The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-12-10 00:00:00

A NOTE UPON READING-ST. CAVANAGH !

(BY AST OCCASIONAL CONTRIBUTOR.)
—" And so ended the adventures of Bernard Cavanagh,
the pretended teetotal abstainer from all kinds of meat and
drink whatsoever" !—We begin at the end—we will not say
the wrong end—for if every knave were to have his due, far
should we be from saying that this fasting impostor did not
meet his desert at the hands of the magistrates of Reading.
But there was something in the wind-up of the history—and
we own we have been troubled with some scruples on the
subject. Perhaps we may find relief by giving them utter-
ance in the Standard; at all events we shall try.
We were startled then, in the first place, by finding that
the knave who had freely practised his.arts in the great towns
of Dublin and Liverpool, and even in the huge " wen" itself.
and passed unscathed, the several ordeals of magistracy
therein, should have been reserved for capture and commit-
tal in the comparatively obscure locality of Reading. We
feared that the worshipful justices of this borough had taken
too much upon themselves ; we were not sure of the sound-
ness of their law, and we concluded either that the well-paid
functionaries of Liverpool, Dublin, and London, had been
singularly remiss, or that the "authorities" of the borough
aforesaid had been remarkably vigilant, astute, and attentive.
But it may perhaps he said, a rogue is no rogue till he is
found out, and that neither in Liverpool, Dublin, nor Lon-
don, did any such curious, pertinacious, officious, detections,
and obstinate old ferret of a person present him or herselfon
the stage, as the female at Reading where searching optics in
disguise could deceive, who knew her man through the patch
on his eye, the kerchief tied round his head, and other vain
attempts to mark his saintship's mug—and, finally, never let
go the " patch" till she had convicted him, to the entire sa-
tisfaction of an admiring world, of buying bacon and saveloys
with villainous intent to devour the same, and satisfy the
cravings of his hunger, like an ordinary mortal! The Ro-
man capital was saved by the cackling of a goose, and Read-
ing owes a prodigious degree of renown to this lynx-eyed fe-
male ; but her evidence, after all, was deficient in one par-
ticular.

She did not SEE the dissembler eat the saveloys, and chew
the bacon with his own undissembled jaws. Here was a
hiatus of which the rogue took immediate advantage, saying,
that though he bought, he never did eat the articles of
which he confessed himself guilty of purchasing; so that,
after all, the proof of his being an eater, like other men,
rests only upon circumstantial evidence. It is true that
surgeon Bulley, of Reading, did afterwards most sa-
tisfactorily, and as it were, by the strength of his horns,
ascertain that the seraphin St. Bernard could no more
do without food—was, in short, no more a chamelion than
the learned lancet himself ; this he brought out to a demon-
stration ; but what then ?—is not this something like hang-
ing a man first and trying him afterwards ? The unfortunate
saint had, at this time already suffered martyrdom on the
wheel for the very crime of whose commission the evidence
would appear to have been still incomplete !
Now, we do not mean to say that the Reading bench did
not draw a legitimate conclusion from the premisesestablished
before thaw, which, we think, amounted to somewhere about
these, viz.,—that Bernard and his company had visited their
good town us vagabonds and strollers—much like a company
of poor players who " strut and fret their hour upon the
stage ", actually, and not figuratively, or a band of itine-
rant mountebanks, showmen, tumblers, or others who live
upon the wonder—having propensities of our common nature
—that he offered himself, in consideration of a small:quodam
honorarium, to the gaze of all curious Readingites—as the
' most wonderful fasting man as vos ever seen in those parts'
—that he was drawing houses—making fools, and filling his
coffers by this device ; and that while carrying on this trade.
and " doing the curiosity" with great effect, as a teetotal
abstainer from all natural sustenance, he was suddenly caught
in the act of secretly, and, as it were, furtively, buying sub-
stantial edibles with a view to their consumption by and upon
his own proper person—thereby proving the fallaciousness,
or, perhaps, we should say, the verity of his pretences as a
genuine Romish saint; from all which sayingsand doings the
worshipful bench declared the aforesaid Bernard and his
company to be incorrigible cheats, rogues, and vagabonds,
and pronounced upon them a sentence of board and lodging
at her majesty's expense, with a quantum sufficit of exercise
on the treadmill to aid digestion, and promote sleep.
Now, we neither dispute the premises aforesaid, nor would
we raise any cavil (as we have intimated), concerning the
strict justice of the conclusion, per se ; our difficulty arises
from what appears to us to be the inequality of the law ; we
have no objection to the penance appointed unto the pre-
tended lying wonder of the Pope's church ; but we are not

leased that he should stand alone in his glory. Out upon
let the law be equal ; whip us
St. John Lings, the Morri-
.

gabonds, say we ; but
vanaghs, but let not tt

ns, and the Mesme

Bernard Cavan

he was the creature of a system—'
in one of its dark phases. Thai

ordinary powers of abstinenc

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covered i