Wisdom is to be purchased only of the tailor. Morality is synonymous with
millinery; whilst Truth herself--pictured by the poetry of the olden day
in angelic nakedness--must now be full-dressed, like a young lady at a
royal drawing-room, to be considered presentable. You may believe that a
man with a gash in his heart may still walk, talk, pay taxes, and perform
all the other duties of a highly civilised citizen; but to believe that
the same man with a hole in his coat can discourse like a reasoning
animal, is to be profoundly ignorant of those sympathetic subtleties
existing between a man's brain and a man's broad-cloth. Party politics
have developed this profound truth--the divine reason of the immortal
creature escapes through ragged raiment; a fractured skull is not so fatal
to the powers of ratiocination as a rent in the nether garments. GOD'S
image loses the divine lustre of its origin with its nap of super-Saxony.
The sinful lapse of ADAM has thrown all his unfortunate children upon the
mercies of the tailor; and that mortal shows least of the original stain
who wraps about it the richest purple and the finest linen. Hence, if you
would know the value of a man's heart, look at his waistcoat.
Philosophers and anatomists have quarrelled for centuries as to the
residence of the soul. Some have vowed that it lived here--some there;
some that, like a gentleman with several writs in pursuit of him, it
continually changed its lodgings; whilst others have lustily sworn that
the soul was a vagrant, with no claim to any place of settlement whatever.
Nevertheless, a vulgar notion has obtained that the soul dwelt on a little
knob of the brain; and that there, like a vainglorious bantam-cock on a
dunghill, it now claps its wings and crows all sorts of triumph--and now,
silent and scratching, it thinks of nought but wheat and barley. The first
step to knowledge is to confess to a late ignorance. We avow, then, our
late benighted condition. We were of the number of sciolists who lodged
the soul in the head of man: we are now convinced that the true dwelling
place of the soul is in the head's antipodes. Let SOLOMON himself return
to the earth, and hold forth at a political meeting; SOLOMON himself would
be hooted, laughed at, voted an ass, a nincompoop, if SOLOMON spoke from
the platform with a hole in his breeches!
PLATO doubtless thought that he had imagined a magnificent theory, when he
averred that every man had within him a spark of the divine flame. But,
silly PLATO! he never considered how easily this spark might be blown out.
At this moment, how many Englishmen are walking about the land utterly
extinguished! Had men been made on the principle of the safety-lamp, they
might have defied the foul breath of the world's opinion--but, alas! what
a tender, thin-skinned, shivering thing is man! His covering--the livery
of original sin, bought with the pilfered apples--is worn into a hole, and
Opinion, that sour-breathed hag, claps her blue lips to the broken web,
gives a puff, and--out goes man's immortal spark! From this moment the
creature is but a carcase: he can eat and drink (when lucky enough to be
able to try the experiment), talk, walk, and no more; yes, we forgot--he
can work; he still keeps precedence of the ape in the scale of
creation--for he can work for those who, thickly clothed, and buttoned to
the throat, have no rent in their purple, no stitch dropped in their
superfine, to expose their precious souls to an annihilating gust, and who
therefore keep their immortal sparks like tapers in burglars'
dark-lanthorns, whereby to rob and spoil with greater certainty!
Gentle reader, think you this a fantastic chapter on holes? If so, then of
a surety you do not read those instructive annals of your country penned
by many a TACITUS of the daily press--by many a profound historian who
unites to the lighter graces of stenography the enduring loveliness of
philosophy.
Some days since a meeting was held in the parish of Saint Pancras of the
"Young Men's Anti-Monopoly Association." The place of gathering, says the
reporter, was "a ruined _penny_ theatre!" It is evident in the brain of
the writer that the small price at which the theatre was ruined made its
infamy: to be blighted for a penny was the shame. Drury Lane and Covent
Garden have been ruined over and over again--but then their ruin, like
PHRYNE'S, has ever been at a large price of admission; hence, like court
harlots, their ruin has been dignified by high remuneration. What,
however, could be expected from a theatre that, with inconceivable
wickedness, suffered itself to be undone for a penny? Let the reporter
answer:--
"---- FORSTER, Esq., advanced, and, assuming _a teapot position_
on the stage, moved the first resolution, to the effect 'That the
bread-tax was the cause of all distress, and that they should use
their strenuous efforts to remove it.' 'Ladies (there was one old
woman _in a shocking bad black and white straw bonnet present_)
and gentlemen (said he), this is a public meeting to all intents
and purposes.'"
For ourselves we care not for an orator's standing like a teapot, if what
he pours out be something better than mere hot-water or dead small beer.
If, however, we were to typify orators in delf, there are many Tory
talkers whom we would associate with more ignominious shapes of crockery
than that of a teapot--senators who are taken by the handle, and by their
party used for the dirtiest offices.
We now come to the bad old woman whose excess of iniquity was blazoned in
her "bad black and white straw bonnet." This woman might have been an
ASPASIA, a DE STAEL, a Mrs. SOMERVILLE,--nay, the SYBILLA CUMEA herself.
What of that? The "bad" bonnet must sink the large souled Grecian to a
cinder-wench, make the Frenchwoman a trapes from the Palais Royal, our
fair astronomer a gipsy of Greenwich Park, and the fate-foretelling sybil
a crone crawled from the worst garret of Battle-bridge. The head is
nothing; the bonnet's all. Think you that Mrs. Somerville could have
studied herself into reputation, that the moon and stars would have
condescended to smile upon her, if she had not attended their evening
parties in a handsome turban, duly plumed and jewelled?