Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, CompleteVarious
General
Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete
Various
English wit and humor -- Periodicals
Domestic, Foreign, Zoological, and Mythological Saloons, they most do
congregate. Once set your eyes upon them, once become acquainted with
their habits and manners, and then mistake them if you can. They are
themselves, alone: like the London dustmen, the Nemarket jockeys, the
peripatetic venders, or buyers of old clo, or the Albert
continuations at one pound one, they appear to be made to measure for
the same. We must now describe them (to speak theatrically) with
decorations, scenes, and properties! The entirely new dresses of a
theatre are like the habiliments of the professional singer, i.e.
neither one nor the other ever were entirely new, and never will be
allowed to grow entirely old. The double-milled Saxony of these worthies
is generally very blue or very brown; the cut whereof sets a man of a
contemplative turn of mind wondering at what precise date those tails
were worn, and vainly speculating on the probabilities of their being
fearfully indigestible, as that alone could to long have kept them from
Times remorseless maw. The collars are always velvet, and always
greasy. There is a slight ostentation manifested in the seams, the
stitches whereof are so apparent as to induce the beholders to believe
they must have been the handiwork of some cherished friend, whose
labours ought not to be entombed beneath the superstructure. The
buttons!oh, for a pen of steam to write upon those buttons! They,
indeed, are the aristocracythe yellow turbans, the sun, moon, and stars
of the woollen system! They have nothing in common with the coatthey
are on it, and thats allthey have no further communionthey decline
the button-holes, and eschew all right to labour for their livingthey
announce themselves as the last new fashionthey sparkle for a week,
retire to their silver paper, make way for the new comers, and, years
after, like the Sleeping Beauty, rush to life in all their pristine
splendour, and find (save in the treble-gilt aodication and their own
accession) the coat, the immortal coat, unchanged! The waistcoat is of a
material known only to themselvesa sort of nightmare illusion of
velvet, covered with a slight tracery of refined mortar, curiously
picked out and guarded with a nondescript collection of the very
greenest green pellets of hyson-bloom gunpowder tea. The buttons (things
of use in this garment) describe the figure and proportions of a large
turbot. They consist of two rows (leaving imagination to fill up a lapse
of the absent), commencing, to all appearance, at the small of the back,
and reaching down even to the hem of the garment, which is invariably a
double-breasted one, made upon the good old dining-out principle of
leaving plenty of room in the victualling department. To complete the
catalogue of raiment, the untalkaboutables have so little right to the
name of drab, that it would cause a controversy on the point. Perhaps
nothing in life can more exquisitely illustrate the Desdemona feeling of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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