Household Words Volume 17 details from bookadda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1858 Excerpt: ...and gorgeous palaces, pyramids and partheuons, are sapped and pulverised; how the pomp, the great view, the show, are but of the hour only, unenduring, evanescent, --such would be but a stale theme for the lay preacher to dwell on. And yet it is hard that Packwood, at least Packwood, should not live Why is it to be an eternal dispensation, that the good men do, shall be always interred with their bones? That because they chauce to be unsung, uhhymned--quia vate carent sacro, as the heathen has it--they shall sleep in Lethe? There have lived braves belore Agamemnon; fighting men belore Napoleon; thinkers, workers, doers, all suffering from this unequal law, all because fate has not found them a chronicler. Iniquitous dispensation Weave then a fresh garland of immortelles, and lay them lightly on the grave of Packwood I Shall we then sing Packwood, whom our fathers delighted to honour, as a doer of miracles in his own line, the work of whose hands came gratefully to ttieir cuticles? And shall W-j not glorify him, too? Who then was Packwood 1 What his speciality? The Mechi-Moses, or Moses-Mechi, of his day, supposing there could be a duality of those distinguished artistes. Mechi for his ware, Moses for his verse. Sweeter than honey flowed the verse of Packwood. His speciality was strops. He sang strops Mr. Carlyle has written it down that the end of the last century was a great season for influx of charlatans. Too harsh a term, perhaps, for men who simply commended their own worth, and were their own showmen, as it were. Few care to be their brethren's showman. Packwood was but one of the throng, --fellow to Solomon and others. The world knows of Solomon by this time, --Solomon who introduced to it the famous healing Balm of Gilead. Doctor Solomon had that Is...