instantly made him one of the commissioners for licensing hackney-coaches, bestowed on him soon after a place in the Pipe-office, and likewise a post in the Custom-house of the value of 600l.
A commissionership of hackney-coaches—a post in the Custom-house—a place in the Pipe-office, and all for writing a comedy! Doesn't it sound like a fable, that place in the Pipe-office?[1] Ah, l'heureux temps que celui de ces fables! Men of letters there still be: but I doubt whether any pipe-offices are left. The public has smoked them long ago.
Words, like men, pass current for a while with the public, and being known everywhere abroad, at length take their places in society; so even the most secluded and refined ladies here present will have heard the phrase from their sons or brothers at school, and will
- ↑ "Pipe.—Pipe, in law, is a roll in the Exchequer, called also the great roll.
"Pipe-Office is an office in which a person called the Clerk of the Pipe makes out leases of crown lands, by warrant, from the Lord-Treasurer, or Commissioners of the Treasury, or Chancellor of the Exchequer.
"Clerk of the Pipe makes up all accounts of sheriffs, &c."—Rees. Cyclopæd. Art. Pipe.
"Pipe-Office.—Spelman thinks so called because the papers were kept in a large pipe or cask."
"These be at last brought into that office of Her Majesty's Exchequer, which we, by a metaphor, do call the pipe . . . . . because the whole receipt is finally conveyed into it by means of divers small pipes or quills."—Bacon. The Office of Alienations.
[We are indebted to Richardson's Dictionary for this fragment of erudition. But a modern man-of-letters can know little on these points, by—experience.]
