Had we been inclined to superstition, what a supernatural treat had been the discourse of Mr. Merripall! His tales of “goblins damned” were terrible enough to have bristled up our hair till it lifted our very hats off our very heads. His reminiscences of resurrection men * were extensive and curious; he knew their “whereabouts” for ten miles round London.
* Two resurrection men stumbling over a fellow dead drunk in
the kennel, bagged, and bore him away to a certain
anatomist. The private bell gave a low tinkle, the side-door
down a dark court opened noiselessly, the sack was emptied
of its contents into the cellar, and the fee paid down. In
an hour or two after, the same ceremony (the subject being
really defunct) was repeated. The bell sounded a third time,
and the anatomical charnel-house received another inmate.
The tippler, having now slept off his liquor, began to grope
about, and finding all dark, and himself he knew not where,
bellowed lustily. This was just as the door was closing on
the resurrection men, who being asked what should be done
with the noisy fellow, answered coolly, “Keep him till you
want him!”
We mean not to insinuate that Mr. Merripall had any share in bringing his departed customers to light again. He was a virtuoso, and his cabinet comprised a choice collection of the veritable cords on which the most notorious criminals had made their transit from this world to the next. He was rich in mendacious caligraphy. Malefactors of liberal education obligingly favoured him with autograph confessions, and affectionate epistles full of penitence and piety; while the less learned condescendingly affixed their contrite crosses to any document that autographmania might suggest. The lion of his library was an illustrated copy of the Newgate Calendar, or New Drop Miscellany, and round his study its principal heroes hung—in frames! He boasted of having shaken by the hand—an honour of which Old Bailey amateurs are proudly emulous—all the successful candidates for the Debtors' Door for these last twenty years; and when Mr. Bosky declared that he had never saluted a dying felon with “My dear sir!” coveted his acquaintance, and craved his autograph, he sighed deeply for the Laureat's want of taste, grew pensive for about a second, and then, as if suddenly recollecting himself, exclaimed,
“Gentlemen, we are but a stone's throw from the Owl and Ivy Bush, where a society called 'The Blinkers' hold their nightly revels: it will well repay your curiosity to step in and take a peep at them. Their president has one eye permanently shut, and the other partially open; the vice has two open eyes, blinking 'like winkin' all the members are more or less somniferous; and though none of them are allowed to fall fast asleep at the club, it is contrary to etiquette to be wide awake. Their conversation is confined to monosyllables, their talk, like their tobacco, being short-cut. Their three cheers are three yawns; they sit round the table with their eyes shut, and their mouths open, the gape, or gap, being filled up with their pipes, from which rise clouds of smoke that make their red noses look like lighted lamps in a fog. To the Reverend Nehemiah Nosebags, their chaplain, I owe the honour of becoming a member; for happening to sit under his proboscis and pulpit, my jaws went through such a gaping exercise at his soporific word of command, that he proposed me as a highly promising probationer, and my election was carried amidst an unanimous chorus of yawns.”
“Here” exclaimed Mr. Bosky, “is the Owl and Ivy Bush.”
“No,” rejoined Mr. Merripall, “'tis the Three Jolly Trumpeters. On the opposite side of the way is the Owl and Ivy Bush.”
Mr. Bosky gazed at the sign, and then, with no small degree of wonderment, at Mr. Merripall. The Lauréat of Little Britain looked signs and wonders!
“I'll take my affidavit to the Owl!” raising his eye-glass to the solemn bird that winked wickedly beneath a newly-varnished cauliflower-wig of white paint; “and though the Ivy Bush looks much more like a birch broom, it looks still less like a Jolly Trumpeter.”
“Egad, you're right!” said the comical coffin-maker; “though, to my vision, it seems as if both houses had changed places since I last saw them.”
The contents of a brace of black bottles flowing under Mr. Merripall's satin waistcoat, and their fumes ascending to what lay within the circumference of his best beaver, might possibly account for this phenomenon.