a large yellow auricula, that is to say, a running away, for a curious flower, and take a great price.  It seems, the gentleman was a lover of a good yellow; and it is known, that when nature in the auricula is exhausted, and has spent her strengh in showing a fine flower, perhaps some years upon the same root, she faints at last, and then turns into a yellow, which yellow shall be bright and pleasant the first year, and look very well to one that knows nothing of it, though another year it turns pale, and at length almost white.  This the gardeners call a run flower, and this they put upon the gentleman for a rarity, only because he discovered at his coming that he knew nothing of the matter.  The same gardener sold another person a root of white painted thyme for the right Marum Syriacum; and thus they do every day.

A person goes into a brickmaker’s field to view his clamp, and buy a load of bricks; he resolves to see them loaded, because he would have good ones; but not understanding the goods, and seeing the workmen loading them where they were hard and well burnt, but looked white and grey, which, to be sure, were the best of the bricks, and which perhaps they would not have done if he had not been there to look at them, they supposing he understood which were the best; but he, in the abundance of his ignorance, finds fault with them, because they were not a good colour, and did not look red; the brickmaker’s men took the hint immediately, and telling the buyer they would give him red bricks to oblige him, turned their hands from the grey hard well-burnt bricks to the soft sammel[9] half-burnt bricks, which they were glad to dispose of, and which nobody that had understood them would have taken off their hands.

I mention these lower things, because I would suit my writing to the understanding of the meanest people, and speak of frauds used in the most ordinary trades; but it is the like in almost all the goods a tradesman can deal in.  If you go to Warwickshire to buy cheese, you demand the cheese ‘of the first make,’ because that is the best.  If you go to Suffolk to buy butter, you refuse the butter of the first make, because that is not the best, but you bargain for ’the right rowing butter,’ which is the butter that is made when the cows are turned into the grounds where the grass has been mowed, and the hay carried off, and grown again:  and so in many other cases.  These things demonstrate the advantages there are to a tradesman, in his being thoroughly informed of the terms of art, and the peculiarities belonging to every particular business, which, therefore, I call the language of trade.

As a merchant should understand all languages, at least the languages of those countries which he trades to, or corresponds with, and the customs and usages of those countries as to their commerce, so an English tradesman ought to understand all the languages of trade, within the circumference of his own country, at least, and particularly of such as he may, by any of the consequences of his commerce, come to be any way concerned with.