"Who steals my purse steals stuff!— 'Twas mine—'tisn't his—nor nobody else's! But he who runs away with my Good Name, Robs me of what does not do him any good, And makes me deuced poor!!"[1]
In order utterly to squabash and demolish every gainsayer, I had thought, at one time, of asking my old and esteemed friend, Richard Lane, to crush them at once with his magic pencil, and to transmit my features to posterity, where all his works are sure to be "delivered according to the direction;" but somehow the noble-looking profiles which he has recently executed of the Kemble family put me a little out of conceit with my own, while the undisguised amusement which my "Mephistopheles Eyebrow," as he termed it, afforded him, in the "full face," induced me to lay aside the design. Besides, my dear Sir, since, as has well been observed, "there never was a married man yet who had not somebody remarkably like him walking about town," it is a thousand to one but my lineaments might, after all, out of sheer perverseness be ascribed to anybody rather than to the real owner. I have therefore sent you, instead thereof, a very fair sketch of Tappington, taken from the Folkestone road (I tore it last night out of Julia Simpkinson's album); get Gilks to make a woodcut of it. And now, if any miscreant (I use the word only in its primary and "Pickwickian" sense of "Unbeliever,") ventures to throw any further doubt upon the matter, why, as Jack Cade's friend says in the play, "There are the chimneys in my father's house, and the bricks are alive at this day to testify it!"
"Why, very well then—we hope here be truths!"
Heaven be with you, my dear Sir!—I was getting a little excited; but you, who are mild as the milk that dews the soft whisker of the new-weaned kitten, will forgive me when, wiping away the nascent moisture from my brow, I "pull in," and subscribe myself,
Yours quite as much as his own, THOMAS INGOLDSBY. Tappington Everard, Feb. 2nd, 1843
FOOTNOTES:
[1]A reading which seems most unaccountably to have escaped the researches of all modern Shakspearians, including the rival editors of the new and illustrated versions.