"Here's your dainty spiced gingerbread! that will melt in your mouth like a red hot brickbat, and rumble in your inside like Punch and his wheelbarrow!"--"And here's your Conjuration Compound, that if you bathe a beefsteak in it the over night, it will come out a veal cutlet in the morning!"
The fair was lighted up, and the fun grew "fast and furious" beginning with a loud chorus of acclamation, and so running on through the whole Sol fa of St. Bartlemy delight. There was a blended incarnation of kettle-drums, fifes, fiddles, French horns, rattles, trumpets, and gongs! A giantess of alarming dimensions, beaming with maternal ecstasy! reddened with deeper intensity from her painted show-cloth; and a miniature Lady-monster, a codicil to the giantess! peeped out imploringly from a wine-cooler in which some facetious crowned sconce had ensconced her at an after-dinner merriment to his Queen and Courtiers.
The Mermaid had a long tail to exhibit and tell. Messrs. Rumfiz and Glumfiz, disciples of Zoroaster! began their magical incantations, swallowed knives and forks and devoured blue flame with increased voracity; the Fantoccini footed it with laudable vigour; the Conjuror would have coined his copper nose, only, winked the wag, "I knows and you knows Je n'ose pas!" the lions and tigers roared "Now or never!" and amidst this oratorio of discord and din, Harlequin, Othello, Columbine, Sir John Falstaff, Desdemona, Jim Crow, Cardinal Wolsey, and Scaramouch quadrilled on the outside platform of Richardson's Grand Booth, the gong (his prompter's tintinabulum!) sounding superabundant glorification.
We hastened to this renowned modern temple of the Smithfield drama, which was splendidly illuminated and guarded by tremendous pasteboard Genii, sphinxes, and unicorns, and saw our old acquaintance Bonassus (who looked like one of His Mandingo Majesty's Spanish liquorice guards!) enact Othello and Jim Crow. After much interpolated periphrasis and palaver, Mr. Bigstick darkly intimated that when he ceased to love the "gentle Desdemona," (Miss Teresa Tumbletuzzy!)
At this moment the scenes stuck fast in the grooves--the halves of a house with an interstice of a yard or so between--when a lecturing mechanic bawled out from his sixpenny elysium,