Melincourt : $b or, Sir Oran Haut-TonPeacock, Thomas Love
General
Melincourt : $b or, Sir Oran Haut-Ton
Peacock, Thomas Love
English fiction -- 19th century; Orangutans -- Fiction; Satire
‘There is not any burden that some would gladlier post off to
another than the charge and care of their religion. There be of
Protestants and professors who live and die in as arrant and
implicit faith as any lay Papist of Loretto. A wealthy man, addicted
to his pleasure and to his profits, finds religion to be a traffic
so entangled and of so many peddling accounts, that, of all
mysteries, he cannot skill to keep a stock going upon that trade.
What should he do? Fain would he have the name to be religious: fain
would he bear up with his neighbours in that. What does he,
therefore, but resolves to give over toiling, and to find himself
out some factor, to whose care and credit he may commit the whole
management of his religious affairs; some divine of note and
estimation that must be. To him he adheres, resigns the whole
warehouse of his religion, with all the locks and keys, into his
custody, and, indeed, makes the very person of that man his
religion, esteems his associating with him a sufficient evidence and
commendatory of his own piety. So that a man may say, his religion
is now no more within himself, but is become a dividual movable, and
goes and comes near him according as that good man frequents the
house. He entertains him, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him:
his religion comes home at night, prays, is liberally supped, and
sumptuously laid to sleep, rises, is saluted, and after the malmsey,
or some well-spiced brewage, and better breakfasted than he whose
morning appetite would have gladly fed on green figs between Bethany
and Jerusalem, his religion walks abroad at eight, and leaves his
kind entertainer in the shop, trading all day without his
religion.’—MILTON’S _Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing_.
Footnote 8:
‘I think I have established his humanity by proof that ought to
satisfy every one who gives credit to human testimony.’—_Ancient
Metaphysics_, vol. iii. p. 40.
‘I have brought myself to a perfect conviction that the oran outang is
a human creature as much as any of us.’—_Ibid._
‘Nihil humani ei deesse diceres praeter loquelam.’—BONTIUS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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