The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0063/00636.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 17KB | 273 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00636}
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$Title{Anthology Of Shorter Works
Our Vestry}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{vestry
honourable
gentleman
captain
honour
every
tiddypot
like
magg
wigsby}
$Date{}
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Title:       Anthology Of Shorter Works
Book:        Our Vestry
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Our Vestry

     We have the glorious privilege of being always in hot water if we like.
We are a shareholder in a Great Parochial British Joint Stock Bank of
Balderdash.  We have a Vestry in our borough, and can vote for a vestryman
- might even be a vestryman, mayhap, if we were inspired by a lofty and noble
ambition.  Which we are not.

     Our Vestry is a deliberative assembly of the utmost dignity and
importance.  Like the Senate of Ancient Rome, its awful gravity overpowers
(or ought to overpower) barbarian visitors.  It sits in the Capitol (we mean
in the capital building erected for it), chiefly on Saturdays, and shakes the
earth to its centre with the echoes of its thundering eloquence, in a Sunday
paper.

     To get into this Vestry in the eminent capacity of Vestryman, gigantic
efforts are made, and Herculean exertions used.  It is made manifest to the
dullest capacity at every election, that if we reject Snozzle we are done
for, and that if we fail to bring in Blunderbooze at the top of the poll, we
are unworthy of the dearest rights of Britons.  Flaming placards are rife on
all the dead walls in the borough, public-houses hang out banners,
hackney-cabs burst into full-grown flowers of type, and everybody is, or
should be, in a paroxysm of anxiety.

     At these momentous crises of the national fate, we are much assisted in
our deliberations by two eminent volunteers; one of whom subscribes himself
A Fellow Parishioner, the other, A Rate-Payer.  Who they are, or what they
are, or where they are, nobody knows; but, whatever one asserts, the other
contradicts.  They are both voluminous writers, inditing more epistles than
Lord Chesterfield in a single week; and the greater part of their feelings
are too big for utterance in anything less than capital letters.  They
require the additional aid of whole rows of notes of admiration, like
balloons, to point their generous indignation; and they sometimes communicate
a crushing severity to stars.  As thus:

     Men of Mooneymount.

     Is it, or is it not, a * * * to saddle the parish with a debt of Pound
          2,745 6s 9d., yet claim to be a Rigid Economist?
     Is it, or is it not, a * * * to state as a fact what is proved to be
          both a moral and a Physical Impossibility?
     Is it, or is it not, a * * * to call Pound 2,745 6s. 9d. nothing; and
          nothing, something?
     Do you, or do you not want a * * * * To Represent You In The Vestry?
     Your consideration of these questions is recommended to you by

     A Fellow Parishioner.

     It was to this important public document that one of our first orators,
Mr. Magg (of Little Winkling Street), adverted, when he opened the great
debate of the fourteenth of November by saying, "Sir, I hold in my hand an
anonymous slander" - and when the interruption, with which he was at that
point assailed by the opposite faction, gave rise to that memorable
discussion on a point of order which will ever be remembered with interest
by constitutional assemblies.  In the animated debate to which we refer, no
fewer than thirty-seven gentlemen, many of them of great eminence, including
Mr. Wigsby (of Chumbledon Square), were seen upon their legs at one time; and
it was on the same great occasion that Dogginson - regarded in our vestry as
"a regular John Bull:" we believe, in consequence of his having always made
up his mind on every subject without knowing anything about it - informed
another gentleman of similar principles on the opposite side, that if he
"cheek'd him," he would resort to the extreme measure of knocking his blessed
head off.

     This was a great occasion.  But, our Vestry shines habitually.  In
asserting its own pre-eminence, for instance, it is very strong.  On the
least provocation, or on none, it will be clamorous to know whether it is to
be "dictated to," or "trampled on," or "ridden over roughshod." Its great
watchword is Self-government.  That is to say, supposing our Vestry to favour
any little harmless disorder like Typhus Fever, and supposing the Government
of the country to be, by any accident, in such ridiculous hands, as that any
of its authorities should consider it a duty to object to Typhus Fever -
obviously an unconstitutional objection - then, our Vestry cuts in with a
terrible manifesto about Self-government, and claims its independent right
to have as much Typhus Fever as pleases itself.  Some absurd and dangerous
persons have represented, on the other hand, that though our Vestry may be
able to "beat the bounds" of its own parish, it may not be able to beat the
bounds of its own diseases; which (say they) spread over the whole land, in
an ever-expanding circle of waste, and misery, and death, and widowhood, and
orphanage, and desolation.  But our Vestry makes short work of any such
fellows as these.

     It was our Vestry - pink of Vestries as it is - that in support of its
favourite principle took the celebrated ground of denying the existence of
the last pestilence that raged in England, when the pestilence was raging at
the Vestry doors.  Dogginson said it was plums; Mr. Wigsby (of Chumbledon
Square) said it was oysters; Mr. Magg (of Little Winkling Street) said, amid
great cheering, it was the newspapers.  The noble indignation of our Vestry
with that un-English institution the Board of Health, under those
circumstances, yields one of the finest passages in its history.  It wouldn't
hear of rescue.  Like Mr. Joseph Miller's Frenchman, it would be drowned and
nobody should save it.  Transported beyond grammar by its kindled ire, it
spoke in unknown tongues, and vented unintelligible bellowings, more like an
ancient oracle than the modern oracle it is admitted on all hands to be.
Rare exigencies produce rare things; and even our Vestry, new hatched to the
woful time, came forth a greater goose than ever.

     But this, again, was a special occasion.  Our Vestry, at more ordinary
periods, demands its meed of praise.

     Our Vestry is eminently parliamentary.  Playing at Parliament is its
favourite game.  It is even regarded by some of its members as a chapel of
ease to the House of Commons: a Little Go to be passed first.  It has its
strangers' gallery, and its reported debates (see the Sunday paper before
mentioned), and our Vestrymen are in and out of order, and on and off their
legs, and above all are transcendently quarrelsome, after the pattern of the
real original.

     Our Vestry being assembled, Mr. Magg never begs to trouble Mr. Wigsby
with a simple inquiry.  He knows better than that.  Seeing the honourable
gentleman, associated in their minds with Chumbledon Square, in his place,
he wishes to ask that honourable gentleman what the intentions of himself,
and those with whom he acts, may be, on the subject of the paving of the
district known as Piggleum Buildings?  Mr. Wigsby replies (with his eye on
next Sunday's paper), that in reference to the question which has been put
to him by the honourable gentleman opposite he must take leave to say, that
if that honourable gentleman had had the courtesy to give him notice of that
question, he (Mr. Wigsby) would have consulted with his colleagues in
reference to the advisability, in the present state of the discussions on the
new paving-rate, of answering that question.  But, as the honourable
gentleman has not had the courtesy to give him notice of that question (great
cheering from the Wigsby interest), he must decline to give the honourable
gentleman the satisfaction he requires.  Mr. Magg, instantly rising to
retort, is received with loud cries of "Spoke!" from the Wigsby interest, and
with cheers from the Magg side of the house.  Moreover, five gentlemen r