Page:A budget of paradoxes (IA cu31924103990507).pdf/177

 since my Budget commenced, a little heap of satirical communications, each having a 666 or two; for instance, alluding to my remarks on the spelling of chemistry, he finds the fated number in . With these are challenges to explain them, and hints about the end of the world. All these letters have different fantastic seals; one of them with the legend 'keep your temper,'—another bearing 'bank token five pence.' The only signature is a triangle with a little circle in it, which I interpret to mean that the writer confesses himself to be the round man stuck in the threecornered hole, to be explained as in Sydney Smith's joke.

There is a kind of Cabbala Alphabetica which the investigators of the numerals in words would do well to take up: it is the formation of sentences which contain all the letters of the alphabet, and each only once. No one has done it with v and j treated as consonants; but you and I can do it. Dr. Whewell and I amused ourselves, some years ago, with attempts. He could not make sense, though he joined words: he gave me

I gave him the following, which he agreed was 'admirable sense:' I certainly think the words would never have come together except in this way:—

I long thought that no human being could say this under any circumstances. At last I happened to be reading a religious writer—as he thought himself—who threw aspersions on his opponents thick and threefold. Heyday! came into my head, this fellow flings muck beds; he must be a quartz pyx. And then I remembered that a pyx is a sacred vessel, and quartz is a hard stone, as hard as the heart of a religious foe-curser. So that the line is the motto of the ferocious sectarian, who turns his religions vessels into mud-holders, for the benefit of those who will not see what he sees.

I can find no circumstances for the following, which I received from another:—

From other quarters I have the following:—

This might be said in time of haze to the queer little figure in