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his vessel in the spectators' faces? Let the right worshipful the
Commissioners of Inspection give him a regiment of dragoons, and
send him into Flanders among the rest. Is another eternally
talking, sputtering, gaping, bawling, in a sound without period or
article? What wonderful talents are here mislaid! Let him be
furnished immediately with a green bag and papers, and threepence in
his pocket {135}, and away with him to Westminster Hall. You will
find a third gravely taking the dimensions of his kennel, a person
of foresight and insight, though kept quite in the dark; for why,
like Moses, Ecce cornuta erat ejus facies. He walks duly in one
pace, entreats your penny with due gravity and ceremony, talks much
of hard times, and taxes, and the whore of Babylon, bars up the
wooden of his cell constantly at eight o'clock, dreams of fire, and
shoplifters, and court-customers, and privileged places. Now what a
figure would all these acquirements amount to if the owner were sent
into the City among his brethren! Behold a fourth in much and deep
conversation with himself, biting his thumbs at proper junctures,
his countenance chequered with business and design; sometimes
walking very fast, with his eyes nailed to a paper that he holds in
his hands; a great saver of time, somewhat thick of hearing, very
short of sight, but more of memory; a man ever in haste, a great
hatcher and breeder of business, and excellent at the famous art of
whispering nothing; a huge idolator of monosyllables and
procrastination, so ready to give his word to everybody that he
never keeps it; one that has forgot the common meaning of words, but
an admirable retainer of the sound; extremely subject to the
looseness, for his occasions are perpetually calling him away. If
you approach his grate in his familiar intervals, "Sir," says he,
"give me a penny and I'll sing you a song; but give me the penny
first" (hence comes the common saying and commoner practice of
parting with money for a song). What a complete system of court-
skill is here described in every branch of it, and all utterly lost
with wrong application! Accost the hole of another kennel, first
stopping your nose, you will behold a surly, gloomy, nasty, slovenly
mortal, raking in his own dung and dabbling in his urine. The best
part of his diet is the reversion of his own ordure, which expiring
into steams, whirls perpetually about, and at last reinfunds. His
complexion is of a dirty yellow, with a thin scattered beard,
exactly agreeable to that of his diet upon its first declination,
like other insects, who, having their birth and education in an
excrement, from thence borrow their colour and their smell. The
student of this apartment is very sparing of his words, but somewhat
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