Salmagundi; or, The whim-whams and opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, esq. [pseud.] and others. By William Irving, James Kirke Paulding and Washington Irving. Printed from the original ed., with a preface and notes by Evert A. Duyckinck.

PINDAR COCKLOFT. 41
SITTING late the other evening in my elbow-chair, indulging in that kind of indolent meditation, which I consider
the perfection of human bliss, I was aroused from my revery by
the entrance of an old servant in the COCKLOFT livery, who
handed me a letter, containing the following address from my
cousin and old college chum, PINDAR COCKLOFT.
Honest ANDREW, as he delivered it, informed me that his
master, who resides a little way from town, on reading a small
pamphlet in a neat yellow cover,* rubbed his hands with symptoms of great satisfaction, called for his favorite Chinese inkstand, with two sprawling Mandarins for its supporters, and
wrote the letter which he had the honor to present me.
As I foresee my cousin will one day become a great favorite
with the public, and as I know him to be somewhat punctilious
as it respects etiquette, I shall take this opportunity to gratify
the old gentleman, by giving him a proper introduction to the
fashionable world. The Cockloft family, to which I have the
comfort of being related, has been fruitful in old bachelors and
humorists, as will be perceived when I come to treat more of its
history. My cousin Pindar is one of its most conspicuous members-he is now in his fifty-eighth year-is a bachelor, partly
through choice, and partly through chance, and an oddity of the
first water. Half his life has been employed in writing odes, sonnets, epigrams, and elegies, which he seldom shows to anybody
but myself after they are written; and all the old chests, drawers
and chair-bottoms in the house, teem with his productions.
In his younger days he figured as a dashing blade in the great
world; and no young fellow of the town wore a longer pig-tail,
or carried more buckram in his skirts. From sixteen to thirty
*The numbers of Salmagundi were originally published in this form.