Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 1Wilson, John
General
Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 1
Wilson, John
Essays
But, alas! for the Odontist! He, the "_Deliciæ generis Humani_," is
dead. The best of all the Bishops of Bristol is no more. Mansel had not
a tithe of his wit--nor Kaye a tithe of his wisdom. And can it be that
we have not yet edited "His Remains!" "Alas! poor Yorick!" If Hamlet
could smile even with the skull of the Jester in his hands, whom when a
princely boy he had loved, hanging on his neck many a thousand times,
why may not we, in our mind's eye seeing that mirthful face "quite
chap-fallen," and hearing as if dismally deadened by the dust, the voice
that "so often set our table on a roar!" Dr Parr's wig, too, is all out
of frizzle; a heavier shot has dishevelled its horsehair than ever was
sent from the Shepherd's gun; no more shall it be mistaken for owl
a-blink on the mid-day bough, or ptarmigan basking in the sun high up
among the regions of the snow. It has vanished, with other lost things,
to the Moon; and its image alone remains for the next edition of the
celebrated treatise "_De Rebus Deperditis_," a suitable and a welcome
frontispiece, transferred thither by the engraver's cunning from the
first of those Eight Tomes that might make the Trone tremble, laid on
the shoulders of Atlas who threatens to put down the Globe, by the least
judicious and the most unmerciful of editors that ever imposed upon the
light living the heavy dead--John Johnson, late of Birmingham, Fellow of
the Royal Society, and of the Royal College of Physicians, whose
practice is duller than that of all Death's doctors, and his
prescriptions in that preface unchristianly severe. ODoherty, likewise,
has been gathered to his fathers. The Standard-bearer has lowered his
colours before the foe who alone is invincible. The Ensign, let us not
fear, has been advanced to a company without purchase, in the
Celestials; the Adjutant has got a Staff appointment. Tims was lately
rumoured to be in a galloping consumption; but the very terms of the
report, about one so sedentary, were sufficient to give it the lie.
Though puny, he is far from being unwell; and still engaged in polishing
tea-spoons and other plated articles, at a rate cheaper than travelling
gypsies do horn. Prince Leopold is now King of the Belgians--but we must
put an end in the Tent to that portentous snore.
"Arise, awake, or be for ever fallen!"
Ho--ho! gentlemen--so you have had the precaution to sleep in your
clothes. The sun, like Maga, is mounting higher and higher in heaven; so
let us, we beseech you, to breakfast, and then off to the Moors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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