Vulgar words in Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 (Page 1)
This book at a glance
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~ ~ ~ Sentence 1,577 ~ ~ ~
Let him call a horse an animal, if he chooses--or an ass--or a cow--but not an eagle--as he loves us, not an eagle; let him call it a bird--the Bird of Jove--the Queen or King of the Sky--or anything else he chooses--but not an animal--no--no--no--not an animal, as he hopes to prosper, to be praised in Maga, embalmed and immortalised.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 1,966 ~ ~ ~
The Moping Owl, indeed!--the Boding Owl, forsooth!--the Melancholy Owl, you blockhead!--why, they are the most cheerful--joy-portending--and exulting of God's creatures!
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,434 ~ ~ ~
This, Doctor, is manifestly what you are ettling at--but you must clap your hand, Doctor, without discrimination, on the great body of the rural population of England, male and female, and take whatever comes first--be it a poor, wrinkled, toothless, blear-eyed, palsied hag, tottering horizontally on a staff, under the load of a premature old age (for she is not yet fifty), brought on by annual rheumatism and perennial poverty;--Be it a young, ugly, unmarried woman, far advanced in pregnancy, and sullenly trooping to the alehouse, to meet the overseer of the parish poor, who, enraged with the unborn bastard, is about to force the parish bully to marry the parish prostitute;--Be it a landlord of a rural inn, with pig eyes peering over his ruby cheeks, the whole machinery of his mouth so deranged by tippling that he simultaneously snorts, stutters, slavers and snores--pot-bellied--shanked like a spindle-strae--and bidding fair to be buried on or before Saturday week;--Be it a half-drunk horse-cowper, swinging to and fro in a wraprascal on a bit of broken-down blood that once won a fifty, every sentence, however short, having but two intelligible words, an oath and a lie--his heart rotten with falsehood, and his bowels burned up with brandy, so that sudden death may pull him from his saddle before he put spurs to his sporting filly that she may bilk the turnpike man, and carry him more speedily home to beat or murder his poor, pale, industrious char-woman of a wife;--Be it--not a beggar, for beggars are prohibited from this parish--but a pauper in the sulks, dying on her pittance from the poor-rates, which altogether amount in merry England but to about the paltry sum of, more or less, six millions a-year--her son, all the while, being in a thriving way as a general merchant in the capital of the parish, and with clear profits from his business of £300 per annum, yet suffering the mother that bore him, and suckled him, and washed his childish hands, and combed the bumpkin's hair, and gave him Epsoms in a cup when her dear Johnny-raw had the belly-ache, to go down, step by step, as surely and as obviously as one is seen going down a stair with a feeble hold of the banisters, and stumbling every foot-fall down that other flight of steps that consist of flags that are mortal damp and mortal cold, and lead to nothing but a parcel of rotten planks, and overhead a vault dripping with perpetual moisture, green and slobbery, such as toads delight in crawling heavily through with now and then a bloated leap, and hideous things more worm-like, that go wriggling briskly in and out among the refuse of the coffins, and are heard, by imagination at least, to emit faint angry sounds, because the light of day has hurt their eyes, and the air from the upper world weakened the rank savoury smell of corruption, clothing, as with a pall, all the inside walls of the tombs;--Be it a man yet in the prime of life as to years, six feet and an inch high, and measuring round the chest forty-eight inches (which is more, reader, than thou dost by six, we bet a sovereign, member although thou even be'st of the Edinburgh Six Feet Club), to whom Washington Irving's Jack Tibbuts was but a Tims--but then ever so many gamekeepers met him all alone in my lord's pheasant preserve, and though two of them died within the month, two within the year, and two are now in the workhouse--one a mere idiot, and the other a madman--both shadows--so terribly were their bodies mauled, and so sorely were their skulls fractured;--yet the poacher was taken, tried, hulked; and there he sits now, sunning himself on a bank by the edge of the wood whose haunts he must thread no more--for the keepers were grim bone-breakers enough in their way--and when they had gotten him on his back, one gouged him like a Yankee, and the other bit off his nose like a Bolton Trotter--and one smashed his _os frontis_ with the nailed heel of a two-pound wooden clog, a Preston Purrer;--so that Master Allonby is now far from being a beauty, with a face of that description attached to a head wagging from side to side under a powerful palsy, while the Mandarin drinks damnation to the Lord of the Manor in a horn of eleemosynary ale, handed to him by the village blacksmith, in days of old not the worst of the gang, and who, but for a stupid jury, a merciful judge, and something like prevarication in the circumstantial evidence, would have been hanged for a murderer--as he was--dissected, and hung in chains;--Be it a red-haired woman, with a pug nose, small fiery eyes, high cheekbones, bulging lips, and teeth like swine-tusks,--bearded--flat-breasted as a man--tall, scambling in her gait, but swift, and full of wild motions in her weather-withered arms, all starting with sinews like whipcord--the Pedestrian Post to and fro the market town twelve miles off--and so powerful a pugilist that she hit Grace Maddox senseless in seven minutes--tried before she was eighteen for child-murder, but not hanged, although the man-child, of which the drab was self-delivered in a ditch, was found with blue finger-marks on its windpipe, bloody mouth, and eyes forced out of their sockets, buried in the dunghill behind her father's hut--not hanged, because a surgeon, originally bred a sow-gelder, swore that he believed the mother had unconsciously destroyed her offspring in the throes of travail, if indeed it had ever breathed, for the lungs would not swim, he swore, in a basin of water--so the incestuous murderess was let loose; her brother got hanged in due time after the mutiny at the Nore--and her father, the fishmonger--why, he went red raving mad as if a dog had bitten him--and died, as the same surgeon and sow-gelder averred, of the hydrophobia, foaming at the mouth, gnashing his teeth, and some said cursing, but that was a calumny, for something seemed to be the matter with his tongue, and he could not speak, only splutter--nobody venturing, except his amiable daughter--and in that particular act of filial affection she was amiable--to hold in the article of death the old man's head;--Be it that moping idiot that would sit, were she suffered, on, on, on--night and day for ever, on the self-same spot, whatever that spot might be on which she happened to squat at morning, mound, wall, or stone--motionless, dumb, and, as a stranger would think, also blind, for the eyelids are still shut--never opened in sun or storm;--yet that figure--that which is now, and has for years been, an utter and hopeless idiot, was once a gay, laughing, dancing, singing girl, whose blue eyes seemed full of light, whether they looked on earth or heaven, the flowers or the stars--her sweetheart--a rational young man, it would appear--having leapt out upon her suddenly, as she was passing through the churchyard at night, from behind a tombstone, in a sack which she, having little time for consideration, and being naturally superstitious, supposed to be a shroud, and the wearer thereof, who was an active stripling of sound flesh and blood, to be a ghost or skeleton, all one horrid rattle of bones; so that the trick succeeded far beyond the most sanguine expectation of the Tailor who played the principal part--and sense, feeling, memory, imagination, and reason, were all felled by one blow of fear--as butcher felleth ox--while by one of those mysteries, which neither we, nor you, nor anybody else, can understand, life remained not only unimpaired, but even invigorated; and there she sits, like a clock wound up to go a certain time, the machinery of which being good, has not been altogether deranged by the shock that sorely cracked the case, and will work till the chain is run down, and then it will tick no more;--Be it that tall, fair, lovely girl, so thin and attenuated that all wonder she can walk by herself--that she is not blown away even by the gentle summer breeze that wooes the hectic of her cheek--dying all see--and none better than her poor old mother--and yet herself thoughtless of the coming doom, and cheerful as a nest-building bird--while her lover, too deep in despair to be betrayed into tears, as he carries her to her couch, each successive day feels the dear and dreadful burden lighter and lighter in his arms.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,475 ~ ~ ~
Had the Doctor not been dead, we should have given him a severe rowing and blowing-up for this vulgar folly; but as he is dead, we have only to hope that the readers of the Oracle who intend to travel will not degrade themselves, and disgust "authors of eminence," by thrusting their ugly or comely faces--both are equally odious--into the privacy of gentlemen who have done nothing to exclude themselves from the protection of the laws of civilised society--or subject their fire-sides to be infested by one-half of the curious men of the country, two-thirds of the clever, and all the blockheads.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,938 ~ ~ ~
Yes, there is pathos in the picture, especially while, on turning round your head, you behold a big blockhead of a vulgar bagman, with his coat-tails over his arms, warming his loathsome hideousness at a fire that would roast an ox.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 3,428 ~ ~ ~
Why--Imagination, thou art an ass, and thy long ears at all times greedy of deception!
~ ~ ~ Sentence 3,868 ~ ~ ~
In the sunk story, immediately below _that_, having been for a season consumptive, we kept a Jenny ass and her daughter--and though we believe it was not unheard around Moray and Ainslie Places, and even in Charlotte Square, we cannot charge our memory with an audit of their bray.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 4,334 ~ ~ ~
Yonder ass licking his lips at a thistle, sees but water for him to drink in Windermere a-glow with the golden lights of setting suns.