A dirty dog is a nuisance not to be borne. But here the question
arises,--who--what--is a dirty dog? Now there are men (no women)
naturally--necessarily--dirty. They are not dirty by chance or
accident--say twice or thrice per diem--but they are always dirty--at
all times and in all places--and never and nowhere more disgustingly so
than when figged out for going to church. It is in the skin--in the
blood--in the flesh--and in the bone--that with such the disease of dirt
more especially lies. We beg pardon, no less in the hair. Now such
persons do not know that they are dirty--that they are unclean beasts.
On the contrary, they often think themselves pinks of purity--incarnations
of carnations--impersonations of moss-roses--the spiritual essences
of lilies, "imparadised in form of that sweet flesh." Now, were such
persons to change their linen every half hour night and day, that is,
were they to put on forty-eight clean shirts in the twenty-four
hours,--and it would not be reasonable, perhaps, to demand more of
them,--yet though we cheerfully grant that one and all of the shirts
would be dirty, we as sulkily deny that at any given moment from sunrise
to sunset, and over again, the wearer would be clean. He would be just
every whit and bit as dirty as if he had known but one single shirt all
his life--and firmly believed his to be the only shirt in the universe.
Men, again, on the other hand, there are--and, thank God, in great
numbers--who are naturally so clean, that we defy you to make them
_bonâ fide_ dirty. You may as well drive down a duck into a dirty
puddle, and expect lasting stains on its pretty plumage. Pope says the
same thing of swans--that is, poets--when speaking of Aaron Hill diving
into the ditch--
"He bears no tokens of the sabler streams,
But soars far off among the swans of Thames."
Pleasant people of this kind of constitution you see going about of a
morning rather in dishabille--hair uncombed haply--face and hands even
unwashed--and shirt with a somewhat day-before-yesterdayish hue. Yet are
they, so far from being dirty, at once felt, seen, and smelt, to be
among the very cleanest of his majesty's subjects. The moment you shake
hands with them, you feel in the firm flesh of palm and finger that
their heart's blood circulates purely and freely from the point of the
highest hair on the apex of the pericranium, to the edge of the nail on
the large toe of the right foot. Their eyes are as clean as unclouded
skies--the apples on their cheeks are like those on the tree--what need,
in either case, of rubbing off dust or dew with a towel? What though,
from sleeping without a night-cap, their hair may be a little toosey? It
is not dim--dull--oily--like half-withered sea-weeds! It will soon comb
itself with the fingers of the west wind--that tent-like tree its
toilette--its mirror that pool of the clear-flowing Tweed.
Irishmen are generally sweet--at least in their own green isle.--So are
Scotchmen. Whereas, blindfolded, take a cockney's hand, immediately
after it has been washed and scented, and put it to your nose--and you
will begin to be apprehensive that some practical wit has substituted in
lieu of the sonnet-scribbling bunch of little fetid fives, the body of
some chicken-butcher of a weasel, that died of the plague. We have seen
as much of what is most ignorantly and malignantly denominated dirt--one
week's earth--washed off the feet of a pretty young girl on a Saturday
night, at a single sitting, in the little rivulet that runs almost round
about her father's hut, as would have served a cockney to raise his
mignionette in, or his crop of cresses. How beautifully glowed the
crimson-snow of the singing creature's new-washed feet!
It will be seen, from these hurried remarks, that there is more truth
than Dr. Kitchiner was aware of in his apophthegm--that a clean skin may
be regarded as next in efficacy to a clear conscience. But the doctor
had but a very imperfect notion of the meaning of the words--clean
skin--his observation being not even skin-deep. A wash-hand basin--a bit
of soap--and a coarse towel--he thought would give a cockney on
Ludgate-hill a clean skin--just as many good people think that a Bible,
a prayer-book, and a long sermon can give a clear conscience to a
criminal in Newgate. The cause of the evil, in both cases, lies too deep
for tears. Millions of men and women pass through nature to eternity
clean-skinned and pious--with slight expense either in soap or sermons;
while millions more, with much week-day bodily scrubbing, and much
Sabbath spiritual sanctification, are held in bad odour here, while they
live, by those who happen to sit near them, and finally go out like the
snuff of a candle.--_Blackwoods Magazine_.
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