“Some people are not to be persuaded to taste of any creatures they have daily seen and been acquainted with whilst they were alive.... In this behaviour, methinks there appears something like a consciousness of guilt; it looks as if they endeavoured to save themselves from the imputation of a crime (which they know sticks somewhere) by removing the cause of it as far as they can from themselves.”—Mandeville.
Aristides Tinfoil, it is our fixed belief, was intended by nature either for lawn sleeves or ermined robes; he was, we doubt it not, sent into this world an embryo bishop, or a lord-chief-justice in posse. Such, we are convinced, was the benignant purpose of nature; but the cruel despotism of worldly circumstance relentlessly crossed the fair design; and Tinfoil, with a heart of honey and a head of iron, was only a player—or, we should rather say, a master among players. Tinfoil might have preached charity-sermons till tears should have overflowed the pews; no matter, he acted the benevolent old men to the sobs and spasms of a crowded audience: he might, with singular efficacy, have passed sentence of death on coiners and sheep-stealers; circumstances, however, confined his mild reproofs to scene-shifters, bill-stickers, Cupids at one shilling per night, and white muslin Graces.
“Where is Mr Moriturus?” asked Tinfoil, chagrined at the untoward absence of his retainer. “Where is he?”
“Ill, Sir,” was the melancholy answer, “very ill.”
“Ill!” exclaimed Tinfoil, in a tone of anger, quickly subsiding into mild remonstrance. “Ill!—why—why doesn’t the good man die at once?”
A pretty budding girl had, unhappily, listened to the silvery tongue of a rival manager. “Take her from the villain!” exclaimed Tinfoil to the sorrowing parent; “bring her here, and then—then I’ll tell you what I’ll do.”
“Dear, kind Mr Tinfoil, what will you do!”
“I’ll bring her out, Sir—bring her out in—” and here the manager named a play in which the horrors of seduction are painted in bold colours for the indignant virtuous. “I’ll bring her out in that, Sir, as a particular favour to you, and sympathising as I must with the affliction you suffer, I—I myself will play the injured father, Sir.”
These, however, are but faint lines in the strongly-marked character of Tinfoil, and merely displaying them to awaken the attention of the reader to what we consider a most triumphant piece of casuistry on the part of our hero—to an incident which admits of so many hundred worldly illustrations—we shall proceed to the pig. The subject, we own, may appear unpromising from its extreme homeliness; yet, as the precious bezoar is sought for in deer and goats, so may a pearl of price be found even in a pig.
It is our fervent wish to be most exact in every point of this little history; yet cannot we remember the exact year in which Tinfoil, revolving in his managerial mind the very many experiments made under his government on the curiosity and sensibilities of the public, determined in a golden moment, upon the introduction of a pig, in a drama to be expressly written for the animal’s capacities. In the slang of the craft, the pig was to be measured for his part.