Your ladyship lies, upon my word, Madam; it is in grain, indeed,
and as fine as can be dyed.

I might make this dialogue much longer, but here is enough to set the
mercer and the lady both in a flame, and to set the shop in an uproar,
if it were but spoken out in plain language, as above; and yet what is
all the shop-dialect less or more than this? The meaning is plain--it is
nothing but _you lie_, and _you lie_--downright Billingsgate, wrapped
up in silk and satin, and delivered dressed finely up in better clothes
than perhaps it might come dressed in between a carman and a porter.

How ridiculous is all the tongue-padding flutter between Miss Tawdry,
the sempstress, and Tattle, my lady's woman, at the change-shop, when
the latter comes to buy any trifle! and how many lies, indeed, creep
into every part of trade, especially of retail trade, from the meanest
to the uppermost part of business!--till, in short, it is grown so
scandalous, that I much wonder the shopkeepers themselves do not leave
it off, for the mere shame of its simplicity and uselessness.

But habits once got into use are very rarely abated, however ridiculous
they are; and the age is come to such a degree of obstinate folly, that
nothing is too ridiculous for them, if they please but to make a custom
of it.

I am not for making my discourse a satire upon the shopkeepers, or upon
their customers: if I were, I could give a long detail of the arts and
tricks made use of behind the counter to wheedle and persuade the buyer,
and manage the selling part among shopkeepers, and how easily and
dexterously they draw in their customers; but this is rather work for a
ballad and a song: my business is to tell the complete tradesman how to
act a wiser part, to talk to his customers like a man of sense and
business, and not like a mountebank and his merry-andrew; to let him see
that there is a way of managing behind a counter, that, let the customer
be what or how it will, man or woman, impertinent or not
impertinent--for sometimes, I must say, the men customers are every jot
as impertinent as the women; but, I say, let them be what they will, and
how they will, let them make as many words as they will, and urge the
shopkeeper how they will, he may behave himself so as to avoid all those
impertinences, falsehoods, follish and wicked excursions which I
complain of, if he pleases.

It by no means follows, that because the buyer is foolish, the seller
must be so too