When Challis saw, he couldn’t perceive it.”
〈WINKING STATUES.〉
The clever and eccentric member for East Surrey, the late Henry Drummond, who founded a professorship of Political Economy at Oxford, made in the House of Commons a most amusing, though rather strong speech against the modern miracles of the Roman Catholic Church, in which he spoke of “their bleeding pictures, their winking statues, and the Virgin’s milk.” On this some profane wag wrote the following couplet:—
“Sagacious Drummond, explain, with your divinity:
Why reject the milk, yet swallow the virginity?”
Probably some clever fellow of that faith was at the bottom of this mischief; for I have observed that the cleverest fellows seem to think that the merit of adhering to a cause entitles them to the right of quizzing it.
I was particularly struck with this idea when I saw, for the first time, at Cologne, the celebrated picture of St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins. The artist has quietly made every one of them more or less matronly.
CHAPTER XXVIII. HINTS FOR TRAVELLERS.
New Inventions — Stomach Pump — Built a Carriage — Description of Thames Tunnel — Barton’s Iridescent Buttons — Chinese Orders of Nobility — Manufactory of Gold Chains at Venice — Pulsations and Respirations of Animals — Punching a Hole in Glass without cracking it — Specimen of an Enormous Smash — Proteus Anguineus — Travellers’ Hotel at Sheffield — Wentworth House.
IN this chapter I propose to throw together a few suggestions, which may assist in rendering a tour successful for its objects and agreeable in its reminiscences.