Essex County herald. [volume] (Guildhall, Vt.) 1873-1964, 1873-11-15

AT midnight. on the 9th of Novem-
Der, in the year of grace one thousand
six hundred and five, Guido Fawkes,
gentleman, was discovered, "booted
and spured," in the vicinity of ST.
Stephens Chapel, having on his person
three matches, finder box, and a
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, Z"
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 a proverb of wickedness. In
boyhood, we looked upon Guido
Fawkes, gentleman, as one a 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 a
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 q
bonfire worthy of the cause it celebrated
might be kindled from the public purse
that the effigy of the arch-fend Guy
might be consumed in fire three times
hotter than the fire of a furnace. Such
fierce iberality 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 9TH of No
vember glowed, in the calendar of then
minds, q 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 tC
door was then the business of every
lover of Church and State. To ask fol
a coat, pair of breaches, shirt (tht
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 bt
dressed. A philosopher might have
\ found good matter IN his eleemosynary
suit. In the coat of the bloodthirsty
wretch, he might have recognized thu
habit of Scum, the slopseller, quie
trader afoat of 10000 in the vest O
the villainous rufian, the discarded
waistcoat of Smallgrog, the homes
landlord of a little home for sailors
in the stockings of the atrocious mis-
creant, the home of the equitable wee
vii, biscuit contractor to his Majesty
fleet while for the bother of the fiend
like effigy, Guy Fawkes was to be ex
hibited, and afterwards burned, in tn
broad-toed shoes of that best of men
Trap, the town attorney.
The chair, too, in which Guy Fawke
sat, might it not have some day en-
shrined Justice of the Peace an,
the lantern, fixed in the hand of tn
diabolical, lynx-eyed monster, might
, not have been the property of the mos
amiable and most somnolent of tn
, Blue Town watchmen And then th
mask fixed upon the efigy, or the lum]
of clay kneaded into human features
, and horribly or delicately expressed
according to the benevolent art of tn
makers, might not the same visor hav
, been worn by perfect gentleman, wit
considerable advantage, at masquer
{ ade-might not the clay nose an
, mouth of the loathsome traitor hav
: borne an accidental likeness to the yer
? pink of patriots /? Let philosophy por
! der well on Guy Fawkes. Prom Je'
roLd's "Fireside Saints and Othe
Papers," in press by Lee &c Shepard.