Advertises Soap

I was pleased when I saw in the distance a horseman making the bottom turn of the road that wound down from this castle.

As we approached each other, I saw that he wore a plumed helmet, and seemed to be otherwise clothed in steel, but bore a curious addition also—a stiff square garment like a herald’s tabard. However, I had to smile at my own forgetfulness when I got nearer and read this sign on his tabard:

  "Persimmon’s Soap—All the Prime-Donna Use It.”

That was a little idea of my own, and had several wholesome purposes in view toward the civilizing and uplifting of this nation.  In the first place, it was a furtive, underhand blow at this nonsense of knight errantry, though nobody suspected that but me.  I had started a number of these people out—the bravest knights I could get—each sandwiched between bulletin-boards bearing one device or another, and I judged that by and by when they got to be numerous enough they would begin to look ridiculous; and then, even the steel-clad ass that hadn’t any board would himself begin to look ridiculous because he was out of the fashion.

Secondly, these missionaries would gradually, and without creating suspicion or exciting alarm, introduce a rudimentary cleanliness among the nobility, and from them it would work down to the people, if the priests could be kept quiet.  This would undermine the Church. I mean would be a step toward that.  Next, education—next, freedom—and then she would begin to crumble.  It being my conviction that any Established Church is an established crime, an established slave-pen, I had no scruples, but was willing to assail it in any way or with any weapon that promised to hurt it.  Why, in my own former day—in remote centuries not yet stirring in the womb of time—there were old Englishmen who imagined that they had been born in a free country:  a “free” country with the Corporation Act and the Test still in force in it—timbers propped against men’s liberties and dishonored consciences to shore up an Established Anachronism with.