the same temples built and consecrated to Sleep and the Muses,
between which two deities they believed the strictest friendship was
established.

I have one concluding favour to request of my reader, that he will
not expect to be equally diverted and informed by every line or
every page of this discourse, but give some allowance to the
author's spleen and short fits or intervals of dulness, as well as
his own, and lay it seriously to his conscience whether, if he were
walking the streets in dirty weather or a rainy day, he would allow
it fair dealing in folks at their ease from a window, to criticise
his gate and ridicule his dress at such a juncture.

In my disposure of employments of the brain, I have thought fit to
make invention the master, and to give method and reason the office
of its lackeys. The cause of this distribution was from observing
it my peculiar case to be often under a temptation of being witty
upon occasion where I could be neither wise nor sound, nor anything
to the matter in hand. And I am too much a servant of the modern
way to neglect any such opportunities, whatever pains or
improprieties I may be at to introduce them. For I have observed
that from a laborious collection of seven hundred and thirty-eight
flowers and shining hints of the best modern authors, digested with
great reading into my book of common places, I have not been able
after five years to draw, hook, or force into common conversation
any more than a dozen. Of which dozen the one moiety failed of
success by being dropped among unsuitable company, and the other
cost me so many strains, and traps, and ambages to introduce, that I
at length resolved to give it over. Now this disappointment (to
discover a secret), I must own, gave me the first hint of setting up