Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1880 edition. Excerpt: ... limbs; and I see a romantic white-haired goat with leering eye and upreached quivering mouth, cropping the sweet shoots of the lush vine under the which these three lie buried!" Extremely right, Mr. A A What d'ye call him! But is this all? "All--save a pair of small brass Bacchic cymbals." L d have mercy on us! what a blind world is this, my masters. Why, thou featherless owl! thou short-nailed mole! descryest thou not clearly that, this tablet having been originally painted some time agone, the varnish, or the macgilp, or the something, has cracked the Miss's skin like a dropsy, and that to hide these ravages, Scumbling has been used!! Dost hear 1 ScumbLing !!" May be so; and what of that?" Stop a moment, will you, my dear reader? I cannot get that interrogative down yet. I must drink this glass of Sherry exactly at three swallows, and take precisely--How precision is disregarded now to be sure! in drawing, in acting, in making up prescriptions, in taking them, in the position of dragoons' feet in the stirrups, in the make of breeches, in grammar, in pronunciation, in choice of words, in--in short--I don't know why I should begin my excellent work On Precision just here! so I put my finger and thumb into the box over which it has hovered for the last twenty-three seconds, and take precisely--two seven-eighths pinches of Paris. I think I feel* a little better now! nevertheless I do pronounce that phrase "what of that" to be the most vulgar, the most impertinent, unfeeling, malevolent, stupid, churlish, s discomfiting, unanswerable query that Apollyon ever thrust in a man's head. It is as bad as a pail of water thrown over you, or a smack in the face! --And to meet with all this, in reward for as fine a piece of connoisseurship as you...
