Do you want a sensation of Miserable Melancholy?
Take, yourself——
Off to a dusty library of bookshelves, chiefly empty, and the remainder having an occasional medical treatise in the original Latin, with diagrams of the human frame, no fire, rain pouring, damp mist over the landscape, no pens, ink, or even paper to tear up into fanciful shapes, and nothing for company except busts of celebrated people, looking like the upper part of the ghosts of half-washed chimney-sweepers.
After a time, they only resemble one thing, a collection of several homicidal criminals.
Sit before a bust, any bust, under the above circumstances.
You wonder to what you would have condemned this hideous creature had he been brought up, in his lifetime, before you, as a magistrate.
On every feature is stamped Ruffian. This man must have been hung, were there any justice in the world.
No. This bust is of the late venerable and excellent Archbishop Snuffler.
Is it possible. And all these other savage-looking creatures? . . . “Are,” says my informant in the damp library who only comes in for a minute, “Archbishops, Bishops, celebrated Philanthropists, Doctors, and men of science.”
And here they are perched up aloft, like overgrown cherubs, whose wings have been taken off by some surgical operation.