WE have the glorious privilege of being always in hot water if we like.
We are a shareholder in a Great Parochial British Joint Stock Bank of
Balderdash. We have a Vestry in our borough, and can vote for a
vestryman—might even _be_ a vestryman, mayhap, if we were inspired by a
lofty and noble ambition. Which we are not.
Our Vestry is a deliberative assembly of the utmost dignity and
importance. Like the Senate of ancient Rome, its awful gravity
overpowers (or ought to overpower) barbarian visitors. It sits in the
Capitol (we mean in the capital building erected for it), chiefly on
Saturdays, and shakes the earth to its centre with the echoes of its
thundering eloquence, in a Sunday paper.
To get into this Vestry in the eminent capacity of Vestryman, gigantic
efforts are made, and Herculean exertions used. It is made manifest to
the dullest capacity at every election, that if we reject Snozzle we are
done for, and that if we fail to bring in Blunderbooze at the top of the
poll, we are unworthy of the dearest rights of Britons. Flaming placards
are rife on all the dead walls in the borough, public-houses hang out
banners, hackney-cabs burst into full-grown flowers of type, and
everybody is, or should be, in a paroxysm of anxiety.
At these momentous crises of the national fate, we are much assisted in
our deliberations by two eminent volunteers; one of whom subscribes
himself A Fellow Parishioner, the other, A Rate-Payer. Who they are, or
what they are, or where they are, nobody knows; but, whatever one
asserts, the other contradicts. They are both voluminous writers,
indicting more epistles than Lord Chesterfield in a single week; and the
greater part of their feelings are too big for utterance in anything less
than capital letters. They require the additional aid of whole rows of
notes of admiration, like balloons, to point their generous indignation;
and they sometimes communicate a crushing severity to stars. As thus: