What can I say against William Butcher, about places? Look at the Home
Secretary, the Attorney-General, the Patent Office, the Engrossing Clerk,
the Lord Chancellor, the Privy Seal, the Clerk of the Patents, the Lord
Chancellor’s Purse-bearer, the Clerk of the Hanaper, the Deputy Clerk of
the Hanaper, the Deputy Sealer, and the Deputy Chaff-wax. No man in
England could get a Patent for an Indian-rubber band, or an iron-hoop,
without feeing all of them. Some of them, over and over again. I went
through thirty-five stages. I began with the Queen upon the Throne. I
ended with the Deputy Chaff-wax. Note. I should like to see the Deputy
Chaff-wax. Is it a man, or what is it?
What I had to tell, I have told. I have wrote it down. I hope it’s
plain. Not so much in the handwriting (though nothing to boast of
there), as in the sense of it. I will now conclude with Thomas Joy.
Thomas said to me, when we parted, ‘John, if the laws of this country
were as honest as they ought to be, you would have come to
London—registered an exact description and drawing of your invention—paid
half-a-crown or so for doing of it—and therein and thereby have got your
Patent.’
My opinion is the same as Thomas Joy. Further. In William Butcher’s
delivering ‘that the whole gang of Hanapers and Chaff-waxes must be done
away with, and that England has been chaffed and waxed sufficient,’ I
agree.
THE NOBLE SAVAGE
TO come to the point at once, I beg to say that I have not the least
belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a prodigious nuisance, and an
enormous superstition. His calling rum fire-water, and me a pale face,
wholly fail to reconcile me to him. I don’t care what he calls me. I
call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be
civilised off the face of the earth. I think a mere gent (which I take
to be the lowest form of civilisation) better than a howling, whistling,
clucking, stamping, jumping, tearing savage. It is all one to me,
whether he sticks a fish-bone through his visage, or bits of trees
through the lobes of his ears, or bird’s feathers in his head; whether he
flattens his hair between two boards, or spreads his nose over the
breadth of his face, or drags his lower lip down by great weights, or
blackens his teeth, or knocks them out, or paints one cheek red and the
other blue, or tattoos himself, or oils himself, or rubs his body with
fat, or crimps it with knives. Yielding to whichsoever of these
agreeable eccentricities, he is a savage—cruel, false, thievish,
murderous; addicted more or less to grease, entrails, and beastly
customs; a wild animal with the questionable gift of boasting; a
conceited, tiresome, bloodthirsty, monotonous humbug.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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