Again--
"Would not John Dory's name have died with him, and so been long
ago dead as a door-nail, if a grotesque likeness for him had not
been found in the fish, which being called after him, has
immortalized him and his ugliness? But if John Dory could have
anticipated this sort of immortality when he saw his own face in
the glass, he might very well have 'blushed to find it fame.'"
He is fond of introducing quaint old legends--
"There are certain Rabbis who affirm that Eve was not taken out of
Adam's side, but that Adam had originally been created with a tail,
and that among the various experiments and improvements which were
made in form and organization before he was finished, the tail was
removed as an inconvenient appendage, and of the excrescence or
superfluous part, which was then lopped off, the woman was formed."
While on this subject he says that Lady Jekyll once asked William Wiston
"Why woman was formed out of man's rib rather than out of any other part
of his body?" Wiston scratched his head and replied, "Indeed, Madam, I
do not know, unless it be that the rib is the most crooked part of the
body."
Southey gives a playbill of the Drolls of Bartholomew Fair in the time
of Queen Anne--
"At Crawley's booth over against the Crown Tavern in Smithfield,
during the time of the Bartholomew Fair, will be presented a little
opera, called the 'Old Creation of the World,' yet newly revived,
with the addition of 'Noah's Flood.
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