True, the ancient Romans knew me as the Old Pretendress, but let that pass. What I want to know is this. Will nothing check the energy of the L. C. C.?—nothing allay their fever for expurgation? I am not a Promenader. I only ask to lie still. Nor a Living Picture either, and have not been for more than eighteen centuries. Talk of Roman noses! Why their eagle was a chicken compared with the London Carrion Crows! Such a power of scent!
It is Guy Fawkes day, and I hear talk of blowing up the Lords. But surely one must draw the line somewhere this side of an insidious exhumation of the Monarchy!
After all, if they do get at my bones, the real marrow of me has transmigrated into the New Woman. Sir, there were New Women in my day. We invented everything. I see the Daily Telegraph says they have found a pellet. That reminds me that after the death of my late husband, Prasutagus, King of the Iceni (not to be confused with the Plioceni of about the same period), I was subjected to the most revolting barbarity at the hands of the Veterans (their name was legionary), and I was obliged to invent a pellet-proof corset.
Then, again, we held all the commissions in the army. How does Tacitus report my famous speech to the Queen Consort's Own Regiment of Pioneers (new style)? "Vincendum illa acie vel cadendum esse. Id mulieri destinatum. Viverent viri et servirent." Let the men live on in slavery! What a prophetic utterance!
By the way, not many Emancipated Women of the present day could speak better Latin than that. Indeed, we took all the University degrees. I myself was an honorary felo de se.
Don't tell me that I am prehistoric, and that Tacitus was a forger of the fourteenth century. No testimony is sacred now-a-days, not even the most profane!
I conclude with a passage from Madame Sarah Gray, which I think comes in rather well.
Beneath this storied hump there lies concealed
A heart once pregnant with a Righteous Plan,
Hands that the rod of Empire used to wield,
And whacked to ecstasy the human Man.
Dear Mr. Punch, may you live for ever; or, failing that, may no rude spoiler mar your "animated bust." Excuse these disjointed remarks, but I am writing in a barrow.
Yours, in the spirit,