18-27.] fJie Tax-Gatherer. 59 



every feature and line of it we put it to them, whether they ever saw a 

 handsome Tax-gatherer? We would not be dogmatic, but we think not. 

 Now, is not this an afflicting state, that a man should, by absolute preju- 

 dice, be thus " curtailed of his fair proportions?" for it matters not, let 

 the humble compiler of the revenue be bright and glistening as Sol, he 

 is set down and noted as foul and murky as Erebus. We repeat it : no 

 Tax-gatherer was ever thought, save by his wife, a good-looking man. 

 (We much doubt whether a pawnbroker, knowing his customer, would 

 advance a single doit on his miniature.) We now aim at proof the 

 second. Did any of our readers (housekeepers again) meet with a really 

 urbane, amiable, and milky -hearted Tax-gatherer ? If so, were ever 

 his good qualities brinted ? No. His highest praise has been couched 

 in " the man is well enough :" a great eulogium certainly, if philoso- 

 phically solved but philosophy rarely mingles in our transactions with 

 Tax-gatherers : there, all is . s. d. and matter-of-fact. 



Let us, however, take " one victim :" let us set out with our Tax- 

 gatherer on his morning's round. 



# * * * * 



Well, the Tax-gatherer has for the last hour been the unresisting 

 victim of two battledores, a negative and an imperative ; he has been 

 struck from house to house by " Not at Home " and " Call Again." 

 And here let us for a moment sympathize with the feelings (if he hath 

 any feeling left) of the poor pedestrian, than whom the unclosed door 

 no sooner reveals to the giggling servant, or to the daughter, who has 

 come skipping and shaking her curls along the passage, and perhaps 

 dwelling on the last note of Di Tanti Palpiti, or of Arne's Monster Aivayf 

 no sooner does the Tax-gatherer stand confessed, than the inhabitant 

 looks blank the visage lengthens a business-like seriousness over- 

 spreads the face, and either set of the above three syllables drop 

 heavily as bullets from the lips of beauty: sometimes, indeed, the trans- 

 action may be enlivened by a querulous shrillness of voice, a sudden^ 

 bodily whisk of the party called upon, and at length, the conference be 

 impressively terminated by a slamming-to of the door. Indeed, a curious 

 man might find some employment in remarking on the entrance of a 

 Tax-gatherer into a retired and quiet street, how many of these portal 

 concussions should attend him on his route. And then narrowly to 

 observe the features of the visited, when they glance from the face of 

 the Tax-gatherer to the missile in' his hand; that dreadful little book 

 that key to the History of England and, like that history, the record 

 of so many departed sovereigns. How the parties recoil from that puny 

 volume ! they shrink back as they look on its unloosed brazen clasp, as 

 though the jaws of a griffin were distended before them. If the man 

 stood ready at the threshold, to hurl into the dwelling-house a Congreve- 

 rocket, the habitant could not behold either the Tax-gatherer or his 

 instrument with greater trepidation. Ingenuity might be goaded to find 

 pertinent similitudes to the book of a Tax-man, with so many and such 

 conflicting attributes is it endowed by its beholders. A sleeping snake, 

 the paw of a leopard, the bill of the butcher-bird, are all common and 

 inexpressive similes. Its sober and harmless-looking covers, of humble 

 sheep, are, in imagination, transformed into the skin of a tyger, that has 

 desolated a village, swallowing a rajah, his body-guards, men, women^ 

 and young children; or to that of a swine that has "eaten her nine 

 farrow:" its pages are held to be veritable leaves from the upas-tree ; 



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