Nay, is it not Portentous, Big with Signs, with its show Sunday, its Dances, its Encænia and what not?
Is it not a time when it is permitted to Man to wriggle out of the inextricable snares of the Fowler with his Attorney-logic, and the frothy effervescences of defunct and buried-in-dusty tomes Antiquity which are nomen-clated Lectures? And to be Oblivious of these Gehenna-Bailiffs emissaried by professors in Tailor-craft, Wine-craft, and the innumerable other crafts and mysteries ranking under the genus Productive Industry. Aye, and those gaily apparelled young ladies (Madchen) who confluctuate hither as to a Focus, or centre of Attraction, though they themselves are also an Attraction, which is an inextricable mystery of Involvedness; do not these too teach a lesson to the gawks, in whose heads is nothing but the Roots of their World restored Hair, and who imagine that the whole Furniture of that digesting mechanism, Man, is but a Lay-figure, gifted indeed, with struttableness and swagger, on which to hang their Peacock-plumes, fringes, cobwebs, and such.
And there is the Encænia too, with its Chaotic Hubbub of Tympanum-splitting Noise, Undergraduates Noise, Ticket admitted Noise, as it were a sort of Tenfold Bedlam smitten with Interjectional Rabies, of groanings and yelpings, Approbation, Depreciation, and the like.”
* * * * *
From The Shotover Papers. Oxford. 1874.
“The Irish Revolution, a history in three books.” By Thomas Snarlyle. Such is the title of a parody, to be found in The Puppet-Showman’s Album, published about 1848, which concludes with a sentence curiously appropriate to these times:—
“Ireland, Ireland, thy leaders are in jail. But be not a Rachel weeping for these children, be comforted!”
——:o:——
JOHN RUSKIN.