is always credulous. Much was then thought wonderful, nay, almost
supernatural, which can now be explained and accounted for, by asy and very
ignoble means. My father--for all this time, though I have never mentioned
him, I had a father living--my father, being in public life, and much
occupied with the affairs of the nation, had little leisure to attend to
his family. A great deal went on in his house, without his knowing any
thing about it. He had heard of my being ill and well, at different hours
of the day; but had left it to the physicians and my mother to manage me
till a certain age: but now I was nine years old, he said it was time I
should be taken out of the hands of the women; so he inquired more
particularly into my history, and, with mine, he heard the story of Simon
and the Jews. My mother said she was glad my father's attention was at last
awakened to this extraordinary business. She expatiated eloquently upon the
medical, or, as she might call them, magical effects of sympathies and
antipathies: on the nervous system; but my father was not at all addicted
to a belief in magic, and he laughed at the whole _female_ doctrine, as he
called it, of sympathies and antipathies: so, declaring that they were all
making fools of themselves, and a Miss Molly of his boy, he took the
business up short with a high hand. There was some trick, some roguery in
it. The Jews were all rascals, he knew, and he would soon _settle_ them. So
to work he set with the beadles, and the constables, and the overseers. The
corporation of beggars were not, in those days, so well grounded in the
theory and so alert in the practice of evasion as, by long experience, they
have since become. The society had not then, as they have now, in a certain
lane, their regular rendezvous, called the _Beggars' Opera_; they had not
then, as they have now, in a certain cellar, an established school for
teaching the art of scolding, kept by an old woman, herself an adept in the
art; they had not even their regular nocturnal feasts, where they planned
the operations of the next day's or the next week's campaign, so that they
could not, as they now do, set at nought the beadle and the parish