My campaign commenced at Birmingham; and my first attack was on a rigid
Calvinist, a tallow-chandler by trade. He was a tall dingy man, in whom
length was so predominant over breadth, that he might almost have been
borrowed for a foundery poker. O that face! a face kat’ emphasin! I
have it before me at this moment. The lank, black, twine-like hair,
pingui-nitescent, cut in a straight line along the black stubble of his
thin gunpowder eye-brows, that looked like a scorched after-math from a
last week’s shaving. His coat collar behind in perfect unison, both of
colour and lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage, which I suppose
he called his hair, and which with a bend inward at the nape of the
neck,--the only approach to flexure in his whole figure,--slunk in
behind his waistcoat; while the countenance lank, dark, very hard, and
with strong perpendicular furrows, gave me a dim notion of some one
looking at me through a used gridiron, all soot, grease, and iron! But
he was one of the thorough-bred, a true lover of liberty, and, as I was
informed, had proved to the satisfaction of many, that Mr. Pitt was one
of the horns of the second beast in THE REVELATIONS, that spake as a
dragon. A person, to whom one of my letters of recommendation had been
addressed, was my introducer. It was a new event in my life, my first
stroke in the new business I had undertaken of an author, yea, and of
an author trading on his own account. My companion after some imperfect
sentences and a multitude of hums and has abandoned the cause to his
client; and I commenced an harangue of half an hour to Phileleutheros,
the tallow-chandler, varying my notes, through the whole gamut of
eloquence, from the ratiocinative to the declamatory, and in the latter
from the pathetic to the indignant. I argued, I described, I promised, I
prophesied; and beginning with the captivity of nations I ended with the
near approach of the millennium, finishing the whole with some of my own
verses describing that glorious state out of the Religious Musings:
------Such delights
As float to earth, permitted visitants!
When in some hour of solemn jubilee
The massive gates of Paradise are thrown
Wide open, and forth come in fragments wild
Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies,
And odours snatched from beds of amaranth,
And they, that from the crystal river of life
Spring up on freshened wing, ambrosial gales!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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