The Inspiration

I may here close my introductory speculations with the general remark, that as no human face divine ever passed before the mortal gaze that was not well worth looking at, for some odd reason or other, so no keyhole in Christendom or out of it was ever cut, bored, or chiselled, that was not, for some similar odd reason, worth peeping into or listening at.

—Laman Blanchard, “Confessions of a Keyhole,” New Monthly Magazine & Humorist 69 (1843), 328.