V. A fragment to illustrate the probable advantage of sulphurous air, and articles, in the country.
I did not think to tell you, when speaking of the fatality of broken limbs in our little dressmaker and her family, that when in St. Thomas’s Hospital with a broken thigh, the doctors said in all probability the tenderness of her bones was owing to the manufacture of sulphur by her mother’s grandfather. Dr. Simon knows her family through operating on the brother of our dressmaker, and often gave them kindly words at the hospital.
I am, dear Sir,
Yours faithfully.
[[41]]
[1] See first article in Notes. [↑]
[2] Inferno, III. 60. I fear that few modern readers of Dante understand the dreadful meaning of this hellish outer district, or suburb, full of the refuse or worthless scum of Humanity—such numbers that “non haverei creduto, che morte tanta n’ havesse disfatta,”—who are stung to bloody torture by insects, and whose blood and tears together—the best that human souls can give—are sucked up, on the hell-ground, by worms. [↑]
[4] I leave this passage as it was written: though as it passes through the press, it is ordered by Atropos that I should hear a piece of evidence on this matter no less clear as to the present ministry of such powers as that which led Peter out of prison, than all the former, or nearly all, former evidence examined by me was of the presence of the legion which ruled among the Tombs of Gennesaret. [↑]
[5] See second article in Notes. [↑]
[6] Quoted in last Fors, p. 341, lines 18–22, from ‘Contemporary Review.’ Observe that it is blasphemy, definitively and calmly uttered, first against Nature, and secondly against Christ. [↑]