There is a great quantity of
eating and drinking, making love and jilting, laughing and the contrary,
smoking, cheating, fighting, dancing, and fiddling: there are bullies
pushing about, bucks ogling the women, knaves picking pockets, policemen
on the lookout, quacks (other quacks, plague take them!) bawling in
front of their booths, and yokels looking up at the tinselled dancers
and poor old rouged tumblers, while the light-fingered folk are
operating upon their pockets behind. Yes, this is Vanity Fair; not a
moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy. Look at the
faces of the actors and buffoons when they come off from their business;
and Tom Fool washing the paint off his cheeks before he sits down to
dinner with his wife and the little Jack Puddings behind the canvas.
The curtain will be up presently, and he will be turning over head and
heels, and crying, "How are you?"
A man with a reflective turn of mind, walking through an exhibition of
this sort, will not be oppressed, I take it, by his own or other
people's hilarity. An episode of humor or kindness touches and amuses
him here and there,---a pretty child looking at a gingerbread stall;
a pretty girl blushing whilst her lover talks to her and chooses her
fairing; poor Tom Fool, yonder behind the wagon mumbling his bone with
the honest family which lives by his tumbling; but the general
impression is one more melancholy than mirthful.
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