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You despoil your own nature by such procedure more than you can damage any one else. Bowie-knife and dagger are more honorable than an anonymous pen sharpened for defamation of character. Better try putting strychnine in the flour barrel. Better mix ratsbane in the jelly cake. That behavior would be more elegant and Christian.
He was introduced, that is, proposed as a member of our club, by Sir Robert Ratsbane, whose grandfather was a druggist, and seconded by Lord Loadstone, the celebrated lady-killer, as a regular pigeon, who dropped, by the death of old 'burn the wind, into half a million at least.
It was a garret-room of a steep-roofed Dutch house, where the rain patted on the shingles, and the lightning gleamed, and the wind piped through the crannies in stormy weather; and where whole troops of hungry rats, like Don Cossacks, galloped about in defiance of traps and ratsbane.
You might as well say: "I propose now to give a little rest to my digestive organs; and, instead of eating heavy meat and vegetables, I will for a little while take lighter food a little strychnine and a few grains of ratsbane." Literary poison in August is as bad as literary poison in December. Mark that.
Being thus accoutred, or rather unaccoutred, he was now no more than Poor Mad Tom, whom the foul fiend had led through fire and through flame, through ford and whirlpool, over bog and quagmire, that hath laid knives under his pillow, and halters in his pew, set ratsbane by his porridge, made him proud at heart to ride on a bay trotting horse over four-inch bridges, to curse his own shadow for a traitor; who eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt, and the water-newt; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, swallows the old rat and ditch dog, drinks the green mantle off the standing pool;
It appears to me that a government of three years may furnish an opportunity of acquiring a very dangerous influence. For my own part, I would as lief they would put ratsbane in my mouth as the 'excellency' with which I am daily crammed.
The voluntary means proceed from outward causes, as by making of corrosives, and applying the same to the more fleshy parts of their bodies, and also laying of ratsbane, spearwort, crowfoot, and such like unto their whole members, thereby to raise pitiful and odious sores, and move the hearts of the goers-by such places where they lie, to yearn at their misery, and thereupon bestow large alms upon them.
And I do confess that I think their varied ptisans and syrups are as much preferable to the mineral regimen of bug-poison and ratsbane, so long in favor on the other side of the Channel, as their art of preparing food for the table to the rude cookery of those hard-feeding and much-dosing islanders.
I think they talked of forty thousand dogs, and five times as many cats; few houses being without a cat, some having several, sometimes five or six in a house. All possible endeavours were used also to destroy the mice and rats, especially the latter, by laying ratsbane and other poisons for them, and a prodigious multitude of them were also destroyed.
For these reasons I suppose it is why some have conceived it would be very expedient for the public good of learning that every true critic, as soon as he had finished his task assigned, should immediately deliver himself up to ratsbane or hemp, or from some convenient altitude, and that no man's pretensions to so illustrious a character should by any means be received before that operation was performed.
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