N° 34. MONDAY, JULY 2, 1787.

'SIR,

NEMO in sese tentat descendere.-Juv.
NOBODY tries himself to scan.—

THE peculiar hardships of my situation call loudly for your interference. As they have hitherto escaped the notice of those righters of wrongs, and redressers of grievances, your periodical predecessors, it remains with you, Sir, by the publishing of this letter, to clear my injured fame from the aspersions of the malevolent; and vindicate to the world the importance of my character.

I shall not detain you, Mr. Griffin, by a long account of my birth, parentage, and education; suffice it only to say, that I never received any education; that I am not indebted to a parent for my existence; but that, notwithstanding I am thus defective in point of ancestry, I boast a family of wide alliances and extensive relationships, and date my birth even prior to the creation.

'In short, Sir, the person who has now the honour to address you, is no other than Nobody. То prove what I have advanced of my large connexions, I am, you must know, allied to Anybody, nearly related to Somebody, and connected by the closest ties to the family of Everybody. Besides these, the various branches of the What'shisnames, the Whatyecallums, the Suchaones, and the Thingums and Thingumbobs, come, one and all, from the same parent stock.

'From this account you might probably be led to suppose, that my situation is, of all others, the most enviable; that I am growing old amid the caresses

of a diffusive family; and that I am looked up to with wonder and veneration by the rest of the world, as a being pre-existent to the common ancestor, and contemporary with every generation of mankind. But alas, Mr. Griffin, very widely mistaken would this idea be found.-Alas, Sir, the world holds me in contempt, and my nearest relations have been taught by their example to do the same. I cannot make Anybody confess his knowledge of me; Everybody shuns the suspicion of being acquainted with me; and Somebody has long ago set himself up in direct opposition to me; and by degrees attracted to his party all the inferior branches of the family, who find their ideas of self-consequence much more pleasingly gratified in the relationship they bear to him, however distant, than in the disgraceful consanguinity of Nobody.

It has not been always thus. There was a time when the name of Nobody was more respected.You cannot but know, Mr. Griffin, that in all places where the feudal system obtained, and even now I believe, in some remote parts of Scotland, it has been customary for whole clans to take the name of the master under whom they held their several tenures; insomuch, that it was nothing unusual for the inhabitants of whole districts to be distinguishable from each other only by the difference of their prænomen, or Christian name, or by some additional cognomen, which they adopted for the purpose of this distinction; so that had you, Sir, lived in those days, there would have been, I doubt not, whole provinces peopled with a hopeful progeny of Griffins. Ah, Sir, these were times indeed. Then it was, that I and my old opposer Somebody, by mutual compact, shared the land between us, and distributed our names to our respective adherents. The barons, to be sure, and all principal persons, considered themselves as members of his family; but then the tenants

and the bulk of the people were of necessity contented to rank under my denomination. And so very inconsiderable was the number of his adherents compared to that of mine, that he might be almost said scarcely to have Anybody on his party; whilst comparatively speaking, Everybody sided with me.

"There were then no regular steps of consequence, no intermediate gradation of ranks between the lord and his slave; but while the importance of the one was sufficiently gratified in the title of Somebody; the other, hugging himself in his own insignificancy, was fully satisfied to herd with the multitude of Nobodies.

'How different is my situation, and how much lessened is the estimation in which I am held in these days; while Everybody is labouring with restless ambition to be considered by the world as Somebody. It is this principle which enforces the young heir into expenses far beyond the limits of his fortune, and melts the accumulation of years in the extravagance of an hour; that he may by his spirited conduct, persuade the admiring world, that he is Somebody. On what other principle does the spouse of the substantial shop-keeper ground her arguments, in favour of frosting the cauliflower-wig, and rolling up the round belly in a new red waistcoat, but that he may be enabled to display himself on a Sunday's terrace, with a dress and figure, which may shew him to be Somebody? And whence that self-sufficient smile which curdles the fat cheek of his love, but from a consciousness of having assumed, together with her flowered damask, a degree of importance, which abundantly rescues her from the disgraceful appellation of a Nobody?

'But even these desertions, Sir, however distressing, and this contempt, however wounding, I might perhaps be able to endure without complaint; and console myself with the idea of their being but nega

N° 34. tive misfortunes. But who, Mr. Griffin, could forbear to complain of the malice of false aspersions, and the railings of groundless abuse? who could bear, without repining, the imputations of vices, of which he was perfectly unconscious; of outrages, of which he was wholly incapable?

1

'There does not pass a day in which my name is not called in a hundred times, as a foil to the vices and imperfections of others; as thus, in speaking of any notorious offender," Nobody is more wicked," -"Nobody more abandoned,”- "Nobody will come sooner to the gallows."—It is, however, some compensation for this, you will say, that I am made use of as a comparison for all that is good and great in any character. But, alas! when you consider how far greater is the propensity of most people to calumny than commendation, you will readily own, that the being coupled once or twice with the name of a great and good man, is but a slender consolation, for being daily associated with the name of every thing that is rascally and villanous under the sun.

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'It cannot, I think, have escaped your observation, how often in common life, a suspicion of being an acquaintance of mine, has been prejudicial to many an innocent and well-meaning person; and has served as an excuse for treating him with the utmost incivility; a hint, that such a person was a fellow "who spoke to Nobody," or a creature that Nobody knew," has been a cause sufficient to subject him to the most mortifying rudeness and contempt. But I shall pass over the consideration of this, and a multitude of other circumstances of the same nature: nor shall I stop to make a single observation on that unaccountable malignity with which mankind are taught to persecute me in proverbs, and most maliciously to pronounce that wind " An ill wind, which blows Nobody good."-But,

'I shall proceed without delay to shew the injus

tice and wickedness of mankind, in laying to my charge several enormities which it is actually out of my power to perform. The first instance which occurs to my memory is one of very great antiquity, of which you, Mr. Griffin, have in a former paper very properly taken the notice it deserved, for which I thank you. I allude to the paltry contrivance of Ulysses, who, to shield himself and his party from the resentment of Polypheme, for the extinction of his eye, had the address to persuade that simple shepherd swain, that it was one Ouders (meaning me, Sir), who was perpetrator of the bloody deed. Of this accusation you have already had the goodness to acquit me to the world. But it were endless to dwell on every particular circumstance which has been laid hold of, to sully my fair fame with malevolent aspersions. I should detain you too long, were I to enumerate the many atrocious housebreakings of which a confirmed suspicion is said to have fallen on Nobody; the many midnight murders at which Nobody was thought to have been present; or (to descend to less heinous offences) the many strayed tea-spoons and broken china-basons, the guilt of which a favourite lap-dog, a cat, or a fine family of little ones, have been lucky enough to throw off their own shoulders on those of Nobody. I myself was not a little displeased the other day, to hear an old gentleman (who by-the-by, has one son of two-and-twenty, and several head of younger children, living in the house with him) complain, in the double capacity of master of a family, and justice of the peace, that he had at that time a pierglass shattered to pieces, an arm broken off his mahogany easy-chair, and a housemaid in the Straw, for all which circumstances he was, as far as he could learn, indebted to the kind officiousness of Nobody.

'Now, Mr. Griffin, I have laid my misfortunes be