Port Royal commercial and Beaufort County Republican. [volume] (Port Royal, S.C.) 1873-1874, 1873-11-27
GUY FaWkes.

At midnight. on the 5th of Novem-
ber, in the year of grace one thousand
six hundred and five, Guido Fawkes,
gentleman" was discovered, "booted
and spurred," in the vicinity of st.
Stephens Chapel, having on his person
|" three matches, Under box, and
dark lantern;" and purposing, by
means of gunpowder, to blow up, says
King James, "the whole nobility, the
most part of the knights and gentry"
besides "the whole judges of the land,
with most of the lawyers, and the whole
clerks" For this one discretion, Guido
Fawkes has forfeited his gentility, and
become proverb of wickedness. In
boyhood, we looked upon Guido
Fawkes, gentleman, as one little
lower than the devil: he had four
horns and dozen tails. Years that
bring the philosophic mind" have di-
vested him of these excrescences and
appendages, and Guido Fawkes now
appears to matured charities merely
person of singularly eccentric dispo-
sition.
Some fve-and-twenty years ago it
was the patriotic custom Of the author
tiles of an Isle of Shepley dockyard to
bestow upon their apprentices a few
wagon loads of resinous timber, that
bonfire worthy of the cause it celebrated
might be kindled from the public purse.
that the efigy of the arch-fend Guy
might be consumed in fire three times
hotter than the fire of furnace. Such
fierce liberality was not lost upon the
towns people their ardor in the burn
ing business smouldered not !; every
man subscribed his plank or log and,
from the commission in his uniform to
Bobby in his pinafore, the 5th of No
vember glowed, in the calendar of their
minds, pillar of fire. For month
before the day, the coming anniversary
busted the thoughts of boyish execu-
cutioners, resolved to show their patri-
otism in the appointment of their Guy
in the grotesque iniquity of his face,
in the cumbrous state of his large arm
chair. To beg clothes from door to
door was then the business Of every
lover of Church and State. To ask for
coat, a pair of breeches, shirt (the
frill could be made of paper, hose, and
hat, was not mendicity, but the fulfill
ment of high social duty.
Guy Fawkes would at length be
dressed. A philosopher might have
found good matter IN his eleemosynary
suit. In the coat of the bloodthirsty
wretch, he might have recognized the
habit of Scum, the slopseller, quiet
trader ahoat of 910, 900 in the vest of
the villainous rufian, the discarded
waistcoat of Smallgrog, the honest
landlord of little home for sailors (;
in the stockings of the atrocious mis-
creant, the home of the equitable wee
vii, biscuit contractor to his Majesty's
fleet; while for the bother of the fiend-
like efigy, Guy Fawkes was to be e1-
hibited, and afterwards burned, in the
broad-toed shoes Of that best of men,
Trap, the town attorney.
The chair, too, in which Guy Fawkes
sat, might it not have some day en-
shrined q Justice of the Peace !? and
the lantern, fixed in the hand of the
diabolical, lynx-eyed monster, might it
not have been the property of the most
amiable and most somnolent of the
Blue Town watchmen /? And then the
mask fixed upon the efigy, or the lump
Of clay kneaded into human features,
and horribly or delicately expressed,
according to the benevolent art of the
makers, might not the same visor have
been worn by perfect gentleman, with
considerable advantage, at a masquer-
ade-might not the clay nose and
mouth of the loathsome traitor have
borne an accidental likeness to the very
pink of patriots? Let philosophy pom
der well on Guy Fawkes.-From Jer-
rolds "Fireside Saints and Other
Papers," in press by Lee & Shepard.