t, respectability was, to
say the truth, the precise qualification which Mr. Joseph Hanson most
needed.

Then the good town of Belford being divided, like most other country
towns, into two prevailing factions, theological and political, the
worthies whom I am attempting to describe prudently endeavoured to catch
all parties by embracing different sides; Mr. Joseph Hanson being a
tory and high-churchman of the very first water, who showed his loyalty
according to the most approved faction, by abusing his Majesty's
ministers as revolutionary, thwarting the town-council, getting tipsy
at conservative dinners, and riding twenty miles to attend an eminent
preacher who wielded in a neighbouring county all the thunders of
orthodoxy; whilst the soft-spoken Mr. Thomas Long was a Dissenter and a
radical, who proved his allegiance to the House of Brunswick (for both
claimed to be amongst the best wishers to the present dynasty and
the reigning sovereign) by denouncing the government as weak and
aristocratic, advocating the abolition of the peerage, getting up an
operative reform club, and going to chapel three times every Sunday.

These measures succeeded so well, that the allotted six months (the
general period of failure in that concern) elapsed, and still found
Mr. Joseph Hanson as flourishing as ever in manner, and apparently
flourishing in trade; they stood him, too, in no small stead, in a
matter which promised to be still more conducive to his prosperity
than buying and selling feminine gear,--in the grand matter (for Joseph
jocosely professed to be a forlorn bachelor upon the lookout for a wife)
of a wealthy marriage.

One of the most thrifty and thriving tradesmen in the town of Belford,
was old John Parsons, the tinman. His spacious shop, crowded with its
glittering and rattling commodities, pots, pans, kettles, meat-covers,
in a word, the whole _batterie de cuisine_, was situate in the narrow,
inconvenient lane called Oriel Street, which I have already done myself
the honour of introducing to the courteous reader, standing betwixt a
great chemist on one side, his windows filled with coloured jars, red,
blue, and green, looking like painted glass, or like the fruit made of
gems in Aladdin's garden, (I am as much taken myself with those jars
in a chemist's window as ever was Miss Edgeworth's Rosamond,) and an
eminent china warehouse on the other; our tinman having the honour to be
next-door neighbour to no less a lady