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'You lie, says I. With that he ups with a lump of a two year old, and lets drive at me. I outs with my bread-earner, and gives it him up to Lamprey in the bread-basket." To make this intelligible to the English, some comments are necessary. Let us follow the text, step by step, and it will afford our readers, as Lord Kames says of Blair's Dissertation on Ossian, a delicious morsel of criticism.
Though the metonymy of bread-earner for a shoeblack's knife may not equal these in elegance, it perhaps surpasses them in ingenuity. I gives it him up to Lamprey in the bread-basket. Homer is happy in his description of wounds, but this surpasses him in the characteristic choice of circumstance.
When Tom Buller saw the woman and children, and then afterwards their strong bread-earner reduced to such a condition, he indeed felt heartily glad that there was no truth in the accusation against him. To have had any part in bringing about such a scene of family distress would have been too much for him.
"We read in a certain author," says Beattie, "of a giant, who, in his wrath, tore off the top of the promontory, and flung it at the enemy; and so huge was the mass, that you might, says he, have seen goats browsing on it as it flew through the air." Compared with this, our orator's figure is cold and tame. "I outs with my bread-earner," continues he.
We forbear to comment on outs with, because the intelligent critic immediately perceives that it has the same sort of merit ascribed to ups with. What our hero dignifies with the name of his bread-earner is the knife with which, by scraping shoes, he earned his bread. Pope's ingenious critic, Mr.
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