light-hearted, and generally remarkable for their engaging manners.
Few just men, not immoderately bilious, could see them in their
recreations without very much respecting the character that is so
easily, so harmlessly, and so simply, pleased.
BILL-STICKING
IF I had an enemy whom I hated – which Heaven forbid! – and if I
knew of something which sat heavy on his conscience, I think I
would introduce that something into a Posting-Bill, and place a
large impression in the hands of an active sticker. I can scarcely
imagine a more terrible revenge. I should haunt him, by this
means, night and day. I do not mean to say that I would publish
his secret, in red letters two feet high, for all the town to read:
I would darkly refer to it. It should be between him, and me, and
the Posting-Bill. Say, for example, that, at a certain period of
his life, my enemy had surreptitiously possessed himself of a key.
I would then embark my capital in the lock business, and conduct
that business on the advertising principle. In all my placards and
advertisements, I would throw up the line SECRET KEYS. Thus, if my
enemy passed an uninhabited house, he would see his conscience
glaring down on him from the parapets, and peeping up at him from
the cellars. If he took a dead wall in his walk, it would be alive
with reproaches. If he sought refuge in an omnibus, the panels
thereof would become Belshazzar’s palace to him. If he took boat,
in a wild endeavour to escape, he would see the fatal words lurking
under the arches of the bridges over the Thames. If he walked the
streets with downcast eyes, he would recoil from the very stones of
the pavement, made eloquent by lamp-black lithograph. If he drove
or rode, his way would be blocked up by enormous vans, each
proclaiming the same words over and over again from its whole
extent of surface. Until, having gradually grown thinner and
paler, and having at last totally rejected food, he would miserably
perish, and I should be revenged. This conclusion I should, no
doubt, celebrate by laughing a hoarse laugh in three syllables, and
folding my arms tight upon my chest agreeably to most of the
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Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
examples of glutted animosity that I have had an opportunity of
observing in connexion with the Drama – which, by-the-by, as
involving a good deal of noise, appears to me to be occasionally
confounded with the Drummer.
The foregoing reflections presented themselves to my mind, the
other day, as I contemplated (being newly come to London from the
East Riding of Yorkshire, on a house-hunting expedition for next
May), an old warehouse which rotting paste and rotting paper had
brought down to the condition of an old cheese. It would have been
impossible to say, on the most conscientious survey, how much of
its front was brick and mortar, and how much decaying and decayed
plaster. It was so thickly encrusted with fragments of bills, that
no ship’s keel after a long voyage could be half so foul. All
traces of the broken windows were billed out, the doors were billed
across, the water-spout was billed over. The building was shored
up to prevent its tumbling into the street; and the very beams
erected against it were less wood than paste and paper, they had
been so continually posted and reposted. The forlorn dregs of old
posters so encumbered this wreck, that there was no hold for new
posters, and the stickers had abandoned the place in despair,
except one enterprising man who had hoisted the last masquerade to
a clear spot near the level of the stack of chimneys where it waved
and drooped like a shattered flag. Below the rusty cellar-grating,
crumpled remnants of old bills torn down, rotted away in wasting
heaps of fallen leaves. Here and there, some of the thick rind of
the house had peeled off in strips, and fluttered heavily down,
littering the street; but, still, below these rents and gashes,
layers of decomposing posters showed themselves, as if they were
interminable. I thought the building could never even be pulled