"Your name is on a great many invitations only because it is my misfortune
to be called by it," his wife told him. "To sit on a barge after ten
o'clock at night in June--the coarsest month in summer--is to court
lumbago; and all I hope is ye'll not be punished by a worse attack than
common."
Mr. Dubbin had refused to be discouraged, even by this churlishness from
his lady, and appeared in attendance upon her, wearing a magnificent
birthday suit of crimson velvet and green brocade, which he meant to
present to his favourite actor at the Duke's Theatre, after he had
exhibited himself in it half a dozen times at Whitehall, for the benefit
of the great world, and at the Mulberry Garden for the admiration of the
_bona-robas_. He was a fat, double-chinned little man, the essence of good
nature, and perfectly unconscious of being an offence to fine people.
Although not a wit himself, Mr. Dubbin was occasionally the cause of wit in
others, if the practice of bubbling an innocent rustic or citizen can be
called wit. Rochester and Sir Ralph Masaroon, and one Jerry Spavinger,
a gentleman jockey, who was a nobody in town, but a shining light at
Newmarket, took it upon themselves to draw the harmless citizen, and, as a
preliminary to making him ridiculous, essayed to make him drunk.
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