Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, October 30, 1841 — John Shaqi
Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, October 30, 1841Various
General
Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, October 30, 1841
Various
English wit and humor -- Periodicals
Wisdom is to be purchased only of the tailor. Morality is synonymous with
millinery; whilst Truth herself--pictured by the poetry of the olden day
in angelic nakedness--must now be full-dressed, like a young lady at a
royal drawing-room, to be considered presentable. You may believe that a
man with a gash in his heart may still walk, talk, pay taxes, and perform
all the other duties of a highly civilised citizen; but to believe that
the same man with a hole in his coat can discourse like a reasoning
animal, is to be profoundly ignorant of those sympathetic subtleties
existing between a man's brain and a man's broad-cloth. Party politics
have developed this profound truth--the divine reason of the immortal
creature escapes through ragged raiment; a fractured skull is not so fatal
to the powers of ratiocination as a rent in the nether garments. GOD'S
image loses the divine lustre of its origin with its nap of super-Saxony.
The sinful lapse of ADAM has thrown all his unfortunate children upon the
mercies of the tailor; and that mortal shows least of the original stain
who wraps about it the richest purple and the finest linen. Hence, if you
would know the value of a man's heart, look at his waistcoat.
Philosophers and anatomists have quarrelled for centuries as to the
residence of the soul. Some have vowed that it lived here--some there;
some that, like a gentleman with several writs in pursuit of him, it
continually changed its lodgings; whilst others have lustily sworn that
the soul was a vagrant, with no claim to any place of settlement whatever.
Nevertheless, a vulgar notion has obtained that the soul dwelt on a little
knob of the brain; and that there, like a vainglorious bantam-cock on a
dunghill, it now claps its wings and crows all sorts of triumph--and now,
silent and scratching, it thinks of nought but wheat and barley. The first
step to knowledge is to confess to a late ignorance. We avow, then, our
late benighted condition. We were of the number of sciolists who lodged
the soul in the head of man: we are now convinced that the true dwelling
place of the soul is in the head's antipodes. Let SOLOMON himself return
to the earth, and hold forth at a political meeting; SOLOMON himself would
be hooted, laughed at, voted an ass, a nincompoop, if SOLOMON spoke from
the platform with a hole in his breeches!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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