Punch or The London charivari: Punch or The London charivari (5.1843)

FATHER MATHEWS POLLY-PUT-

IT is not generally known that funds are at this moment being
raised for the erection of a Temperance Hall, to be called The
Polly put the kettle on icon, to be devoted to Father Mathew on
his return next year to London. The father proposes to give a series
of lectures, illustrative of the loveliness of Temperance and the
horrors of drunkenness ; to do this, he will take a drop of gin and

water understand us, not mixed—in which he will show the separate

rewards of sobriety and intoxication.

Our readers will remember that, a short time since, a certain Pro-
fessor, by means of the Solar Microscope, showed—and shocked by

showing the good people of London the monsters that inhabit a

single drop of water. We witnessed with horror the exhibition,
which we verily believe sent dow/i the New River shares for some
time fifty per cent. ; for in one drop of what we thought pare iiuid,; be a few of the glories of the Water-Drop—and only a few.

we saw, revealed by the microscope, insects large as lobsters, and
a thousand times more ugly ; creatures with claws—attorneys of
the water-butt, devouring their smaller brethren. That little drop
of water, like England, seemed absolutely borne down by over-
population.

Well, thought we, Father Mathew, by his microscope, will show
a Drop of Water after another fashion. In that shall we behold
mermaids, beautiful as angels, with a wedding-ring in one hand, and
a hundred-pound-note in another : bags of money, swimming about
with fins, like the fins of gold-fish, to them. Then shall we see the
happy family of a mechanic, his wife, and ten children (four in red
morocco shoes), at tea, with a handsome silver watch upon the table,
and all the volumes of Punch upon the book-shelf! And these wili