Who dares gaze on him with irreverend Eyes?

"Wert thou the owner of this good freight friend, thou might find its presence less uncomfortable than thou now appearest to think," returned the literal peasant, who had no humour for raillery, and to whom a jest on the subject of property had that sort of irreverend character that popular opinion and holy sayings have attached to waste.

Our great essayist has exalted her into a Deity, and invested her with a mythological charm, which makes us doubt her existence; so that to laugh at her can be no more irreverend than to sneer at the belief in apparitions, a joke which is very generally enjoyed in these good days of spick-and-span philosophy.