Roundabout Papers - Penn State University

Thackerayyou feel disappointed? During your walk you have beenmaking up your mind that that cold meat, with moderationand a pickle, will be a very sufficient dinner:you have accustomed your thoughts to it; and here, inplace of it, is a turkey, surrounded by coarse sausages,or a reeking pigeon-pie or a fulsome roast-pig. I haveknown many a good and kind man made furiously angryby such a contretemps. I have known him lose histemper, call his wife and servants names, and a wholehousehold made miserable. If, then, as is notoriouslythe case, it is too dangerous to balk a man about hisdinner, how much more about his article? I came to mymeal with an ogre-like appetite and gusto. Fee, faw,fum! Wife, where is that tender little Princekin? Haveyou trussed him, and did you stuff him nicely, and haveyou taken care to baste him and do him, not too brown,as I told you? Quick! I am hungry! I begin to whet myknife, to roll my eyes about, and roar and clap my hugechest like a gorilla; and then my poor Ogrina has to tellme that the little princes have all run away, whilst shewas in the kitchen, making the paste to bake them in!I pause in the description. I won’t condescend to reportthe bad language, which you know must ensue, whenan ogre, whose mind is ill regulated, and whose habitsof self-indulgence are notorious, finds himself disappointedof his greedy hopes. What treatment of his wife,what abuse and brutal behavior to his children, who,though ogrillons, are children! My dears, you may fancy,and need not ask my delicate pen to describe, the languageand behavior of a vulgar, coarse, greedy, largeman with an immense mouth and teeth, which are toofrequently employed in the gobbling and crunching ofraw man’s meat.And in this circuitous way you see I have reached mypresent subject, which is, Ogres. You fancy they are deador only fictitious characters—mythical representativesof strength, cruelty, stupidity, and lust for blood? Thoughthey had seven-leagued boots, you remember all sortsof little whipping-snapping Tom Thumbs used to eludeand outrun them. They were so stupid that they gaveinto the most shallow ambuscades and artifices: witnessthat well-known ogre, who, because Jack cut open135