Phil Robinson, Under the Sun — Of Tailors (1882)
“ We know the elephant to have been the aggressor; but just as we rejoice with Punch over the murder of his wife, and the affront he offers to the devil, so we applaud the ill-mannered pachyderm. “The elephant,” we read in childhood, “put his trunk into a tailor’s shop,” thrust his nose, some four feet of it, into a tailor’s house, his castle, writing himself down a gross fellow and an impertinent. ”
Phil Robinson, Under the Sun — Of Tailors (1882)
“ Heaven-born, it has bred with monster fiends. True superstition is reverent, and from it, like orchids from an old tree-trunk, spring blossoms of rare beauty But as the same tree feeds noisome fungi, the vampire epiphyte and slab lichens, so from the grand old trunk of superstition has sprung out a growth of unwholesome fictions. ”
Phil Robinson, Under the Sun — Of Tailors (1882)
“ Nature, and she is no fool, has thought good to reproduce the tailor type in bird and insect: then why does man contemn the tailor? Because he sits cross-legged? Then is there not a whole man in Persia. Why should our children be taught in the nursery rhyme, how “nine-and-twenty tailors went out to kill a snail, but not a single one of them dared to touch his tail”? Or why should the world exult over the tailor, whom the elephant, as we learn from Mrs. ”
