This led to Mr. Wopsle's (who
had never been heard of before) coming in with a star and garter
on, as a plenipotentiary of great power direct from the Admiralty,
to say that the Swabs were all to go to prison on the spot, and
that he had brought the boatswain down the Union Jack, as a slight
acknowledgment of his public services. The boatswain, unmanned for
the first time, respectfully dried his eyes on the Jack, and then
cheering up, and addressing Mr. Wopsle as Your Honor, solicited
permission to take him by the fin. Mr. Wopsle, conceding his fin with
a gracious dignity, was immediately shoved into a dusty corner,
while everybody danced a hornpipe; and from that corner, surveying
the public with a discontented eye, became aware of me.
The second piece was the last new grand comic Christmas pantomime,
in the first scene of which, it pained me to suspect that I
detected Mr. Wopsle with red worsted legs under a highly magnified
phosphoric countenance and a shock of red curtain-fringe for his
hair, engaged in the manufacture of thunderbolts in a mine, and
displaying great cowardice when his gigantic master came home (very
hoarse) to dinner. But he presently presented himself under
worthier circumstances; for, the Genius of Youthful Love being in
want of assistance,--on account of the parental brutality of an
ignorant farmer who opposed the choice of his daughter's heart, by
purposely falling upon the object, in a flour-sack, out of the
first-floor window,--summoned a sententious Enchanter; and he,
coming up from the antipodes rather unsteadily, after an apparently
violent journey, proved to be Mr.
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