Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, CompleteVarious
General
Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete
Various
English wit and humor -- Periodicals
My friend Tom is a fine specimen of the genus. He is about fifteen hands
high, rising thirty, herring-bowelled, small head, large ears, close
mane, broad chest, and legs à la parentheses ( ). His dress is a long
brown-holland jacket, covering the protuberance known in Bavaria by the
name of pudo, and in England by that of bustle. His breeches are of cord
about an inch in width, and of such capacious dimensions, that a truss
of hay, or a quarter of oats, might be stowed away in them with perfect
convenience: not that we mean to insinuate they are ever thus employed,
for when we have seen them, they have been in a collapsed state, hanging
(like the skin of an elephant) in graceful festoons about the mid-person
of the wearer. These necessaries are confined at the knee by a
transverse row of pearl buttons crossing the genu patella. The pars
pendula is about twelve inches wide, and supplies, during conversation
or rumination, a resting-place for the thumbs or little fingers. His
legs are encased either in white ribbed cotton stockings, or that
peculiar kind of gaiter yclept kicksies. His feet know only one pattern
shoe, the ancle-jack (or highlow as it is sometimes called), resplendent
with Day and Martin, or the no less brilliant Warren. Genius of
propriety, we have described his tail before that index of the mind,
that idol of phrenologists, his pimple!we beg pardon, we mean his head.
Round, and rosy as a pippin, it stands alone in its native loveliness,
on the heap of clothes beneath.
Tom is not a low man; he has not a particle of costermongerism in his
composition, though his discourse savours of that peculiar slang that
might be considered rather objectionable in the salons of the élite.
The bell which he has the honour to answer hangs at the gate of a west-
end livery-stables, and his consequence is proportionate. To none under
the degree of a groom does he condescend a nod of recognitionwith a
second coachman he drinks porterand purl (a compound of beer and blue
ruin) with the more respectable individual who occupies the hammer-cloth
on court-days. Tom estimates a man according to his horse, and his
civility is regulated according to his estimation. He pockets a gratuity
with as much ease as a state pensioner; but if some unhappy wight
should, in the plenitude of his ignorance, proffer a sixpence, Tom
buttons his pockets with a smile, and politely begs to leave it till it
becomes more.
With an old meerschaum and a pint of tolerable sherry, we seat ourselves
at our window, and hold many an imaginative conversation with our friend
Tom. Sometimes we are blest with more than ideality; but that is only
when he unbends and becomes jocular and noisy, or chooses a snug corner
opposite our window to enjoy his otiumconfound that phrase!we would
say his indolence and swagger
A pound to a hay-seed agin the bay.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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