country at present, I shall not despair of living to see) let me recommend the following treatise to be carried about as a pocket companion, by all gentlemen and ladies, when they are going to visit, or dine, or drink tea; or where they happen to pass the evening without cards, as I have sometimes known it to be the case upon disappointments or accidents unforeseen; desiring they would read their several parts in their chairs or coaches, to prepare themselves for every kind of conversation that can possibly happen.
Although I have, in justice to my country, allowed the genius of our people to excel that of any other nation upon earth, and have confirmed this truth by an argument not to be controlled, I mean, by producing so great a number of witty sentences in the ensuing dialogues, all of undoubted authority, as well as of our own production, yet I must confess at the same time, that we are wholly indebted for them to our ancestors; for as long as my memory reaches, I do not recollect one new phrase of importance to have been added: which defect in us moderns I take to have been occasioned by the introduction of cant words in the reign of king Charles the second. And those have so often varied, that hardly one of them, of above a year's standing, is now intelligible; nor any where to be found, excepting a small number strewed here and there in the comedies, and other fantastick writings of that age.
The honourable colonel James Graham, my oldfriend and companion, did likewise, toward the end of the same reign, invent a set of words and phrases, which continued almost to the time of his death.
