The wanderings of a pen and pencil . rable. It was the board day, and a gentleman, who held office at this appropri-ately termed Bastile, conducted us over the several sections of the had never entered the like before; and the first observation we ventured,was upon the animal, idiotic expression of two fourths of the inhabitants. Onemight have conceived, that Lavater himself, or Conolly of Hanwell, hadselected the inmates of this physiognomical museum, on account of theirvacuity and the individual portraits. It was the absence of hope which weperceived! — the blank which human face
The wanderings of a pen and pencil . rable. It was the board day, and a gentleman, who held office at this appropri-ately termed Bastile, conducted us over the several sections of the had never entered the like before; and the first observation we ventured,was upon the animal, idiotic expression of two fourths of the inhabitants. Onemight have conceived, that Lavater himself, or Conolly of Hanwell, hadselected the inmates of this physiognomical museum, on account of theirvacuity and the individual portraits. It was the absence of hope which weperceived! — the blank which human faces are moulded to, when they treadas upon a plank drawn over a pit of darkness — with the extreme possibilityof holding existence, uncomforted and in fear. What are they in fear of? —Of the rude voice, and the thundering reproof to the very semblance of anerror— the mere crumbs of wrong which fall from their lips or appear in ! they are the dry bones thrown into the den of the bear — we mean, of To face Pate THE POOR-LAW UNION. 135 vulgar authority. Some were there we had known in the sunshine of theirhumble life, before misfortune and the grave, and the impatient landlord, hadrifled their store of plenty and of peace : there was no distinction — they toowere altered, as we have decribed. We saw many little children — stuntedcroppies, who had been kiln-dried out of all their poetical associations. Theplasterer who whitewashes the miserable walls must have been commissionedto sweep them down from crown to chin, with a concentrated solution of were huddled together, the yellow ones and the white ones, as dull andas free from the wrinkles of mirth, as a basket full of stale eggs from the Welshborder. One child was nursed by an idiotic woman of a Mongolian cast offeature. Men have seen things in the glass of the astrologer which haveturned their brains. The infant was a student in insanity, and there was aspark shooting up into the head of th
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