The misanthrope answered,
as usual, in a surly tone: "By your question you must either take
me for a pimp or an idiot. What, in the name of nonsense, should
I know of such a rascal, unless I were to court his acquaintance
with a view to feast my own spleen, in seeing him fool the whole
nation out of their money? Though, I suppose, his chief profits
arise from his practice, in quality of pander. All fortune-tellers
are bawds, and, for that reason, are so much followed by people of
fashion. This fellow, I warrant, has got sundry convenient apartments
for the benefit of procreation; for it is not to be supposed that
those who visit him on the pretence of consulting his supernatural
art, can be such fools, such drivellers, as to believe that he can
actually prognosticate future events."
The company, according to his expectation, imputed his remarks to
the rancour of his disposition, which could not bear to think that
any person upon earth was wiser than himself; and his ears were
regaled with a thousand instances of the conjurer's wonderful
prescience, for which he was altogether indebted to fiction.
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