THE RETORT COURTEOUS.

Observer, Volume 4, Issue 96, 15 July 1882, Page 275

THE RETORT COURTEOUS.

,Mr J.O. Wilkes called on Dr Wallis the other day and paid him 255., for the use of that venerable shedifice which the doctor by some mental "hallucination or process of " unconscious cerebration," persists in dignifying with, the title of "Athenseum." Shades of Minerva ! Imagine the immortal philosophers, poets and rhetoricians of classic Athens with its noble architecture, its Parthenon, and its masterpieces of Phidias and the great sculptors, rising from their graves to behold a thing designated an Athenccum which they would not condescend to use as a stable ! The pawky doctor, while lovingly fingering the bawbees, took occasion to deliver a homily to the apostle of Freethought, on the awful sinf ulness of desecrating that venerable and sacred pile by permitting Mr Denton to teach babes and sucklings the humiliating doctrine of the descent of man from the ape. Eti passant, it may be mentioned that Mr Denton, in his lecture to the children of Newton City East school never referred in any way to that particular theory, but confined his remarks to interesting and instructive elementary teachings adapted to the minds of his hearers, and not calculated to drive an average Sunday school teacher into paroxysms of bewildered indignation.

But the thing that agitated the doctor's soul to its abyssmal depths was the solemn fact that a sum of £10 had been paid to Mr Denton for that single discourse. Smarting under the recent humiliation of an audience consisting of five old ladies, seven or eight puzzled Scotchmen, sixteen small boys, and a sprinkling of deadheads — the ilotsom and jetsom of bygone tea-fuddles — with a nett result to the exchequer of a handful of threepenny bits, a battered sixpence, and a button — the contrast was too severe on the doctor's feelings, and he gave vent to all the bitterness of his soul in a wail of grief, " Why I would have given as good a lecture for ten shillings," he moaned. All the warlike ardour of J. 0. W.s soul gleamed in his eyes as he retorted, "Yes, but it wouldn't be worth as many pence," and then, while he had his adversary on the hip, he followed up the attack with the remark that after all he had reason to believe that there might be something in the theory that man was descended from a lower order of animals, inasmuch as he had seen some persons hold forth in that very building who would not reflect credit on any order of creation. The doctor passed, and J. 0. W. quietly scored a march.