Tiddypot then touched their hats to one another across
the Vestry, a great many times, and it is thought that these proceedings
(reported to the extent of several columns in next Sunday’s paper) will
bring them in as church-wardens next year.
All this was strictly after the pattern of the real original, and so are
the whole of our Vestry’s proceedings. In all their debates, they are
laudably imitative of the windy and wordy slang of the real original, and
of nothing that is better in it. They have head-strong party
animosities, without any reference to the merits of questions; they tack
a surprising amount of debate to a very little business; they set more
store by forms than they do by substances:—all very like the real
original! It has been doubted in our borough, whether our Vestry is of
any utility; but our own conclusion is, that it is of the use to the
Borough that a diminishing mirror is to a painter, as enabling it to
perceive in a small focus of absurdity all the surface defects of the
real original.
OUR BORE
IT is unnecessary to say that we keep a bore. Everybody does. But, the
bore whom we have the pleasure and honour of enumerating among our
particular friends, is such a generic bore, and has so many traits (as it
appears to us) in common with the great bore family, that we are tempted
to make him the subject of the present notes. May he be generally
accepted!
Our bore is admitted on all hands to be a good-hearted man. He may put
fifty people out of temper, but he keeps his own. He preserves a sickly
solid smile upon his face, when other faces are ruffled by the perfection
he has attained in his art, and has an equable voice which never travels
out of one key or rises above one pitch. His manner is a manner of
tranquil interest. None of his opinions are startling. Among his
deepest-rooted convictions, it may be mentioned that he considers the air
of England damp, and holds that our lively neighbours—he always calls the
French our lively neighbours—have the advantage of us in that particular.
Nevertheless he is unable to forget that John Bull is John Bull all the
world over, and that England with all her faults is England still.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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