Andrew Wynter

“ Everything that we see about us, from the primal granite rocks to the child’s toy which ministers to the whim of the moment, is by a slow process of disintegration passing away into a fine dust, which goes on for ever, building up the crust of the globe—a fine dust which in the course of time becomes animated with verdant sod, and to all appearance silently obliterates the marks which humanity is ever graving upon its surface, or building or shaping with its pigmy hands. ”

“ We fold up and carry in our cerebrum the scenes and incidents of years of travel; we summon at will the faces of thousands of persons, who have been seen by us only for a moment; we invert our mental vision, and there upon the tablet of the brain we see as vividly as in a camera, the groupings of scenes that have occurred in eventful periods of our lives. How are all these myriads of images written upon the grey matter of the brain, and so ordered, sorted, and grouped that we can select exactly those we want from the immense store, without disturbing the remainder? ”

“ The life of a coroner in a mighty metropolis like London must be an odd one. His grim duty leads him day by day into palace and cottages, back-slums and noble mansions. In a certain sense he is a modern Charon, whose pass is required ere a company of corpses, some days more, some days less, can find quiet burial. They say ghosts listen for the sound of the crowing cock before they retreat to their narrow beds, so mortals, suddenly deprived of life, must have the permit of twelve good men and true, and the coroner’s signature, ere the sexton will lift a shovel in their behalf. ”

“ Yet no fact is more certain than that throughout Asia the practice of inoculation had obtained for ages; and that the Chinese—the inevitable nation to which we have always to go back for the birth of any great discovery—systematically employed inoculation as early as the sixth century. Yet strange to say, in Asia this precious knowledge came to a dead stand-still; and had it not been for the lively English lady, inoculation might not have been introduced into England for another half century, and possibly vaccination would even now be in the womb of time. ”

“ The art of Cookery is, something like the egg-trick of Columbus, very easy when some one has shown us how to do it; but it certainly is strange that in all our rage for teaching the people “common things,” one so common and yet so important should never have been hit upon.
Of all the employments of women, what so important as that of cooking? but we hear nothing about it from Miss Emily Faithfull; yet it is of infinitely greater importance that they study the art of feeding the body in a wholesome manner than that they should take to printing, which they cannot do better than men. ”

“ That longer row of sheds, facing the water and the landing-slip, is divided off into numberless pigeon-holes, out of which peer as ill-tempered a set of gun-boats, as well could be got together, if we may judge from the names conspicuously painted on their bows. Snappers, Growlers, Biters, Vixens, Termagants, Bruisers, Snarlers, &c., all looking at you out of their houses, just like so many bull-dogs in a sporting dog-dealer’s yard.
But how do these 200 feet gun-boats perform the feat of getting so comfortably on dry land? There is a huge locomotive, and before you are the rails. ”

“ If these facts will not permit us to look upon Captain Fowke’s building as a packing-case, what shall we say of it as a casket, as a jewel-case prepared to receive, for perhaps a century to come, the decennial congregations of the wealth of the globe? When the secret power presiding at the South Kensington Museum undertook to create this structure destined to be the cynosure of foreign eyes, and when the behest went forth from the very cradle of art design in this country, the world anticipated some triumph of artistic skill. ”

“ The highest kind of beauty consists in expression—it is the play of features which charms, not the mere beauty of the human mask, unimpassioned by the soul beneath. And this expression is just the thing that photography misses. When a man or woman, and especially when a woman sits to the sun for her portrait, the first thing she does is to make up a face—she can’t help it, my good reader—let the muscles of your mouth play naturally, whilst your friend is daring you to do so, if you can. ”

“ It certainly is only another testimony to the slowness of our Anglo-Saxon nature, that such a splendid stream, running through the richest city in the world, should be allowed to ramble at its own pleasure over an immense amount of shore, converting it, at low-water, into a fetid mudbank of thousands of acres in extent, which, under the influence of the summer sun, gives out exhalations of the most unhealthy character. ”

“ The inventor of the lucifer match calls into life one of the four elements to do our bidding in our domestic and industrial homes every day, and yet even his name is unknown to the public. But all great and universal inventions are sure to have their dark as well as their bright sides, and after the twenty-five years’ experience we have had, since the first blue spirt of light was elicited by the sand-paper, medical men have come to the knowledge that the manufacturing of them has created a new and terrible disease among the workers. ”

“ But it must be evident to all, that Nature herself has drawn the line between male and female labour; it is a nice question of physical power. When we see half a dozen stalwart young men selling ribbons in a mercer’s shop, there is a palpable waste of power, and we feel almost inclined to ask for only one hour of the old days of the press-gang. On the other hand, when we see women in the fields, bent double with hoeing in the midday sun, we feel that they are overtasked. ”

“ When an epidemic arises people rush to the vaccination stations to protect their little ones against the arrows of death which they see flying around them and striking here and there to the death; but the epidemic passes, and their fears with it—a new crop of unvaccinated children springs up, and a new epidemic, to be repeated every four or five years, sweeps off these neglected children, and spreads terror and contagion among adults. ”

“ To survey the map, it would seem as though all the ships of the world had been attracted by our shores as by some magnetic mountain, and then shattered helplessly upon them. When we remember, however, that England is the centre of the commercial world, and that hither are attracted the mercantile navies of all nations, as well as of our own; and when we again remember that our island is surrounded with narrow seas, skirted by dangerous rocks, headlands, and sands, the wonder ceases, and we are no longer surprised, as we were when children, that in great storms sailors should seek the open sea. ”

“ For the small sum of half-a-crown you may in the summer season leave hot and dusty London behind you, traverse the South Downs, skirt the South coast, spend a day in the great naval arsenal of Portsmouth, and be back again in town to a late tea—that is, those who like cheap trips and this kind of racing within an inch of their lives, may do so if they like—which I do not. ”

“ The mass of coloured photographs we see about are, we confess, beneath contempt; but the manner in which the artists have worked is alone accountable for their failure. The real excellence of a coloured photograph results from the artist following only the outlines which photography has given him on the paper; but the bungling dauber proceeds to destroy this beautiful drawing by painting with solid colour, which effectually hides all the wonderful delicacy of the sun’s pencil’s touch beneath. ”

“ The wide-extending heath almost prepared him for the Grand Stand, and the innumerable persons in uniform led him to expect a sham light. The line of streamers and flags of all nations, and the town of booths running right and left, seemed as though the old fair had been revived for his delectation. But what was the meaning of the long range of earthworks far away on the other side of the Common? Of the hundred thousand people who lined the vast enclosure, in carriages and on foot, possibly not a thousand persons could, of their own personal knowledge, have given an answer. ”

“ To all appearances only, however; for year by year we are discovering that beneath the smiling sod and the sad-coloured earth, lie the scattered remnants of the ages that have gone. The successive waves of men that have passed over the globe have left traces as indelibly inscribed beneath our feet as the light ripples of the ocean, thousands upon thousands of years ago, have graven themsevles upon the sandstone shores of the pre-adamite world.
Let us for a moment retrace the long Egyptian galleries that have given rise to these reflections. ”

“ Does it not seem strange, however, that we, the greatest maritime power in the world, should be behind our neighbours in our scientific arrangements for lighting our coasts? We have illuminated our smallest country towns with gas, and the electric light is a common thing in our places of amusement to show dissolving views; yet in the sailor’s last agony, when his noble ship is amid the breakers, he finds no better light than the oil-lamp and reflector to warn him of his danger! ”

“ Yet, from these old inky forests, from the green valleys up which the pine-trees climb like black priests to the mountain summit, rush the torrents of toys which push on from year to year and penetrate into every nursery in Europe. In the recesses of the old Thuringian and other forests are glued, and turned, and painted, the legions of soldiers, the fleets of Noah's-arks, and the countless whips, rattles, and squeaking dolls that go to their last account in the snug nurseries of Europe. ”

“ A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,
when one sees our race of dogs reduced by extraordinary care to the utmost conceivable pitch of ugliness, and to find people—reputed to be knowing ones—actually believing in that ugliness as the acme of perfection and beauty? Thank God, the utmost effort of the breeder’s art cannot make anything but a noble gentleman out of the bloodhound. How judicially the few hounds of this class carried themselves! ”

“ Even to those accustomed to the presence of death there is something very startling in the sudden transition from the life and noise of a great metropolitan thoroughfare to the dead-house of a large hospital, tenanted by silent inmates such as these, who but a few days since moved in health and spirits amid the hubbub, dreaming not that they were on the edge of that bourne from which no traveller returns. ”

“ Here and there beads of white set off the general gloom of the house-front, like the crape pipings of a widow’s cap. The very metal window frames and plates had gone into a decorous mourning—zinc taking the place of—what we feel, under the circumstances, would be quite indecent—brass. Our neighbours across the Channel, who know how to dress up affliction as appropriately as their bonbonnière, have long since seen the necessity of classifying the trappings of grief, and of withdrawing them from the vulgar atmosphere of gayer costumes. ”

“ As one surveys the large exhibition room at the Egyptian Hall covered with vigorously painted pictures of the deeds of daring of the winners of the Victoria Cross, it is scarcely possible to believe that they have all been produced by one hand within these last two years. Never was there a better example of the difference between ourselves and France than this exhibition affords. Versailles is crowded with ill-drawn but stirring pictures of national heroism, lavishly paid for by the government: here a single individual undertakes the task, and accomplishes it on his own resources. ”

“ But we are not content with frustrating the effects of death in the thousand odd ways actuaries seem for ever puzzling their brains to find out, but we pooh-pooh accidents, in a monetary sense, in the same cool manner. For instance, there is the Accidental Death Insurance Company, which not only pays our widow a handsome sum in case of our decease in some abrupt unnatural manner, but engages to set us up in weekly clover if a wasp has bitten us, or our favourite dog has given us a spiteful snap. ”