aintance starts at sudden
alteration, hinting in such surprise, decay and the final tomb. He
grows old with no former intimates--churchyard voices--crying 'How
you're altered.' How many a man might have been a truer husband, a
better father, firmer friend, more valuable citizen, had he, when
arrived at legal maturity, cut off, say--an inch of his nose. This
inch--only an inch!--would have destroyed the vanity of the very
handsomest face, and so driven the thought of a man from a vulgar
looking-glass, a piece of shop crystal--and more, from the fatal
mirrors carried in the heads of women, to reflect heaven knows how
many coxcombs who choose to stare into them--driven the man to the
glass of his own mind. With such small sacrifice he might have been
a philosopher. Thus considered, how many a coxcomb may be within an
inch of a sage!"

In another passage of the same book we read--

"Was there not Whitlow, beadle of the parish of St. Scraggs? What a
man-beast was Whitlow! how would he, like an avenging ogre, scatter
apple-women! how would he foot little boys guilty of peg-tops and
marbles! how would he puff at a beggar--puff like the picture of
the north wind in a spelling book! What a huge heavy purple face he
had, as though all the blood of his body were stagnant in his
cheeks! and then when he spoke, would he not growl and snuffle like
a dog? How the parish would have hated him, but that the parish
heard there was a Mrs. Whitlow; a small fragile woman, with a face
sharp as a penknife, and lips that cut her words like scissors! and
what a forlorn wretch was Whitlow with his head brought once a
night to the pillow! poor creature! helpless, confused; a huge
imbecility, a stranded whale! Mrs. Whitlow talked and talked; and
there was not an apple-woman that in Whitlow's sufferings was not
avenged: not a beggar that, thinking of the beadle at midnight,
might not in his compassion have forgiven the beadle of the day.
And in this punishment we acknowledge a grand, a beautiful
retribution. A Judge Jeffreys in his wig is an abominable tyrant;
yet may his victims sometimes smile to think what Judge Jeffreys
suffers in his night cap!"

It is almost unnecessary to observe that the writer of Mrs. Caudle's
Curtain Lectures was somewhat severe upon the fair sex. His idea of