down.
Through all our land we could not boast
A knight more gay, more prompt than he,
To rise and fill a bumper toast,
And pass it round with THREE TIMES THREE.

None better knew the feast to sway,
Or keep Mirth's boat in better trim;
For Nature had but little clay
Like that of which she moulded him.
The meanest guest that graced his board
Was there the freest of the free,
His bumper toast when Peter poured,
And passed it round with THREE TIMES THREE.

He kept at true good humour's mark
The social flow of pleasure's tide:
He never made a brow look dark,
Nor caused a tear, but when he died.
No sorrow round his tomb should dwell:
More pleased his gay old ghost would be,
For funeral song, and passing bell,
To hear no sound but THREE TIMES THREE.

(_Hammering of knuckles and glasses and shouts of bravo!_)

_Mr Panscope._
(_Suddenly emerging from a deep reverie._) I have heard, with the most
profound attention, every thing which the gentleman on the other side
of the table has thought proper to advance on the subject of human
deterioration; and I must take the liberty to remark, that it augurs a
very considerable degree of presumption in any individual, to set
himself up against the _authority_ of so many great men, as may be
marshalled in metaphysical phalanx under the opposite banners of the
controversy; such as Aristotle, Plato, the scholiast on Aristophanes,
St Chrysostom, St Jerome, St Athanasius, Orpheus, Pindar, Simonides,
Gronovius, Hemsterhusius, Longinus, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Paine,
Doctor Paley, the King of Prussia, the King of Poland, Cicero,
Monsieur Gautier, Hippocrates, Machiavelli, Milton, Colley Cibber,
Bojardo, Gregory Nazianzenus, Locke, D'Alembert, Boccaccio, Daniel
Defoe, Erasmus, Doctor Smollett, Zimmermann, Solomon, Confucius,
Zoroaster, and Thomas-a-Kempis.

_Mr Escot._
I presume, sir, you are one of those who value an _authority_ more
than a reason.

_Mr Panscope._
The _authority_, sir, of all these great men, whose works, as well as
the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the entire series of the
Monthly Review, the complete set of the Variorum Classics, and the
Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions, I have read through from
beginning to end, deposes, with irrefragable refutation, against your
ratiocinative speculations, wherein you seem desirous, by the futile
pro