midnight
_ Then suddenly place before him a chandelier , a fiddler , and a magnificent beau in silk stockings and pumps , bounding , skipping , swinging , capering , and throwing himself into ten thousand attitudes , till his face glows with fever , and distils with perspiration : the first impulse excited in his mind by such an apparition will be that of violent fear , which , by the reiterated perception of its harmlessness , will subside into simple astonishment . Then let any genius , sufficiently powerful to impress on his mind all the terms of the communication , impart to him , that after a long process of ages , when his race shall have attained what some people think proper to denominate a very advanced stage of perfectibility , the most favoured and distinguished of the community shall meet by hundreds , to grin , and labour , and gesticulate , like the phantasma before him , from sunset to sunrise , while all nature is at rest , and that they shall consider this a happy and pleasurable mode of existence , and furnishing the most delightful of all possible contrasts to what they will call his vegetative state : would he not groan from his inmost soul for the lamentable condition of his posterity ? _ Mr Jenkison . _ I know not what your wild and original man might think of the matter in the abstract ; but comparatively , I conceive , he would be better pleased with the vision of such a scene as this , than with that of a party of Indians -LRB- who would have all the advantage of being nearly as wild as himself -RRB- , dancing their infernal war-dance round a midnight fire in a North American forest . _ Mr Escot . _ Not if you should impart to him the true nature of both , by laying open to his view the springs of action in both parties . _ Mr Jenkison .