The Illustrated Christmas Cracker by John Julius Norwich

Author:John Julius Norwich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2013-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

I love all waste

And solitary places, where we taste

The pleasure of believing what we see

Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be:

And such was this wide ocean, and this shore

More barren than its billows.

Shelley

How beautiful, I have often thought, would be the names of many of our vilest diseases, were it not for their disagreeable associations. My old friend Jenny Fraser sends me this admirable illlustration of the fact by J. C. Squire:

So forth there rode Sir Erysipelas

From good Lord Goitre’s castle, with the steed

Loose on the rein: and, as he rode, he mused

On Knights and Ladies dead: Sir Scrofula,

Sciatica of Glanders and his friend,

Stout Sir Colitis out of Aquitaine,

And Impetigo, proudest of them all,

Who lived and died for blind Queen Cholera’s sake:

Anthrax, who dwelt in the enchanted wood

With those princesses three, tall, pale and dumb,

And beautiful, whose names were music’s self,

Anaemia, Influenza, Eczema.

And then, once more, the incredible dream came back

How long ago, upon the fabulous shores

Of far Lumbago, all on a summer’s day,

He and the maid Neuralgia, they twain,

Lay in a flower-crowned mead, and garlands wove

Of gout, and yellow hydrocephaly,

Dim palsies, and pyrrhoea, and the sweet

Myopia, bluer than the summer sky:

Agues, both white and red, pied common cold,

Cirrhosis, and that wan, faint flower of love

The shepherds call dyspepsia. – Gone! all gone!

There came a Knight: he cried ‘Neuralgia!’

And never a voice to answer. Only rang

O’er cliff and battlement and desolate mere

‘Neuralgia!’ in the echo’s mockery.

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