SELECT READING.
1. One enervating morning, just after the rise of the sun, a youth bearing the cognomen of Galileo glided into his gondola over the legendary waters of the lethean Thames. He was accompanied by his allies and coadjutors, the dolorous Pepys and the erudite Cholmondeley, the most combative aristocrat extant, and an epicurean who, for learned vagaries and revolting discrepancies of character, would take precedence of the most erudite of all Areopagite literati.
2. These sacrilegious dramatis personæ were discussing in detail a suggestive and exhaustive address, delivered from the proscenium box of the Calisthenic Lyceum by a notable financier on obligatory hydropathy, as accessory to the irrevocable and irreparable doctrine of evolution, which had been vehemently panegyrized by a splenetic professor of acoustics, and simultaneously denounced by a complaisant opponent as an undemonstrated romance of the last decade, amenable to no reasoning, however allopathic, outside of its own lamentable environs.
3. These peremptory tripartite brethren arrived at Greenwich, wishing to aggrandize themselves by indulging in exemplary relaxation, indicatory of implacable detestation of integral tergiversation and exoteric intrigue. They fraternized with a phrenological harlequin who was a connoisseur in mezzotint and falconry. The piquant person was heaping contumely and scathing raillery on an amateur in jugular recitative, who held that the Pharaohs of Asia were conversant with his theory that morphine and quinine were exorcists of bronchitis.
4. Meanwhile, the leisurely Augustine of Cockburn drank from a tortoise-shell wassail cup to the health of an apotheosized recusant, who was his supererogatory patron, and an assistant recognizance in the immobile nomenclature of interstitial molecular phonics. The contents of the vase proving soporific, a stolid plebeian took from its cerements a heraldic violoncello, and, assisted by a plethoric diocesan from Pall Mall, who performed on a sonorous piano-forte, proceeded to wake the clangorous echoes of the Empyrean. They bade the prolyx Caucasian gentlemen not to misconstrue their inexorable demands, while they dined on acclimated anchovies and apricot truffles, and had for dessert a wiseacre's pharmacopoeia. Thus the truculent Pythagoreans had a novel repast fit for the gods.
5. On the subsidence of the feast they alternated between soft languors and isolated scenes of squalor, which followed a mechanist's reconnaissance of the imagery of Uranus, the legend of whose incognito related to a poniard wound in the abdomen received while cutting a swath in the interests of telegraphy and posthumous photography. Meantime an unctuous orthoepist applied a homeopathic restorative to the retina of an objurgatory spaniel (named Daniel) and tried to perfect the construction of a behemoth which had got mired in pygmean slough, while listening to the elegiac soughing of the prehistoric wind.