since my Budget commenced, a little heap of satirical communications, each having a 666 or two; for instance, alluding to my remarks on the spelling of chemistry, he finds the fated number in χιμεια. With these are challenges to explain them, and hints about the end of the world. All these letters have different fantastic seals; one of them with the legend 'keep your temper,'—another bearing 'bank token five pence.' The only signature is a triangle with a little circle in it, which I interpret to mean that the writer confesses himself to be the round man stuck in the threecornered hole, to be explained as in Sydney Smith's joke.
There is a kind of Cabbala Alphabetica which the investigators of the numerals in words would do well to take up: it is the formation of sentences which contain all the letters of the alphabet, and each only once. No one has done it with v and j treated as consonants; but you and I can do it. Dr. Whewell and I amused ourselves, some years ago, with attempts. He could not make sense, though he joined words: he gave me
I gave him the following, which he agreed was 'admirable sense:' I certainly think the words would never have come together except in this way:—
I long thought that no human being could say this under any circumstances. At last I happened to be reading a religious writer—as he thought himself—who threw aspersions on his opponents thick and threefold. Heyday! came into my head, this fellow flings muck beds; he must be a quartz pyx. And then I remembered that a pyx is a sacred vessel, and quartz is a hard stone, as hard as the heart of a religious foe-curser. So that the line is the motto of the ferocious sectarian, who turns his religions vessels into mud-holders, for the benefit of those who will not see what he sees.
I can find no circumstances for the following, which I received from another:—
From other quarters I have the following:—
This might be said in time of haze to the queer little figure in
