munity, has acquired that air of dignity and that readiness in the exchange of compliments, which courts, balls, and levees, easily confer.
But Trypherus, without any settled purposes of malignity, partly by his ignorance of human nature, and partly by the habit of contemplating with great satisfaction his own grandeur and riches, is hourly giving disgust to those whom chance or expectation subjects to his vanity.
To a man whose fortune confines him to a small house, he declaims upon the pleasure of spacious apartments, and the convenience of changing his lodging-room in different parts of the year; tells him, that he hates confinement; and concludes, that if his chamber was less, he should never wake without thinking of a prison.
To Eucretas, a man of birth equal to himself, but of much less estate, he shewed his services of plate, and remarked that such things were, indeed, nothing better than costly trifles, but that no man must pretend to the rank of a gentleman without them; and that for his part, if his estate was smaller, he should not think of enjoying but encreasing it, and would inquire out a trade for his eldest son.
He has, in imitation of some more acute observer than himself, collected a great many shifts and artifices by which poverty is concealed; and among the ladies of small fortune, never fails to talk of frippery and slight silks, and the convenience of a general mourning.
I have been insulted a thousand times with a catalogue of his pictures, his jewels, and his rarities, which, though he knows the humble neatness of my habitation, he seldom fails to conclude by a de-
