n the world, and calls every
thriving man a pitiful upstart.

Major Matchlock is the next senior, who served in the last civil wars,
and has all the battles by heart. He does not think any action in Europe
worth talking of, since the fight of Marston Moor; and every night tells
us of his having been knocked off his horse at the rising of the London
apprentices; for which he is in great esteem among us.

Honest old Dick Reptile is the third of our society. He is a
good-natured indolent man, who speaks little himself, but laughs at our
jokes; and brings his young nephew along with him, a youth of eighteen
years old, to show him good company, and give him a taste of the world.
This young fellow sits generally silent; but whenever he opens his
mouth, or laughs at anything that passes, he is constantly told by his
uncle, after a jocular manner, "Ay, ay, Jack, you young men think us
fools; but we old men know you are."

The greatest wit of our company, next to myself, is a Bencher, of the
neighbouring Inn, who in his youth frequented the ordinaries about
Charing Cross, and pretends to have been intimate with Jack Ogle. He has
about ten distichs of Hudibras without book, and never leaves the club
till he has applied them all. If any modern wit be mentioned, or any
town-frolic spoken of, he shakes his head at the dulness of the present
age, and tells us a story of Jack Ogle.

For my own part, I am esteemed among them, because they see I am
something respected by others; though at the same time I understand by
their behaviour, that I am considered by them as a man of a great deal
of learning, but no knowledge of the world; insomuch, that the
Major sometimes, in the height of his military pride, calls me the
philosopher; and Sir Jeoffery, no longer ago than last night, upon a
dispute what day of the month it was then in Holland, pulled his pipe
out of his mouth, and cried, "What does the Scholar say to it?"

Our club meets precisely at six o'clock in the evening; but I did not
come last night till half an hour after seven, by which means I
escaped the battle of Naseby, which the Major usually begins at about
three-quarters after six. I found also, that my good friend the Bencher
had already spent three of his distichs; and only waiting an opportunity
to hear a sermon spoken of that he might introduce the couplet where "a
stick" rhymes to "ecclesiastic." At my entrance into the room, they were
naming a red petticoat and a clo