is really nothing, but under the specious pretence of learning and antiquity, to impose upon the world.  There are other things which I cannot tolerate among his rarities; as, the china figure of a lady in the glass case; the Italian engine for the imprisonment of those who go abroad with it:  both which I hereby order to be taken down, or else he may expect to have his letters patents for making punch superseded, be debarred wearing his muff next winter, or ever coming to London without his wife.[354] It may perhaps be thought I have dwelt too long upon the affairs of this operator; but I desire the reader to remember, that it is my way to consider men as they stand in merit, and not according to their fortune or figure; and if he is in a coffee-house at the reading hereof, let him look round, and he will find there may be more characters drawn in this account than that of Don Saltero; for half the politicians about him, he may observe, are, by their place in nature, of the class of tooth-drawers.

[Footnote 337:  See p. 273, note.]

[Footnote 338:  A small violin or fiddle.  See No. 160.]

[Footnote 339:  A dancing-master, who either was French, or pretended to be so.  See No. 109.]

[Footnote 340:  A song of Waller’s begins: 

“Behold the brand of beauty tost! 
See, how the motion doth dilate the flame!”
(Dobson).
]

[Footnote 341:  The rigadoon was a dance for two persons.  Cf. Guardian, No. 154:  “We danced a rigadoon together.”]

[Footnote 342:  On the site of Eaton and Belgrave Squares.  See Spectator, No. 137:  “The Five Fields towards Chelsea.”]

[Footnote 343:  In “Bartholomew Fair,” act ii. sc. i.  Overdo went to the Fair in disguise, and being mistaken for a cutpurse, was well beaten.]

[Footnote 344:  Salter, a barber, opened a coffee-house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, in 1695.  Sir Harry Sloane, whose servant he had been, gave him some curiosities to start a museum.  Others, including Admiral Munden and his fellow-officers, added to the collection, and the first catalogue appeared in 1729.  The more startling curiosities were, of course, not genuine.  The remains of the collection were sold in 1799 for about L50.  A view of Salter’s house will be found in Timbs’ “Clubs and Club Life in London.”  Verses of a more or less coarse nature by Don Saltero appeared not unfrequently in the “British Apollo,” in 1709.]

[Footnote 345:  From “gingiva,” the gum.]

[Footnote 346:  Salter played very badly on the fiddle.]

[Footnote 347:  “Sir Roger de Coverley,” the famous country-dance tune.]

[Footnote 348:  By Dr. Henry Aldrich, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, where Steele matriculated.]

[Footnote 349:  “De Poematum cantu, et viribus Rythmi,” 1673.]

[Footnote 350:  Master Nicholas.  See “Don Quixote,” chap. v.]

[Footnote 351:  There were two John Tradescants (father and son) who collected objects of natural history.  Their collection formed the foundation of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.  The “Museum Tradescantianum:  or, A Collection of Rarities preserved at South Lambeth, near London, by John Tradescant,” contains interesting portraits of both John Tradescant, senior, and John Tradescant, junior, as well as a plate of the Tradescant arms.]