In vain, we endeavor to throw a sunny and joyous air over our picture of this period; nothing passes before our fancy but a crowd of sad-visaged people, moving duskily through a dull gray atmosphere.
“Reader, I was born and cried / Crackt so, smelt so, and so died, / Like to Caesar’s was my death, / He in senate lost his breath; / And alike interr’d doth lie, / Thy famous Romulus and I. / And, at last, like Flora fair, / I left the commonwealth mine air.”
John Hoskyns | Epitaph on the Fart in the Parliament House