parson join'd his interest with his wife's in the whole affair, and in
order to do things as they should be, and give the poor soul as good a
title by law to practise, as his wife had given by institution,--he
cheerfully paid the fees for the ordinary's licence himself, amounting in
the whole, to the sum of eighteen shillings and four pence; so that betwixt
them both, the good woman was fully invested in the real and corporal
possession of her office, together with all its rights, members, and
appurtenances whatsoever.

These last words, you must know, were not according to the old form in
which such licences, faculties, and powers usually ran, which in like cases
had heretofore been granted to the sisterhood. But it was according to a
neat Formula of Didius his own devising, who having a particular turn for
taking to pieces, and new framing over again all kind of instruments in
that way, not only hit upon this dainty amendment, but coaxed many of the
old licensed matrons in the neighbourhood, to open their faculties afresh,
in order to have this wham-wham of his inserted.

I own I never could envy Didius in these kinds of fancies of his:--But
every man to his own taste.--Did not Dr. Kunastrokius, that great man, at
his leisure hours, take the greatest delight imaginable in combing of asses
tails, and plucking the dead hairs out with his teeth, though he had
tweezers always in his pocket? Nay, if you come to that, Sir, have not the
wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself,--have they not
had their Hobby-Horses;--their running horses,--their coins and their
cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles, their
pallets,--their maggots and their butterflies?--and so long as a man rides
his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither
compels you or me to get up behind him,--pray, Sir, what have either you or
I to do with it?