Adieu, _monsieur_ the
colonel; fain would I have passed you by without this comment; but your
association with the black spirits of the 'Age'{3} has placed you upon a
pedestal, the proper mark for satire to shoot her barbed arrows at.
"But let us take a turn down the High Street; and as I live here comes
an old flame of the colonel's, Miss R*g*rs, who is now turned into Mrs.
E***n, and who, it is said, most wickedly turned her pen, and pointed
the following _jeu d'esprit_ against her late protector, when he was
laid up by a serious accident, which happened to his knee after the more
serious loss of a--_Foote_.
3 "A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind" says Pope; and
it would appear so from the intimacy which subsists between
the colonel and his jackall Bunn, the would-be captain, who
it is said is the _filius nullius_ of old Ben Bunn the
_conveyancer_, not of legal title or estate by roll of
parchment, but of the very soil itself. Lord W. Lennox, too,
no doubt, prides himself upon the illegitimate origin of his
ancestry; and the publisher of the infamous scandals
manufactured in the Quadrant is also of the same kidney,
being the reputed natural son of jolly old Bardolph Jennyns.
What the remaining portion of the coterie spring from, the
Gents and Bs.
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