FullReads

But the fashion of jokes, with all other things, passes away; as did the transient mode which had so favoured us. The ancles of our fair friends in a few weeks began to reassume their whiteness, and left us scarce a leg to stand upon. Other female whims followed, but none, methought, so pregnant, so invitatory of shrewd conceits, and more than single meanings.

Somebody has said, that to swallow six cross-buns daily consecutively for a fortnight would surfeit the stoutest digestion. But to have to furnish as many jokes daily, and that not for a fortnight, but for a long twelvemonth, as we were constrained to do, was a little harder execution. “Man goeth forth to his work until the evening”–from a reasonable hour in the morning, we presume it was meant. Now as our main occupation took us up from eight till five every day in the City; and as our evening hours, at that time of life, had generally to do with any thing rather than business, it follows, that the only time we could spare for this manufactory of jokes–our supplementary livelihood, that supplied us in every want beyond mere bread and cheese–was exactly that part of the day which (as we have heard of No Man’s Land) may be fitly denominated No Man’s Time; that is, no time in which a man ought to be up, and awake, in. To speak more plainly, it is that time, of an hour, or an hour and a half’s duration, in which a man, whose occasions call him up so preposterously, has to wait for his breakfast.

O those headaches at dawn of day, when at five, or half-past-five in summer, and not much later in the dark seasons, we were compelled to rise, having been perhaps not above four hours in bed–(for we were no go-to-beds with the lamb, though we anticipated the lark ofttimes in her rising–we liked a parting cup at midnight, as all young men did before these effeminate times, and to have our friends about us–we were not constellated under Aquarius, that watery sign, and therefore incapable of Bacchus, cold, washy, bloodless–we were none of your Basilian water-sponges, nor had taken our degrees at Mount Ague–we were right toping Capulets, jolly companions, we and they)–but to have to get up, as we said before, curtailed of half our fair sleep, fasting, with only a dim vista of refreshing Bohea in the distance–to be necessitated to rouse ourselves at the detestable rap of an old hag of a domestic, who seemed to take a diabolical pleasure in her announcement that it was “time to rise;” and whose chappy knuckles we have often yearned to amputate, and string them up at our chamber door, to be a terror to all such unseasonable rest-breakers in future–

“Facil” and sweet, as Virgil sings, had been the “descending” of the over-night, balmy the first sinking of the heavy head upon the pillow; but to get up, as he goes on to say,

–revocare gradus, superasque evadere ad auras–

and to get up moreover to make jokes with malice prepended–there was the “labour,” there the “work.”

No Egyptian taskmaster ever devised a slavery like to that, our slavery. No fractious operants ever turned out for half the tyranny, which this necessity exercised upon us. Half a dozen jests in a day (bating Sundays too), why, it seems nothing! We make twice the number every day in our lives as a matter of course, and claim no Sabbatical exemptions. But then they come into our head. But when the head has to go out to them–when the mountain must go to Mahomet–

Reader, try it for once, only for one short twelvemonth.

It was not every week that a fashion of pink stockings came up; but mostly, instead of it, some rugged, untractable subject; some topic impossible to be contorted into the risible; some feature, upon which no smile could play; some flint, from which no process of ingenuity could procure a distillation. There they lay; there your appointed tale of brick-making was set before you, which you must finish, with or without straw, as it happened. The craving Dragon–the Public–like him in Bel’s temple–must be fed; it expected its daily rations; and Daniel, and ourselves, to do us justice, did the best we could on this side bursting him.