to the other, just as the temptation has wrought. But a villainous affair
it is, and will one day so blend and confound us all together, that no one
shall be able to stand up and swear, 'That his own great grandfather was
the man who did either this or that.'

This evil had been sufficiently fenced against by the prudent care of the
Yorick's family, and their religious preservation of these records I quote,
which do farther inform us, That the family was originally of Danish
extraction, and had been transplanted into England as early as in the reign
of Horwendillus, king of Denmark, in whose court, it seems, an ancestor of
this Mr. Yorick's, and from whom he was lineally descended, held a
considerable post to the day of his death. Of what nature this
considerable post was, this record saith not;--it only adds, That, for near
two centuries, it had been totally abolished, as altogether unnecessary,
not only in that court, but in every other court of the Christian world.

It has often come into my head, that this post could be no other than that
of the king's chief Jester;--and that Hamlet's Yorick, in our Shakespeare,
many of whose plays, you know, are founded upon authenticated facts, was
certainly the very man.

I have not the time to look into Saxo-Grammaticus's Danish history, to know
the certainty of this;--but if you have leisure, and can easily get at the
book, you may do it full as well yourself.

I had just time, in my travels through Denmark with Mr. Noddy's eldest son,
whom, in the year 1741, I accompanied as governor, riding along with him at
a prodigious rate thro' most parts of Europe, and of which original journey
performed by us two, a most delectable narrative will be given in the
progress of this work. I had just time, I say, and that was all, to prove