“WHEN VULCAN FORGED,” &c.
“Bless my soul!” said Sir Peter Laurie, rushing into the Justice-room the morning the Exchequer Bill affair was discovered, and seizing Hobler by the button; “This is a dreadful business. Have you any idea, Hobler, who the delinquent is?” “Why really, Sir Peter, ’tis difficult to say; but from an inspection of the forged instruments I should say it was Smith’s work.” Sir Peter felt the importance of the suggestion, and rushed off to Sir Robert Peel to recommend the stoppage of all the forges in the kingdom.
PEEL’S PRE-EXISTENCE!
“Every man is not only himself,” says Sir THOMAS BROWNE; “there hath been many Diogenes, and as many Timons, though but few of that name. Men are lived over again. The world is now as it was in ages past: there was none then but there hath been some one since that parallels him, and, as it were, his revived self.” We are devout believers in the creed.
HERR VON TEUFELSKOPF was a High German doctor, of the first class. He had taken his diploma of Beelzebub in the Black Forest, and was gifted with as fine a hand to force a card—with as glib a tongue to harangue a mob at wakes and fairs, as any professor since the birth of the fourth grace of life,—swindling. He would talk until his head smoked of his list of miraculous cures—of his balsams, his anodynes, his elixirs; in the benevolence of his soul he would, to accommodate the pockets of the poor, sell a pennyworth of the philosopher’s stone; and, as a further illustration of his sympathy for suffering man or woman, give, even for a kreutzer, a mouthful of the Fountain of Youth. As a water-doctor, too, his Sagacity was inconceivable. A hundred years ago, he told to a fraction the amount of the national debt, from a single glance at the specimen sent him by JOHN BULL; and more, for five-and-twenty years predicted who would be the incoming Lord Mayor of London, from an inspection of a pint of water presented to him every season from Aldgate-pump. He could prophesy all the politics of the Court of Aldermen from a phial filled at Fleet-ditch; and could at any time—no trifling task—tell the amount of corruption in the House of Commons, by taking up a handful of water at Westminster-bridge. On his stolen visit to England—for the honour he has done our country has never been generally known—he calculated to a nicety how many puppies and kittens were annually drowned in the Thames, and how many suicides—particularising the sex and dress of each sufferer—were committed in the same period, from a bottlefull of Thames water brought to him wherewith to dilute his brandy at the Ship public house, Greenwich—a hostelry much frequented by Doctor TEUFELSKOPF. We have seen the calculation very beautifully illuminated on ass’s skin, and at this moment deposited in the college of Heligoland. It is not generally known that the Doctor died in this country; lustily predicting, however, that after a nap of a score or so of years he would return to this life in an entirely new character. The Doctor has kept his word. HERR VON TEUFELSKOPF, as Sir THOMAS BROWNE says, is “lived over again” in Sir ROBERT PEEL!
It is impossible to reflect upon the enlarged humanity of Sir ROBERT—for though, indeed, he is no other than the old German quack revived, we will not refuse to him his new name—toward the sufferers of Paisley, without feeling that the fine spirit of finesse which made the reputation of the student of the Black Forest has in no way suffered from its long sleep; but, on the contrary, has risen very much refreshed for new practice. The Doctor never compassed so fine a sleight as Sir ROBERT when lately, playing the philanthropist, he struck his breeches’ pocket with a spasm of benevolence, and pulled therefrom—fifty pounds! Only a few weeks before, Sir ROBERT had sworn by all his list of former cures, that he would clothe the naked and feed the hungry, if he were duly authorised and duly paid for such Christian-like solicitude. He is called in; he then prorogues Parliament to the tune of “Go to the devil and shake yourself,” and sits down in the easy chair of salary, and tries to think! Disturbed in his contemplations by the groans and screams of the famishing, he addresses the starving multitude from the windows of Downing-street, telling them he can do nothing for them in a large way, but—the fee he has received to cure them can afford as much—graciously throwing them fifty pounds from his private compassion! As a statesman he is powerless; but he has no objection to subscribe to the Mendicity Society.
It is an old hacknied abuse of NERO, that when Rome was in flame he accompanied the crackling of doors and rafters with his very best fiddle. We grant this showed a want of fine sympathy on the part of NERO; there was, nevertheless, a boldness, an exhibition of nerve, in such instrumentation. Any way, it leaves us with a higher respect for NERO than if he had been found playing on the burning Pantheon with a penny squirt. His mockery of the Romans, bad as it was, was not the mockery of compassion.