To get into this Vestry in the eminent capacity of Vestryman, gigantic
efforts are made, and Herculean exertions used. It is made manifest to
the dullest capacity at every election, that if we reject Snozzle we are
done for, and that if we fail to bring in Blunderbooze at the top of the
poll, we are unworthy of the dearest rights of Britons. Flaming placards
are rife on all the dead walls in the borough, public-houses hang out
banners, hackney-cabs burst into full-grown flowers of type, and
everybody is, or should be, in a paroxysm of anxiety.
At these momentous crises of the national fate, we are much assisted in
our deliberations by two eminent volunteers; one of whom subscribes
himself A Fellow Parishioner, the other, A Rate-Payer. Who they are, or
what they are, or where they are, nobody knows; but, whatever one
asserts, the other contradicts. They are both voluminous writers,
indicting more epistles than Lord Chesterfield in a single week; and the
greater part of their feelings are too big for utterance in anything less
than capital letters. They require the additional aid of whole rows of
notes of admiration, like balloons, to point their generous indignation;
and they sometimes communicate a crushing severity to stars. As thus:
MEN OF MOONEYMOUNT.
Is it, or is it not, a * * * to saddle the parish with a debt of
£2,745 6_s._ 9_d._, yet claim to be a RIGID ECONOMIST?
Is it, or is it not, a * * * to state as a fact what is proved to be
_both a moral and a_ PHYSICAL IMPOSSIBILITY?
Is it, or is it not, a * * * to call £2,745 6_s._ 9_d._ nothing; and
nothing, something?
Do you, or do you _not_ want a * * * TO REPRESENT YOU IN THE VESTRY?
Your consideration of these questions is recommended to you by
A FELLOW PARISHIONER.
It was to this important public document that one of our first orators,
MR. MAGG (of Little Winkling Street), adverted, when he opened the great
debate of the fourteenth of November by saying, ‘Sir, I hold in my hand
an anonymous slander’—and when the interruption, with which he was at
that point assailed by the opposite faction, gave rise to that memorable
discussion on a point of order which will ever be remembered with
interest by constitutional assemblies. In the animated debate to which
we refer, no fewer than thirty-seven gentlemen, many of them of great
eminence, including MR. WIGSBY (of Chumbledon Square), were seen upon
their legs at one time; and it was on the same great occasion that
DOGGINSON—regarded in our Vestry as ‘a regular John Bull:’ we believe, in
consequence of his having always made up his mind on every subject
without knowing anything about it—informed another gentleman of similar
principles on the opposite side, that if he ‘cheek’d him,’ he would
resort to the extreme measure of knocking his blessed head off.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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