[76]: Which was so altered in appearance after his death by innumerable wounds, that they masked it as effectually us the iron one had done.
[77]: There is a kind of sea-bird which sleeps on the wing, or floats up and down; and the motion of the sea is often what awakes it.
[78]: This vetch has some of its flowers and fruit above ground, but most of them under it; though the latter are white.—Linnæus.
[79]: At page 163 of the ‘Pocket-Book for Watering Places, and Visitors to them,’ it is stated that while the ladies are lying bolted into their baths, young gentlemen sit on the covers and entertain them while they are under water. Against which arrangement Reason certainly can urge no valid objection, for the wood of the baths is quite as thick as silk; and when all is said, Everybody is, if covered at all, always in some covering inside of which he or she is altogether devoid of covering—though perhaps Fancy, and Imagination may urge this objection, that a bed-quilt a quarter of a yard thick would not be quite so becoming, or close-fitting a ball-dress as a gauze. If once the Innocence of the imagination be offended, there is no other to spare; the senses cut neither be innocent nor the contrary.
[80]: The white-flowering sort would weep—the red-flowering sort would storm, as the pale moon indicates rainy weather, and the red moon high wind. (Pallida luna pluit, rubicunda fiat.)
[81]: In the neighbourhood of Comorn (Windisch’s ‘Geography of Hungary’). Buchan mentions a similar twin-birth in Scotland.
[82]: There was a superstition that the Headsman’s sword moved, of itself, before cutting off somebody’s head.
[83]: Who distinguished himself by painting thistles as much as Swift by writing them.
[84]: There is nothing more unreasonable, uncontrollable, and inexplicable, than this feeling of repugnance to the unclean—this inconsistent alliance between the will and the coats of the stomach. Cicero says, “the modest do not willingly use the word ‘modesty’” (a transcendental form of disgust with the impure)—and those who feel the repugnance in question deal with it in a similar manner, particularly as bodily and moral purity are neighbours (which the chaste and cleanly Swift exemplified in his own person). Even physical loathing (of which the subject-matter is mental, more than physical), affects the moral sense more than is supposed. Cross the street with undigested food, or antimonial wine, in your stomach, and you will feel a stronger distaste to a score of faces (and for more books when you come home) than at ordinary times.
[85]: A beggar in England who keeps a shop full of crutches, eye-plaster, false legs, &c., which every one who wants to be lame, blind, &c., must be supplied with. ‘Britt. Annal.’