The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 46 pages of information about The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction.

The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 46 pages of information about The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction.

A Village Hampden.—­In the churchyard of one of the parishes of Walsall, Staffordshire, is the following epitaph on a person named Samuel Wilks, who appears, like other persons of his name, to have been a great stickler for the rights of the people:—­“Reader, if thou art an inhabitant of the Foreign of Walsall, know that the dust beneath thy feet was imprisoned in thy cause, because he refused to incorporate the poor-rates of the Foreign of Walsall and those of the Borough of Walsall.  His resistance was successful.  Reader, the benefit is thine.”

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Difference between a Town and a Village.—­The other night it was warmly contested in the Reform debate in the House of Commons, whether Bilston and Sedgeley, in Staffordshire, were towns or villages.  Mr. Croker spoke of the “village of Bilston,” and the “rural district of Sedgeley,” but Sir John Wrottesley maintained that the right hon. gentleman would find nothing in Bilston that would give him any idea of sweet Auburn.  “He would find a large market-town in the parish of Wolverhampton, filled not with trees and waving foliage, but with long chimneys and smoking steam-engines.  The time was also beyond his memory when Sedgeley was a rural district.  The right hon. gentleman would find there no mossy fountains, no bubbling brooks; the only thing at all like them which he could find there would be the torrents of boiling water which the steam-engines perpetually discharged.”

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Dutch Disgust.—­You might seek through all London to find such a piece of furniture as a spitting-box.  A Dutchman who was very uncomfortable for the want of one, declared, with great indignation, that an Englishman’s only spitting-box was his stomach.

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Awkward Honour.—­A medical gentleman has written a letter to Sir Henry Halford on Cholera, in which he takes to himself the credit of being “the first to discover the disease, and communicate it to the public.”  The public is much obliged to him.—­Globe.

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Newspapers.—­We wish Lieutenant Drummond would calculate the miles of newspaper columns which every club-haunter daily swallows, and the price he pays for the same to the proprietaries and the revenue.—­Examiner.

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Scandal.—­The tell-tale trumpery and eaves-dropping with which the “Tour of a German Prince” is trickseyed out, reminds us of an observation by Lady Morgan:  “Admit these fellows into your house, and the only return they will make you is to put you in their book.”

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Yorkshire Fun.—­The assizes and the theatre always open together at York, and it is common to hear the Tykes say, “Eh, lad, ther’l be fun next week; t’pla’ctors is cuming, and t’men’s to be hung all at t’syame time.”—­ Atlas.

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The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.