Your Committee were greatly delighted by a series of portraits of a tribe of individuals, carrying flagelli, or whips, and whose noses were made the subject of a very learned paper by your president. The extreme redness of the point was formerly supposed to arise from drinking brandy; but your president having taken several successive draughts of that spirit, without any peculiar redness in the nose becoming immediately obvious, was prevented by exhaustion, ending in utter prostration, from continuing his very ingenious and interesting experiment. It is believed, by your Committee, that the redness of nose, which was characteristic of the old auriga, or coach-driver, arose from a constant habit of blushing, which the peculiar modesty of the race, as it is found alluded to in reports of police cases in past ages, would account for easily.
But the great attraction to your Committee consisted in the two celebrated figures of antiquity, known to the public as the Whig and Tory, by whom, according to old writers, this country was torn for a considerable period. Your committee congratulate themselves that they do not live in those shocking times, when, according to contemporary writers, the Whigs ruined the British Constitution four times in six years, and the Tories gave, in the same period, eleven death-blows to public liberty. How the Constitution ever was restored to health, or how liberty was brought to life, has greatly puzzled your Committee; but they have at last discovered that there were, in those days certains pills which eradicated everything; and, as mention is made in old books of various pillars of the state, your Committee have no hesitation in attributing the wondrous cures to the means alluded to.
Your Committee had almost forgotten to mention a very curious old machine, called a drop; and, taken in connexion with the black-letter phrase of "a drop too much," there can be no doubt that the drop now in the Museum was that which is constantly spoken of as "too much," by the old chroniclers.
The remains of a gibbet also gave rise to a curious discussion in one of the sections, and your Committee at last decided that the instrument was used by a hanging committee attached to a society of painters, who, under the pretext of executing justice, were in the habit of resorting to all sorts of cruelty.
The Association were likewise favoured with the perusal of a very scarce old volume, mysteriously labelled, "A tax-gatherer's Book;" from which your Committee are led to infer, that there were formerly a class of marauders who traversed the kingdom, going from door to door, and exacting sums of money from the inhabitants. To show the frivolous pretexts that sufficed for these plunderers to carry on their system of rapine, your Committee have only to observe that a demand was made on account of light and air, which were actually in those days paid for by the people in the form of what was called a window-tax.
Your Committee having concluded their inspection of the British Museum, returned into the open air; and a shower of rain coming on, they had an opportunity of making a series of observations on the effect which moisture produces upon the skin, and the power of the animal caloric, in the human foot, to resist for a time the chill ultimately engendered by walking into puddles.
THE BOUNDARY QUESTION.
The parlours of a house in Pleasant Row
Were occupied by Mrs. Snow;
The first-floor front and back