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bailiffs, kicked fiddlers down-stairs, ate at Locket's, loitered at
Will's; they talked of the drawing-room and never came there; dined
with lords they never saw; whispered a duchess and spoke never a
word; exposed the scrawls of their laundress for billet-doux of
quality; came ever just from court and were never seen in it;
attended the levee sub dio; got a list of peers by heart in one
company, and with great familiarity retailed them in another. Above
all, they constantly attended those committees of Senators who are
silent in the House and loud in the coffeehouse, where they nightly
adjourn to chew the cud of politics, and are encompassed with a ring
of disciples who lie in wait to catch up their droppings. The three
brothers had acquired forty other qualifications of the like stamp
too tedious to recount, and by consequence were justly reckoned the
most accomplished persons in town. But all would not suffice, and
the ladies aforesaid continued still inflexible. To clear up which
difficulty, I must, with the reader's good leave and patience, have
recourse to some points of weight which the authors of that age have
not sufficiently illustrated.
For about this time it happened a sect arose whose tenets obtained
and spread very far, especially in the grand monde, and among
everybody of good fashion. They worshipped a sort of idol {72a},
who, as their doctrine delivered, did daily create men by a kind of
manufactory operation. This idol they placed in the highest parts
of the house on an altar erected about three feet. He was shown in
the posture of a Persian emperor sitting on a superficies with his
legs interwoven under him. This god had a goose for his ensign,
whence it is that some learned men pretend to deduce his original
from Jupiter Capitolinus. At his left hand, beneath the altar, Hell
seemed to open and catch at the animals the idol was creating, to
prevent which, certain of his priests hourly flung in pieces of the
uninformed mass or substance, and sometimes whole limbs already
enlivened, which that horrid gulph insatiably swallowed, terrible to
behold. The goose was also held a subaltern divinity or Deus
minorum gentium, before whose shrine was sacrificed that creature
whose hourly food is human gore, and who is in so great renown
abroad for being the delight and favourite of the Egyptian
Cercopithecus {72b}. Millions of these animals were cruelly
slaughtered every day to appease the hunger of that consuming deity.
The chief idol was also worshipped as the inventor of the yard and
the needle, whether as the god of seamen, or on account of certain
other mystical attributes, hath not been sufficiently cleared.
The worshippers of this deity had also a system of their belief
which seemed to turn upon the following fundamental.
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