bevoriskius; but the facts are certain, for
I have had the curiosity to mark them down one by one with my pen;-
-but the cock sparrow, during the little time that I could have
finished the other half of this note, has actually interrupted me
with the reiteration of his caresses three-and-twenty times and a
half.
How merciful, adds Bevoriskius, is heaven to his creatures!
