metropolis, upon one frivolous errand or another,--set in so strong,--as to
become dangerous to our civil rights,--though, by the bye,--a current was
not the image he took most delight in,--a distemper was here his favourite
metaphor, and he would run it down into a perfect allegory, by maintaining
it was identically the same in the body national as in the body natural,
where the blood and spirits were driven up into the head faster than they
could find their ways down;--a stoppage of circulation must ensue, which
was death in both cases.

There was little danger, he would say, of losing our liberties by French
politicks or French invasions;--nor was he so much in pain of a consumption
from the mass of corrupted matter and ulcerated humours in our
constitution, which he hoped was not so bad as it was imagined;--but he
verily feared, that in some violent push, we should go off, all at once, in
a state-apoplexy;--and then he would say, The Lord have mercy upon us all.

My father was never able to give the history of this distemper,--without
the remedy along with it.

'Was I an absolute prince,' he would say, pulling up his breeches with both
his hands, as he rose from his arm-chair, 'I would appoint able judges, at
every avenue of my metropolis, who should take cognizance of every fool's
business who came there;--and if, upon a fair and candid hearing, it
appeared not of weight sufficient to leave his own home, and come up, bag
and baggage, with his wife and children, farmer's sons, &c. &c. at his
backside, they should be all sent back, from constable to constable, like
vagrants as they were, to the place of their legal settlements. By this
means I shall take care, that my metropolis totter'd not thro' its own
weight;--that the head be no longer too big for the body;--that the
extremes, now wasted and pinn'd in, be restored to their due share of