Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, November 6, 1841,Various
General
Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, November 6, 1841,
Various
English wit and humor -- Periodicals
"Bless my soul!" said Sir Peter Laurie, rushing into the Justice-room the
morning the Exchequer Bill affair was discovered, and seizing Hobler by
the button; "This is a dreadful business. Have you any idea, Hobler, who
the delinquent is?" "Why really, Sir Peter, 'tis difficult to say; but
from an inspection of the _forged_ instruments I should say it was
_Smith's work_." Sir Peter felt the importance of the suggestion, and
rushed off to Sir Robert Peel to recommend the stoppage of all the forges
in the kingdom.
* * * * *
PEEL'S PRE-EXISTENCE!
"Every man is not only himself," says Sir THOMAS BROWNE; "there hath been
many Diogenes, and as many Timons, though but few of that name. _Men are
lived over again_. The world is now as it was in ages past: there was none
then but there hath been some one since that parallels him, and, as it
were, _his revived self_." We are devout believers in the creed.
HERR VON TEUFELSKOPF was a High German doctor, of the first class. He had
taken his diploma of Beelzebub in the Black Forest, and was gifted with as
fine a hand to force a card--with as glib a tongue to harangue a mob at
wakes and fairs, as any professor since the birth of the fourth grace of
life,--swindling. He would talk until his head smoked of his list of
miraculous cures--of his balsams, his anodynes, his elixirs; in the
benevolence of his soul he would, to accommodate the pockets of the poor,
sell a pennyworth of the philosopher's stone; and, as a further
illustration of his sympathy for suffering man or woman, give, even for a
kreutzer, a mouthful of the Fountain of Youth. As a water-doctor, too, his
Sagacity was inconceivable. A hundred years ago, he told to a fraction
the amount of the national debt, from a single glance at the specimen sent
him by JOHN BULL; and more, for five-and-twenty years predicted who would
be the incoming Lord Mayor of London, from an inspection of a pint of
water presented to him every season from Aldgate-pump. He could prophesy
all the politics of the Court of Aldermen from a phial filled at
Fleet-ditch; and could at any time--no trifling task--tell the amount of
corruption in the House of Commons, by taking up a handful of water at
Westminster-bridge. On his stolen visit to England--for the honour he has
done our country has never been generally known--he calculated to a nicety
how many puppies and kittens were annually drowned in the Thames, and how
many suicides--particularising the sex and dress of each sufferer--were
committed in the same period, from a bottlefull of Thames water brought to
him wherewith to dilute his brandy at the Ship public house, Greenwich--a
hostelry much frequented by Doctor TEUFELSKOPF. We have seen the
calculation very beautifully illuminated on ass's skin, and at this moment
deposited in the college of Heligoland. It is not generally known that the
Doctor died in this country; lustily predicting, however, that after a nap
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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