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The houses are chiefly built of brick, but it seems as if some years ago the inhabitants had been seized with an architectural disease, which has left its marks in the shape of an eruption of stucco porticoes, and one or two pretensious mansions, externally resembling jails or infirmaries, internally boasting halls which bear the same proportion to the living rooms as Falstaff's gallon of sack to his halfpennyworth of bread.
Joe, the costermonger, Bill, the market-labourer, Tom, the fish-porter, and the rest come home in a straggling way; and, if they can buy a pennyworth of coal, they boil the little kettle. Then one of the children runs to the chandler's and gets a halfpennyworth of tea, a scrap of bread, and perhaps a penny slice of sausage.
And what has been the consequence? That wholesome nausea which it has been his good fortune to create wherever he has been allowed to practise in his humble circle. Has anyone thrown away a halfpennyworth of sympathy upon any person mentioned in this history? Surely no.
The hams and tongues seem, indeed, rather a poor halfpennyworth to this intolerable deal of sack; but this instance of Surinam privation in those days may open some glimpse at the colonial standards of comfort.
All this is sumptuous; for we are of the aristocracy of workmen. The labourers of Paris do not live so well. They go to the gargottes, where they get threepence halfpennyworth of bouilli—soup, beef and vegetable—which includes the title to a liberal supply of bread.
"I recollect," he writes, "seeing, years ago, at the prison for idiots and madmen, at Bicêtre, near Paris, a poor wretch bent down under the bondage of his imprisonment and his personal infirmity, to whom one of our party gave a halfpennyworth of snuff in a cornet or 'screw' of paper.
Newman Noggs did not say that he had hunted up the old furniture they saw, from attic and cellar; or that he had taken in the halfpennyworth of milk for tea that stood upon a shelf, or filled the rusty kettle on the hob, or collected the woodchips from the wharf, or begged the coals.
Having inspected the upper floors I descended to the basement, where what are called the 'Shelter men' are received at a separate entrance at 5.30 in the afternoon, and buying their penny or halfpennyworth of food, seat themselves on benches to eat. Here, too, they can sit and smoke or mend their clothes, or if they are wet, dry themselves in the annexe, until they retire to rest.
But these are but the halfpennyworth of bread compared to the vast quantity of sack. The matter seems fairly summed up in the story of the man who said, 'Turner is not ungenerous; he once paid the toll over Waterloo Bridge for me! Mr. Ruskin charges Turner's faults upon his contemporaries and the public who failed to appreciate his genius. But is this for a moment sustainable?
Pendennis's husband for his part did not attempt to console Sir Barnes Newcome Newcome, Baronet. I never professed to have a halfpennyworth of pity at that gentleman's command.
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