Professing Philanthropist. Then, you were to pay up your
subscription, get your card of membership and your riband and
medal, and were evermore to live upon a platform, and evermore to
say what Mr. Honeythunder said, and what the Treasurer said, and
what the sub-Treasurer said, and what the Committee said, and what
the sub-Committee said, and what the Secretary said, and what the
Vice-Secretary said. And this was usually said in the unanimously-
carried resolution under hand and seal, to the effect: 'That this
assembled Body of Professing Philanthropists views, with indignant
scorn and contempt, not unmixed with utter detestation and loathing
abhorrence'--in short, the baseness of all those who do not belong
to it, and pledges itself to make as many obnoxious statements as
possible about them, without being at all particular as to facts.

The dinner was a most doleful breakdown. The philanthropist
deranged the symmetry of the table, sat himself in the way of the
waiting, blocked up the thoroughfare, and drove Mr. Tope (who
assisted the parlour-maid) to the verge of distraction by passing
plates and dishes on, over his own head. Nobody could talk to
anybody, because he held forth to everybody at once, as if the
company had no individual existence, but were a Meeting. He
impounded the Reverend Mr. Septimus, as an official personage to be
addressed, or kind of human peg to hang his oratorical hat on, and
fell into the exasperating habit, common among such orators, of
impersonating him as a wicked and weak opponent. Thus, he would
ask: 'And will you, sir, now stultify yourself by telling me'--and
so forth, when the innocent man had not opened his lips, nor meant
to open them. Or he would say: 'Now see, sir, to what a position
you are reduced. I will leave you no escape. After exhausting all
the resources of fraud and falsehood, during years upon years;