Lord Brougham and Dr. Reid.
“I don’t want explanation, I want air”—Brougham on Ventilation, Vide Times. “Lord Brougham has expressed a very natural repugnance to be treated like an animal, shut up for the purpose of having ventilating experiments tried upon him. Such, however, is the fate of all Members of Parliament who are subjected to the horrors of Dr. Reid’s process. We can fancy the agonies of the Ex-Chancellor, imprisoned in an exhausted receiver, like one of those little figures we have seen ascending and descending in a glass tube, according as the air was let in upon or withdrawn from them. Brougham’s rencontre with Reid would be well worthy of a poetical celebration, in a strain somewhat similar to the following:—
We met, ’twas in the House,
And I hoped he would shun me;
He came, I could not breathe,
For his tube was upon me.
He puff’d, the air was cold,
The thermometer alter’d:
I knew ’twas freezing point,