to grow tired of seeing and talking of Master Harrington. Some new wonder
came into fashion; I think it was Jedediah Buxton, the man of prodigious
memory, who could multiply in his head nine figures by nine; and who, the
first time he was taken to the playhouse, counted all the steps of the
dancers, and all the words uttered by Garrick in Richard the Third. After
Jedediah Buxton, or about the same time, if I recollect rightly, came
George Psalmanazar, from his Island of Formosa, who, with his pretended
Dictionary of the Pormosan language, and the pounds of raw beef he devoured
per day, excited the admiration and engrossed the attention of the Royal
Society and of every curious and fashionable company in London: so that
poor little I was forgotten, as though I had never been. My mother and
myself were left to settle the affair with my nerves and the Jews, as we
could. Between the effects of real fear, and the exaggerated expression of
it to which I had been encouraged, I was now seriously ill. It is well
known that persons have brought on fits by pretending to have them; and by
yielding to feelings, at first slight and perfectly within the command of
the will, have at last acquired habits beyond the power of their reason, or
of their most strenuous voluntary exertion, to control. Such was my
pitiable case; and at the moment I was most to be pitied, nobody pitied me.
Even my mother, now she had nobody to talk to about me, grew tired of my
illness. She was advised by her physician, on account of her own health, by
no means to keep so close to the house as she had done of late: she went
out therefore every night to refresh herself at crowded parties; and as
soon as she left the house, the nurse and every body in the family left me.
The servants settled it, in my hearing, that there was nothing in life the
matter with me, that my mother and I were equally vapoursome-ish and
_timersome_, and that there was no use in nursing and pampering of me up in
them fantastical _fancifulnesses_: so the nurse, and lady's maid, and
housekeeper, went down all together to _their_ tea; and the housemaid, who
was ordered by the housekeeper to stay with me, soon followed, charging the