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In this strange ‘goose-weather’, when even the snow and the black-fringed clouds seem like old theatrical properties, dead players’ cast-off rags, ‘the complexion of a murderer in a bandbox, consisting of a large piece of burnt cork, and a coal-black Peruke’, and when the wind is so cold that it seems like an empty theatre’s ‘Sea, consisting of a dozen large waves, the tenth a little bigger than ordinary, and a little damaged’,^[1] I thought of those medicines that were advised for Melancholy, in the Anatomy of this disease, of mummies made medicine, and of the profits of Dust-sifting.

Each tenth wave of the wind blew old memories like melting snowflakes in my face. ‘The Battlebridge Dust and Cinder-Heap’, it is said, existed since the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London. This mountain of filth and cinders afforded food for hundreds of pigs. Russia, hearing in some way of the enormous dust-heap, purchased it for the purpose of rebuilding Moscow after it had been burned. The side of the mountain of dust is now covered by thoroughfares whose names were derived from the popular ministers of that day. And again: ‘Descending the hill, you will find yourself at Battlebridge, among a people as characteristic and looking as local as if the spot had been made for them, and they for the spot. At a glance you will perceive what are the distinctions which make the difference between them and the population you have just passed through ...’

Here comes another memory, colder still, and melting like the snow. ‘The ground on which the Battlebridge Dust-Heap stood, was sold to the Pandemonium Theatre Company. They built a theatre, where that cloud-kissing dust-heap had been. Come, I’ll enter. The interior is somewhat fantastic, but light and pretty too; and filled with Battlebridge beaux and belles. There was no trace of any dustman there.’

There have, too, been humbler profits from the dust. An old woman named Mary Collins, a dust-sifter, giving evidence before a judge, answered when he expressed surprise that she should possess so much property: ‘Oh, your worship, that’s nothing ... we find them among the dust. It is dustman’s law. I have raised houses from my profits made among the dust.’

Whether the inhabitants of those thoroughfares near the dust-heap, from which those who believe in the destiny of mankind were to rebuild Moscow, listened, in the early dawn, to the far-off sounds of what songs the sirens sang, I know not. Perhaps, instead, they listened to the little hopeful articulations rising from the dust—the lip-clicks of the earthworms which are, it may be, amongst the earliest origins of our language. ‘The clicking noises made by earthworms recently discovered by the physiologist, O. Mangold, do not concern us,’ we are told by Herr Georg Schwidetzky, in a profoundly interesting recent book,^[2] ‘for though the ancient race of earthworms can claim kinship with us, our own wormlike ancestors were water animals, and at present we know nothing of their noises. Still, there is a possibility that certain lip-clicks were derived from the noises made by worms.’

Shall we find our cure for Melancholy in this thought of the origin of the kiss between loved one and loved one, mother and child, or in that other statement made in the same book: ‘The Latin word “Aurora” (dawn) can without difficulty be derived from an earlier “ur-ur”, supplemented in two places by A. The changes are, of course, always later editions. Now, phonetically “ur-ur” is the remains of a lemur word, and is a sound characteristic of the whole genus. When we seek information about the lives of these lemurs (who live, today, in the tropics, and especially in Madagascar), we learn to our surprise that they indulge in a kind of morning worship. They sit with raised hands, their bodies in the same position as that of the famous Greek praying boy, warming themselves in the sun.... It is therefore not unwarrantable to assume that Aurora, the Roman goddess of dawn, has her ultimate origin in the morning exercise of a lemur.’

We may find some cure for Melancholy in the contemplation of this, or in the reason given by some scientist for distinguishing Man from Beast. ‘Man’s anatomical preeminence’, we are told, ‘mainly consists in degree rather than in kind, the differences are not absolute. His brain is larger and more complex, and his teeth resemble those of animals in number and pattern, but are smaller, and form a continuous series, and, in some cases, differ in order of succession.’

We have, indeed, many causes for pride and congratulation, and amongst these is the new and friendly interest that is shown between nations. ‘Richard L. Garner’ (again I quote from Herr Schwidetzky) ‘went to the Congo in order to observe gorillas and chimpanzees in their natural surroundings, and to investigate their language. He took a wire cage with him, which he set up in the jungle and from which he watched the apes.’ Unfortunately, the wire cage, chosen for its practical invisibility to imaginative and idealistic minds, always exists during these experiments. ‘Garner, however, tried to teach human words to a little chimpanzee. The position of the lips for the word Mamma was correctly imitated, but no sound came.’ This is interesting, because a recent psycho-analyst has claimed that the reason for the present state of unrest in Europe is that every man wishes to be the only son of a widow. We can see, therefore, that if imbued with a few of the doctrines and speeches of civilization, the innocent, pastoral, and backward nations of the Apes will become as advanced, as ‘civilized’, as the rest of us. Who knows that they may not even come to construct cannon?

To go further in our search for some antidote against Melancholy, we may seek in our dust-heap for some rigid, and even splendid, attitude of Death, some exaggeration of the attitudes common to Life. This attitude, rigidity, protest, or explanation, has been called eccentricity by those whose bones are too pliant. But these mummies cast shadows that do not lie in their proper geometrical proportions, and from these distortions dusty laughter may arise.

Eccentricity exists particularly in the English, and partly, I think, because of that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that is the hallmark and birthright of the British nation.

This eccentricity, this rigidity, takes many forms. It may even, indeed, be the Ordinary carried to a high degree of pictorial perfection, as in the case I am about to relate.

On the 26th of May, 1788, Mary Clark, aged twenty-six, and the mother of six children, was delivered of a child in Carlisle Dispensary. I will not enter into the medical details, but it seems that this interesting infant was ‘full grown, and seemed in perfect health. Her limbs were plump, fine and well proportioned, and she moved them with apparent agility. It appeared to the doctors that her head presented a curious appearance, but this did not trouble them much, for the child behaved in the usual manner, and it was not until the evidence of its death became undeniable, at the age of five days, that these gentlemen discovered that there was not the least indication of either cerebrum, cerebellum, or any medullary substance whatever.’

Mr Kirby, from whose pages I have culled this story, and who seems to have been one of those happy persons who never look about them, but who, when confronted with an indubitable fact, are astonished very easily, concludes with this pregnant sentence: ‘Among the inferences deduced by Dr Heysham from this extraordinary conformation, but advanced with modest diffidence, is this: that the living principle, the nerves of the trunk and extremities, sensation and motion, may exist independent of a brain.’ This is the supreme case of Ordinariness, carried to such a high degree of perfection that it becomes eccentricity. Again, any dumb but pregnant comment on life, any criticism of the world’s arrangement, if expressed by only one gesture, and that of sufficient contortion, becomes eccentricity.

Thus, Miss Beswick, who belongs to the former order of eccentrics, did not resemble the child who was born without brains, whose supreme ordinariness and resemblance to other human beings was proved by the fact that it did not know that it was alive. Miss Beswick’s ordinariness lay in the fact that she could not realize that she was dead, and, as a result, the cold dark shadow of her mummy hung over Manchester in the middle of the eighteenth century. If she was buried in the earth, reasoned Miss Beswick, her death might prove to be only an illusion, a dreamless sleep.... She left, therefore, a large sum of money to Dr Charles White and his two children, Miss Rosa White and her sister, with their cousin Captain White, on condition that the doctor should pay her a visit every morning, after what appeared, to uninstructed persons, to be her death, in order that he might be assured of the reality of this. When her last breath ceased, therefore, this motionless old lady, with her white staring face, black menacing eyes, and thick black eyebrows, was embalmed and laid in the dust of the attic, in the house where she had passed nearly eighty years. Dr White lived below, and the silence and dust of the house was disturbed, from time to time, by the scuttling of his ghostlike children, and every morning by the voice of the Doctor as he examined his mute and watchful patient.

When the Doctor died, the mummified Miss Beswick, that candidate for immortality, was removed to the Lying-in Hospital.

Another eccentric, of quite a different order, was Major Peter Labellière. Described as a Christian patriot and Citizen of the World, he expressed his criticism of the conduct of that planet, by leaving in his will the direction to bury him head downwards, in order, he explained, that ‘as the world was turned topsyturvy, it was fit that he should be so buried that he might be right at last’. He died on June the 6th, 1800, and was buried at Box Hill.

We have, too, Richard Brothers, the sailor, a courageous and tragic figure, who did, in reality, become mad in later life, as a result of the privations he endured for conscience’ sake. This poor humble and bewildered saint resigned his commission because, according to his own statement, he ‘conceived the military life to be totally repugnant to the duties of Christianity, and he could not conscientiously receive the wages of plunder, bloodshed, and murder’. Mr Timbs remarks that ‘this step reduced him to great poverty, and he appears to have suffered much in consequence. His mind was already shaken, and his privations and solitary reflections seem, at length, to have entirely overthrown it. The first instance of his madness appears to have been his belief that he could restore sight to the blind.’ This pitiful hallucination, on the part of Richard Brothers, was called madness. But, according to the writer I have just quoted, the same illusions or hallucinations, in other and more fortunate minds, have been, even if disregarded by those minds, held to be a proof of genius. He says, gravely: ‘It would be easy to mention many examples of illustrious men who have been subject to hallucinations without them having in any way influenced their conduct. Thus, Malebranche declared he heard the voice of God distinctly within him. Descartes, after long confinement, was followed by an invisible person, calling upon him to pursue the search of truth.’

But it is not this unregarded voice alone which, if heeded, would bring us to paradise. Might I not, indeed, write of those persons who, beset by the physical wants of this unsatisfactory world, can, by the force of their belief, satisfy those wants through the medium of the heaven they have created for that purpose. In this heaven, anything may happen; it is a heaven built upon earth, yet subject to no natural laws. It is true that it is invisible to all but its fortunate inhabitants, and that all material needs are gratified spiritually; but this state may be better than to have no heaven at all. Among these heaven-inhabitants were the Shakers, and the foundress of this particular heaven was Ann Lee, who was born at Manchester in 1736. Eventually, the Shakers settled in America, where their fervour, and particularly their tenets, caused a good deal of astonishment, and, in some cases, resentment. The reason for both astonishment and resentment was this: Mrs Lee had received the intimation, straight from heaven, that the outward manifestation of love between the sexes was at the root of this world’s downfall; and, according to some rebels against this theory, matters had come to a pretty pass; since the choice lay between the downfall of the world, and the complete discontinuation of life on that planet. They preferred the downfall, they said—every time! Even Mr Lee, who had at first been frightened by Mrs Lee into respecting the results of this message from heaven, and who for some time followed her about hoping that she might receive counter-orders of some sort, in the end plumped for the downfall, and disappeared, when the Shakers reached America, in the company of a female Shaker whom he had converted to his heresy. Mrs Ray Strachey, in her delightful book Religious Fanaticism (Faber & Faber), gives a pleasing picture of the fervour and practices of these virtuous persons, quoted from the writings of a contemporary member. ‘Heaven’, he writes, ‘is a Shaker Community on a very large scale. Everything in it is spiritual. Jesus Christ is the Head Elder, and Mother Ann the Head Eldress. The buildings are large and splendid, being all of white marble. There are large orchards with all kinds of fruit ... but all is spiritual’ (the italics are mine). Mother Ann, when not in heaven, worked hard as a laundress, so that those large and splendid mansions, those large orchards with all kinds of fruit, must have been a comfort to that worn body, that kind heart. ‘At one of the meetings’, the narrative continues, ‘it was revealed to us that Mother Ann was present, and that she had brought a dozen baskets of spiritual fruit for her children, upon which the Elder invited us all to go forth to the baskets in the centre of the floor, and help ourselves. Accordingly, all stepped forth and went through the motions of taking fruit and eating it. You will wonder if I helped myself to fruit like the rest. No; I had not faith enough to see the baskets or the fruit; and you may think perhaps that I laughed at the scene; but in truth I was so much affected by the general gravity and the solemn faces I saw around me that it was impossible to laugh.’

Other things as well as fruit were sometimes sent as presents, such as spiritual golden spectacles. These heavenly ornaments came in the same way as the fruit, and just as much could be seen of them. We are told that ‘On the second Sunday I spent with the Shakers there was a curious exhibition. After dinner, all the members assembled in the hall and sang two songs. Then the Elder informed them that it was a “gift” for them to march in procession, with their golden instruments playing as they marched to the holy fountain, and wash away all the stains they had contracted by sinful thoughts and feelings; for Mother Ann was pleased to see her children pure and holy. I looked for musical instruments, but as they were spiritual I could not see them. The procession marched two and two into the yard, and round the square, and came to a halt in the centre. During the march, each one made a sound with the mouth, to please him or herself, and at the same time went through the motions of playing on some particular instrument, such as the clarinet, French horn, bass drum, etc.; and such a noise was made that I felt as if I had got among a band of lunatics. Most of the brethren then commenced going through the motions of washing face and hands, but finally some of them tumbled themselves in all over; that is, they rolled on the grass, and went through comical and fantastic capers.

‘During my whole time with the Shakers a revival was going on among the spirits in the invisible world, and much of the members’ time was spent in such performances. It appeared to me that whenever any of the brethren or sisters wanted some fun they “got possessed of spirits”.’

This, indeed, was a less concrete heaven than that modern paradise, that cloud-high world of paper erected by Ivar Kreuger, a heaven which, though it was made of paper, he succeeded in making untransparent, so that none of the financiers who were its saints could catch any glimpse, through those glistening walls, of the rotting physical and spiritual slums beyond it. Indeed, in the little shallow hell which was its foundation, he built the most modern and convenient of all heavens, wherein, instead of Mother Ann’s unheard voice, he had his dummy telephone.

Let us leave the thought of that shallow hell, and turn, for a medicine for our Melancholy, to one case where no heaven, but a complete world whose glory enters, usually, through the medium of five senses, was received through the medium of four senses alone. This conqueror of the material world was named Margaret McAvoy, and she was born at Liverpool on the 28th June, 1800. After she had become totally blind at the age of sixteen, she could distinguish colours by the touch of her fingers. This power of touch, it seemed, varied very materially with circumstances. When her hands were cold, she declared that the faculty was altogether lost, and that it was exhausted, also, by long and unremitting efforts. In these days of the triumph of that great and noble woman Helen Keller, the minor and rather elementary triumphs of Margaret McAvoy may not seem significant: but I append some notes about her experiences, taken down by a committee of doctors and other scientists who examined her, for the reason that education—the mind—played no part in these triumphs. They are due to physical sensibility alone. As against this, we must acknowledge that the description given to the doctors must have been less difficult in her case than in the case of one who was born blind.

‘The red rays of the solar spectrum being thrown upon her hand, she said it appeared as gold. All the colours being thrown on the back of her hand, she distinctly described the different parts of her hand. She marked the moments when the colours became faint, and again vivid, by the occasional passing of a cloud, without being desired to do so. The prismatic colours afforded her the greatest pleasure that she had experienced since her blindness. She never saw a prism in her life. She felt the spectrum warm—the violet rays were the least pleasant. She observed that the red rays appeared warmer and more pleasant than the violet, which opinion coincides with that of Herschel, who proved the great differences of heat-content among the different prismatic rays.

Question: “What sensation did you feel when you first were asked and told the colour of my coat?”

Answer: “At first it was a sensation of astonishment and then of pleasure.”

Question: “Do you prefer any colour?”

Answer: “I prefer the lightest colours, as they give a pleasurable feeling; a sort of glow to my fingers, indeed, all through me. Black gives me rather a shuddering feel.”

Question: “Is the feeling similar when they are enclosed in a phial bottle, or when you feel them through the plain glass?”

Answer: “It is similar, but not exactly so, if the bottle is cold.”

Question: “Do you feel the colour equally well if the glasses are placed before an object?”

Answer: “If the glasses are very close to each other, as if there were only one glass, I feel the colour, but it appears more faint; but if they are placed at a distance from each other, I do not feel the object.”

Question: “If coloured glasses are given to you, what sensation do you feel?”

Answer: “Much the same as when silks are put into my hand.”

Question: “How do you tell glass from stones?”

Answer: “The stones feel harder and more solid, and the glass softer.”

Question: “Did you not recently feel a seal which you declared was neither stone nor glass?”

Answer: “Yes, I did say so, and it felt softer than glass.”

Question: “In what way was the impression made upon the fingers, when you felt the figures reflected from the mirror through the plain glass?”

Answer: “I feel the figures as an image upon each finger.”

Question: “How do figures or letters feel through the glass?”

Answer: “As if they were raised up to the finger.”

Question: “What is the feeling you have of different fluids?”

Answer: “Similar to my feeling of silks.”

Question: “How do you know the difference between water and spirits of wine?”

Answer: “By the spirits of wine feeling warmer than water.”

Question: “How do you know that a person is putting out his hand or nodding to you?”

Answer: “If anyone puts out his hand on entering, or going out of the room, I feel as if air, or wind, was wafted towards me, and I put out mine. If a nod is made pretty near to my face, a similar sensation is felt, but if a finger is pointed at me, or a hand held before me in a gentle manner, I do not feel it unless I am about to read or tell colours, and then I very soon tell if there be any obstruction between the mouth, the nostrils, and the object.”

Question: “How do you calculate the height of persons entering the room?”

Answer: “By feeling, as if less or more wind were wafted towards me, according to the height of the person.”

Question: “If a person passes you quickly, do you feel any additional sensation?”

Answer: “Yes, I feel a greater sense of heat, according to the quickness with which a person passes me, or comes into the room.” ’

From reflecting on this triumph over the material world, we may turn to the thoughts of that heaven of love that survives material death, and of the angels of that heaven. Such an angel appeared in the painted, half-mad guise of poor Sarah Whitehead, known as the Bank Nun.

This solitary and destitute creature, once so happy and rich, not in material comforts only, but in love, was a girl of seventeen when her brother, who was employed at the Bank, took her to live with him. His house was luxurious, for he was living far beyond his means, and Sarah had carriages, and as many dresses as she could want. Nobody knew where he procured his money, but the truth was that he had been speculating like a madman, for, having begun the life of luxury, he did not know how to withdraw from it. Indeed, his most valued friendships, excepting that of one family, who come into the story later, depended upon that luxury; for nothing, as we know, causes a deeper pain (and a greater shrinking from pain) than the sight of a friend suffering from need. When the Bank knew of his speculations, the governors warned him kindly and delicately that gambling on the part of those employed was against the rules of the Bank, and that in the end, if he did not stop speculating, he must be dismissed. Whereupon he lost his temper and, in spite of all that could be said to dissuade him, resigned his situation.

His sister never knew that he had left the Bank, and the luxuries in the house continued; but she did notice that many of the guests who came to their daily dinner-parties were not of the same kind as those who came in former days. They were noisier and were dressed more flashily. Her brother, too, seemed changed. His face was dulled and pale, as if he were starved with cold, although it was burning summer weather; and it seemed, too, as if he were listening, not to what was being said to him, but for some knock upon the door. After a while the dinner-parties ceased. The carriages disappeared. ‘Want’, Messrs Wilson and Caulfield tell us, ‘planted a withering finger where, before, luxury had revelled. Despair seized him and, harried on by his friends, he associated himself with the notorious Roberts, who raised heavy sums of money among the Hebrew tribes of London by representing himself as the heir of the Duke of Northumberland, and he absolutely effected a mortgage on the Duke’s estate, with many other expert forgeries, which, however, could not be proved in a legal way.’ But though he could not be punished by the law, the poor foolish creature whom he had used as a cat’s-paw must die.

Young Whitehead left the house, for the last time, one dawn, before his sister was awake, and without leaving one word of farewell for her, since he hoped to spare her the knowledge of his fate. She waited for him all day, and then, as the evening fell and he did not come, a feeling of mortal illness stole over her, and she crouched near the door, listening for his footstep. But time went by, and still he did not come.... At last, just as the light was fading, some friends came to the house; but they did not seem surprised to find her crouching near the door. They spoke in a queer muttering voice, and their faces were sickly and pale, but they explained that they had not been well. Besides, the light was strange, and this might explain their look. Her brother, they said, had sent a message asking her to go with them to their house in Wine Court, for he could not return home that evening or the next.

Three mornings afterwards, Sarah Whitehead, in that distant street, did not hear the bell of St Sepulchre’s Church tolling for the death of the man who had been hanged for forgery, only three days after he was condemned to death, whilst the man who was guilty went free.

The days passed, and Sarah Whitehead’s friends begged her to stay with them still, for her brother could not return home yet, they said. But his long absence, so strange, so unexplained, with not a word, not a sign to her, preyed upon her spirits. Perhaps, she thought, he had married and forgotten his sister. So at last, unknown to her friends, she left their house and made her way to the Bank, and a young and foolish clerk, taken aback at her appearance, blurted out the whole story of that day which she had spent alone, and the three days that followed. She neither spoke nor wept, but stood looking at the man, whose voice, before that look, died away till it was nothing but a whisper. She stood there, for a very long time, looking at that silent white-faced young man. Then, very slowly, walking on such heavy feet as the dead might use if, after many years of waiting, of numbed, dumb and anguished pain, they might return to us to watch the little details of our life, Sarah Whitehead, aged in this life less than twenty years, gathered up her broken dust, her blood that had turned to stone and, in the space of some hours, those remains of ruin found themselves once more in the home of her friends.

In the days and nights that followed, those wrecked and jagged pieces left by ruin, were drawn together until they formed some kind of despairing prison for a huge world of primitive chaos wherein no form existed, only a period of huge clots of darkness followed by an universe of mad and chattering light that had once been empty waiting sunlight. Then, slowly, her whole being would be invaded by some huge and formless bulk, growing vaster as it loomed out of the blackness and the light, until both blackness and light were blotted out. Then after an aeon that existed not in time, that huge bulk would shrink until it was nothing but a small helpless creature, emitting a terrible broken crying, a hopeless, helpless whimpering as it was torn to pieces. But no sound from that crying reached the world beyond, for the prison that entombed it was too strong, and that prison longed to break, but could not. Yet I have heard that sound raising itself, amid the little tumults of the dust, the lip-clicks of worms that are soon to transform themselves into the speech, and the kiss of mankind; although the busy dusty world is too deafened by the sound of the machines that it has made for the trapping and murdering of time to listen to those sounds that are clear as the songs of angels.

At eight o’clock every morning, Sarah Whitehead would make her way to the Bank, to wait for her brother. She had been left as destitute as any scarecrow in the fields, but she never knew this; for Alderman Birch, we are told, ‘was a true friend to her, and allowed her a small annuity, which was regularly paid to her every week by a lady in the city, who kindly undertook the office to save her the trouble of going out of the city to the house of her benefactor. Her existence depended entirely on the bounty of friends. In a dress of sable, with painted face, and head enveloped with a sort of coronet fancifully decked out with streamers of black crape, and a reticule hung on her arm, she daily attended at the Bank, where she continued loitering about for hours, waiting for her brother, under the belief that he was still employed in the establishment.’

The Governors of the Bank, overcome with pity for her misery, and knowing her condition would have been destitute were it not for the compassion of Alderman Birch and one or two other friends, very frequently gave her money; and so did everyone else who worked at the Bank; but at last, owing to this kindness on their part, her unhappy mad brain conceived the idea that they were trying to keep her out of immense sums of money. She began to make scenes at the Bank, and these, taking place in business hours, became in the end so painful that the authorities were obliged to forbid her to come to the Bank for a time. They did this very unwillingly, since they were full of pity for her; and, as soon as she had promised to be quieter in her behaviour, she was allowed to come again, and could be seen haunting the Bank as before. Only once did she forget her promise, and that was when, walking up to the Lord Rothschild of that time, in the Stock Exchange, she accused him violently of trying to rob one so forlorn as herself and, declaring that he had defrauded her of her whole fortune, she demanded the £2,000 which he had stolen from her. Looking at her with compassion, Lord Rothschild took a half-crown from his pocket, and said, gently, ‘There, then, take that, and don’t bother me now; I’ll give you the other half tomorrow.’ She thanked him quietly and gratefully, and went away without another word.

Every day, for twenty-five years, this ghost might have been seen waiting for that other and beloved ghost, at one or another of the chop-houses near the Bank, for, although he was long in returning, he must come to her soon, she thought. If one, richer than herself, offered her a glass of brandy, she would accept it with a grateful look, but silently; then, having drunk the brandy she would creep out again into Threadneedle Street, to wait for her brother there. For twenty-five years this life of hope continued, but then the appearance of the Bank Nun began to change. Perhaps some ray of dreadful piercing light had pierced the inner darkness of her mind. In any case, though she was now only between fifty-five and sixty years of age, she broke very fast. One day, some time before her death, she did not go to the Bank as usual; and from that time, until she was laid in her grave, her brother, had he come to the Bank to meet her, would have found no faithful loving ghost awaiting him. Something in that ghost had broken, was lost.

This was one of the tales of heaven, hidden in the guise of despair, that I heard rising from the dust, and broken or muffled by that deadness. Who knows, that some strange gesture, some remembered look, may not recall the soul to these mummies lying under the ruins of time, though the dust mutters: ‘Egyptian ingenuity was more unsatisfied, continuing their bodies in sweet consistencies to assist the return of their souls. But all was vanity, feeding the wind, and folly. Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim cureth wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsam.’

[1] ‘List of Theatrical Properties’, Tatler, No 42.

[2] Do You Speak Chimpanzee? published by Messrs Routledge.