1830.] The Club-Room. 37 



With one hand this suppliant presses the pontifical toe to his adoring 

 lips, and with the other drops a triple crown, as the Extinguisher, upon 

 a toy strongly resembling the one on which the Pope's legate tram- 

 pled in the days of John of pious and pope-kicked memory. At his 

 side kneels, what I am afraid was intended for the representative of one 

 of my friends. Beside him lies a box, with the words candid, or can- 

 died, orange, which perhaps alludes to some forgotten period of history. 

 In front of him a stove burns a bundle of records, inscribed '" William 

 and Mary ; James I. ; Car. II. j Exclusion Bill," &c. The portion of the 

 picture at the side of his holiness is peculiarly insolent and emblematic. 

 A heavy, black brute, with a fiery band between its horns, inscribed 

 " Papal Bull," is goring a British bull dog, muzzled, on the ground. 

 A view of the Monument, broken, is lying under the dog's paw. Above 

 him is a volume of the Lives of the Popish Saints, with a frontispiece of 

 Guy Fawkes, in the uniform of the guards ; and, filling the centre of the 

 foreground, is a scroll describing the several changes essential to the 

 improved Constitution of 1829. 



The Chairman. Let them rail on. A papist can be taught the value 

 of a vote like any other man ; and if there are bigots among them who 

 think that the Pope carries the keys of heaven and hell at his girdle, or 

 that St. Ursula's knee-pan is good for the cholic, or that St. Agatha's os 

 sacrum cures mares of barrenness, and horses of the staggers, so much 

 the better. Your fat friars are the antipodes of your thin philosophers ; 



Cr red-gilled abbots are the last men in the world to turn upon the 

 d that fills their rotundity ; and if the whole land were papist, from 

 St. James's Square to St. Kilda, though we might have dirt, laziness, 

 and licentiousness, a rich increase of illegitimates, and a change from the 

 night population of the Strand to the holy preserves of the nunnery ; 

 though we might have treachery in our councils, foreign gold in our 

 legislature, spies in our houses, and scaffolds in our streets, the country 

 would escape a very considerable quantity of political grumbling. 



But what are you smuggling under the table there, Ringlet ? 



Ringlet. Oh nothing ; a sketch of a public character, quite unworthy 

 of attention. 



The Chairman. Let me see it, however. (It is handed to him.) Ha ! 

 ha ! ha ! I quite agree with you, Ringlet, in the insignificance, but cer- 

 tainly not of the artist's part ; that is capital. " A Cabinet Curiosity/' 

 Ha ! ha ! ha ! It will make the fellow's fortune. Look, Rat, how incom- 

 parably the cidevantjeime homme, the by-gone dandy, is touched in every 

 line. See the dull dignity, the grave absurdity, the dry foolery that 

 stiffens from top to toe. What can surpass the affected fashion of the 

 dress, the relay of coloured inside waistcoats, the buckramed coat, with 

 Stultz 1 and silliness worked in every seam of it, the sliding feet, that 

 look as if they anticipated the slipper age, and were already basketed 

 in their grand climacteric, compounds of flannel and chalk stones? Then 

 the visage, a measureless void ; a carle blanche of diplomacy ; a sheet of 

 unwritten parchment, with an embroidered border of lovelocks ; Madame 

 La Hortense's screws, d la Cythere, drooping over the cream coloured 

 cheek, and the whole forming a matchless portrait of blighted sentimen- 

 tality. Do you know the subject, Ringlet ? Eh. 



Ringlet. Not any more than yourself. 



(A servant brings in a letter to Culverin.} 



Culverin. I beg pardon for a moment (opens it, and reads: the words 



