CHAP, in.] OVERTURES FROM SMOLLETT AND NEWBERY.
half-pay officer of unexpected fortune, unable to bear the 1760.
transition from, moderate to extravagant means, and rendered Mt. 32.
so insensible by unused indulgences that he had come to
see FalstajF without a smile and the Orphan without emotion.
A fourth was a little history of seduction, hasty, abrupt, and
not very real; but in which the hero bore such a general
though indistinct resemblance to the immortal family of the
Primroses, as to have fitly merged and been forgotten in
their later glory. *
The last of these detached essays which I shall mention
for the present, did not appear in the British Magazine, but
much concerned it; and, though not reckoned worthy of
preservation by its writer, is evidence not to be omitted of
his hearty feeling to Smollett, and ready resource to serve a
friend. It was in plain words a puff of the British Magazine
and its projector; and a puff of as witty pretension as ever
visited the ingenious brain of the yet unborn friend of
Mr. Dangle. It purported to describe a Wow-wow; a kind
of newspaper club of a country town, to which the writer
amusingly described himself driven, by his unavailing efforts
to find anybody anywhere else. All were at the "Wow-wow,
from the apothecary to the drawer of the tavern; and there
he found, inspired by pipes and newspapers, such a smoke
and fire of political discussion, such a setting right of all the
mistakes of the generals in the war, such a battle, conducted
with chalk, upon the blunders of Finck and Daun, and such
quidnunc explosions against the Dutch in Pondicherry, that
infallibly the "Wow-wow must have come to a war of its own
* This " History of Miss Stanton" is included in Mr. Prior's edition of the
Miscellaneous Works (i. 214) -with many other pieces not before collected, which
make the book by far the best of the collections that have yet appeared, though
it is by no means carefully or accurately edited. The other three papers mentioned
above are in i. 201, 205, 224 ; and for the Wow-wow, see i. 322.