"By this hand," replied Gratiano, "I gave it to a youth, a kind of boy, a little scrubbed boy no higher than yourself; he was clerk to the young counsellor that by his wise pleading saved Anthonio's life: this prating boy begged it for a fee, and I could not for my life deny him."

Yet you, forsooth, an idle prating dame, Would fain increase the number, and upstart To our high seats, decking your babbling self With usurp'd titles of our dignity. LIN.

Two English gentlemen and a Scotchman, travellers as we were, were standing gazing at this prating doctor, and one of them catched a fellow picking his pocket.

Beshrew me, lords, but in this jolly vein 'Twere pity but the prating fool were slain.

H. I did, my lord, I saw it all; But missing this same prating friar, And hearing you so much desire To have the losel's company, I went to seek Small-Honesty.

I'm sure I should not him, and less my sister; Who, when I with my uncle went this voyage, Was then one of those little prating girls, Of whom fond parents tell such tedious stories: Well, go you back.

Away you prating knave.

He has been at Lancaster-road Chapel three months, and, unlike many new parsons, he had more sense than preach his best sermons firstthan make a grand pyrotechnic dash at the onset and settle down into a round of prating mediocrity afterwards.

But, had the world no wiser men than I, We'd pen the prating parrots in a cage.

Mar. His fit begins to take him now again, 'Tis a strange Feaver, and 'twill shake us all anon, I fear, Would he were well cur'd of this raging folly: Give me the warrs, where men are mad, and may talk what they list, and held the bravest fellows; This pelting prating peace is good for nothing: drinking's a vertue to't.

7. Item, that she maintains a train of prating pettifoggers, prowling sumners, smooth-tongued bawds, artless empirics, hungry parasites, newscarriers, janglers, and such like idle companions, that delude the commonalty.

Montagu was a brilliant rhetorician, and therefore, though he had ten times Harley's capacity for the driest parts of business, was represented by detractors as a superficial, prating pretender."

" "Now you talk like a silly prating priestling," she said.

And then the prating puppy, that he sent on board me, is no Captain, after all!

I have not forgot How thou didst love thy Charles, when he was yet A prating schoolboy: I have not forgot The busy joy on that important day, When, child-like, the poor wanderer was content To leave the bosom of parental love, His childhood's play-place, and his early home,

Folly and falsehood prate apace; Truth under bushel is fain to creep; Flattery is treble, pride sings the bass, The mean, the best part, scant doth peep. With floods and storms thus be we tost: Awake, good Lord, to thee we cry; Our ship is almost sunk and lost; Thy mercy help our misery.

The raven once in snowy plumes was dress'd, White as the whitest dove's unsullied breast, Fair as the guardian of the Capitol, Soft as the swan; a large and lovely fowl; His tongue, his prating tongue, had changed him quite To sooty blackness from the purest white.

If you hadn't come to-day I should have been gone without seeing you, for I began to think that you were as narrow as these prating abolitionists.