" Since these portentous weathercocks have thus laid
their heads together, wonderful events had already occurred. The
good old king, notwithstanding that he had lived eighty-two
years, had all at once given up the ghost; another king had
mounted the throne; a royal duke had died suddenly; another, in
France, had been murdered; there had been radical meetings in all
parts of the kingdom; the bloody scenes at Manchester; the great
plot in Cato Street; and, above all, the queen had returned to
England! All these sinister events are recounted by Mr. Skyrme
with a mysterious look and a dismal shake of the head; and being
taken with his drugs, and associated in the minds of his auditors
with stuffed-sea-monsters, bottled serpents, and his own visage,
which is a title-page of tribulation, they have spread great
gloom through the minds of the people of Little Britain. They
shake their heads whenever they go by Bow Church, and observe
that they never expected any good to come of taking down that
steeple, which in old times told nothing but glad tidings, as the
history of Whittington and his Cat bears witness.
The rival oracle of Little Britain is a substantial cheesemonger,
who lives in a fragment of one of the old family mansions, and is
as magnificently lodged as a round-bellied mite in the midst of
one of his own Cheshires.
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