with pain and shame enough—­yet outwardly trying to face it down, as if nothing had happened—­when the roguish grin of one of these young wits encountered me.  There he stood, pointing me out with his dusky finger to the mob, and to a poor woman (I suppose his mother) in particular, till the tears for the exquisiteness of the fun (so he thought it) worked themselves out at the corners of his poor red eyes, red from many a previous weeping, and soot-inflamed, yet twinkling through all with such a joy, snatched out of desolation, that Hogarth—­but Hogarth has got him already (how could he miss him?) in the March to Finchley, grinning at the pye-man—­there he stood, as he stands in the picture, irremovable, as if the jest was to last for ever—­with such a maximum of glee, and minimum of mischief, in his mirth—­for the grin of a genuine sweep hath absolutely no malice in it—­that I could have been content, if the honour of a gentleman might endure it, to have remained his butt and his mockery till midnight.

I am by theory obdurate to the seductiveness of what are called a fine set of teeth.  Every pair of rosy lips (the ladies must pardon me) is a casket, presumably holding such jewels; but, methinks, they should take leave to “air” them as frugally as possible.  The fine lady, or fine gentleman, who show me their teeth, show me bones.  Yet must I confess, that from the mouth of a true sweep a display (even to ostentation) of those white and shining ossifications, strikes me as an agreeable anomaly in manners, and an allowable piece of foppery.  It is, as when

  A sable cloud
  Turns forth her silver lining on the night.

It is like some remnant of gentry not quite extinct; a badge of better days; a hint of nobility:—­and, doubtless, under the obscuring darkness and double night of their forlorn disguisement, oftentimes lurketh good blood, and gentle conditions, derived from lost ancestry, and a lapsed pedigree.  The premature apprenticements of these tender victims give but too much encouragement, I fear, to clandestine, and almost infantile abductions; the seeds of civility and true courtesy, so often discernible in these young grafts (not otherwise to be accounted for) plainly hint at some forced adoptions; many noble Rachels mourning for their children, even in our days, countenance the fact; the tales of fairy-spiriting may shadow a lamentable verity, and the recovery of the young Montagu be but a solitary instance of, good fortune, out of many irreparable and hopeless defiliations.

In one of the state-beds at Arundel Castle, a few years since—­under a ducal canopy—­(that seat of the Howards is an object of curiosity to visitors, chiefly for its beds, in which the late duke was especially a connoisseur)—­encircled with curtains of delicatest crimson, with starry coronets inwoven—­folded between a pair of sheets whiter and softer than the lap where Venus lulled Ascanius—­was discovered by chance, after all methods of search had failed,