to note his entrance into life in a cellar
of Grub Street, or in a garret in Seven
Dials. The adventurer's after career
divides itself into five separate sections, each
as distinct in its way, even in costume and
situation, as the transformations of a
mountebank. At the outset, young Bardana sets
up reputably as an apothecary in St. Martin's
Lane, Westminster. Afterwards, he assumes the
direction of the botanical gardens of
Lord Petre and the Duke of Richmond.
Quitting that more wholesome and primitive
occupation, he struts and frets his
hour upon the stage until fairly hissed
and laughed off the boards, successively of
Covent Garden and the Haymarket, as
something too ridiculous to be tolerated even
as a histrionic butt. Subsequently, the ex-
actor, ex-gardener, ex-apothecary, takes to
literature, and takes kindly too. He undertakes
the British Magazine. He scribbles
off a Naval History of England—leaving
Horatio Nelson to illustrate it transcendantly,
and Willian James to write it a long
while afterwards. Turning Novelist even, he
pens the Adventures of a Creole, the Life of
Lady Frail, and the History of Mr. Lovell.

By the bye, however, Bardana Hill, took
a higher flight. Not content with thus merely
dabbling in literature, the chrysalis of the
desk burst forth at last resplendently into
the butterfly of the Quack-Physician, basking
in the daylight and the waxlight alternately,
as a gay lounger perfectly equipped
in the airiest fashions then in vogue: his
cane daintily clouded, his velvet coat richly
embroidered, his wrists and breast delicately
laced, his peruke exquisitely crimped and
powdered. His chariot rolls continually
between Bedford Square and Ranelagh.
He is such a matchless economist of the
twenty-four hours, that, in spite of all his
professional avocations, during an interval of
many years, he is never once known to have
missed a single public entertainment. He is
at every rout and ridotto. He flaunts among
the "pleachéd allies" and the smooth-shaven
lawns of the public gardens. Conspicuous in
his box at the theatre, he there raises
critical turmoils about him during the
performances. Having judiciously obtained his
diploma betimes, from the college of St.
Andrew's in Scotland, Bardana becomes
further glorified by the King of Sweden,
who creates him Chevalier of the order of
the Polar Star or Vasa. Whereupon, forth
comes yet more lustrously the ever-
imperturbable and self-complacent Quack, styling
himself—Sir John Hill, Acad. Reg. Scient.
Burd. Soc. To which magical hieroglyphic
my amusing acquaintance Smart, one of the
small poets of those times, facetiously alludes
in his satiric volume, entitled The Hilliad,
where he says:

     While Jargon gave his titles on a block,
     And styled him M.D. Acad. Budig. Soc.

Bardana Hill certainly came in for more
than a few smart raps over the knuckles.
What does Charles Churchill sing of him in
the terrible Rosciad?

     With sleek appearance, and with ambling pace,
     And, type of vacant head, with vacant face,
     The Proteus Hill put in his modest plea,—
     'Let favour speak for others, worth for me.'
     For who, like him, his various powers could call
     Into so many shapes, and shine in all?
     Who could so nobly grace the motley list—
     Actor, inspector, doctor, botanist?
     Knows any one so well—sure no one knows—
     At once to play, prescribe, compound, compose?

But then his own hand was against every
other man's remorselessly. And everybody
knows how proverbial wisdom saith dogmatically—
Those who play at bowls must look out
for rubbers. Rubbers! Sir John the Doctor
had more than those to look out for, as his
wonderful serio-comic history relates. It is in
most significant allusion to this circumstance
that the merciless Smart puts into the mouth
of a wretched Sybil this ludicrous
admonition:

     The chequered world's before thee; go, farewell!
      Beware of Irishmen, and learn to spell.

This mysterious and remarkable warning
had reference to an irascible gentleman of
the name of Browne and of the nature of
Pat, who, irritated by some of the scandalous
pleasantries of Sir John, one fine afternoon
thrashed him soundly with a cane upon one
of the lamplit gravel walks of Ranelagh.
More terrible, however, than either the scornful
couplets of Smart, or the muscular
drubbings of Browne, there descended upon poor
luckless Hill the stinging, derisive wit of
Henry Fielding, from the empyrean of his
Covent Garden Journal. Even this, Bardana
Hill drew down upon himself—at the very
time, too, when he was being unmercifully
belaboured by the lithe and flickering wand
of the then famous Harlequin, Woodward.
Literary onslaughts of a far more damaging
description Sir John doubtless often had to
endure, but no assailant ever made more
lively attacks upon his matchless impudence
than light-footed, merry-handed Harlequin
Woodward: one of whose paper-pellets
directed against the Quack of Quacks, still
preserves a most agreeable reputation as
an exquisite specimen of sly and humorous
bantering.

Who can wonder, however, that Bardana,
having raised himself thus conspicuously
upon a pedestal of insolent pretension, should
have there become the butt upon which
were concentrated for a time all the flying
shafts of ridicule, pointed with the scorn
and winged with the wit of the wisest as
well of the most whimsical of his many
gifted contemporaries? Surely no one who
has ever ventured to turn the leaves of his
scurrilous Inspector, a periodical paper