omes
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 L300 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 ima