"Mr. Escot.-I only question, Sir, where I expect a reply; which, from things that have no existence, I am not visionary enough to anticipate. "Mr. Panscope.- I beg leave to observe, Sir, that my language was perfectly perspicuous and etymologically correct; and I conceive I have demonstrated what I shall now take the liberty to say in plain terms that all your opinions are extremely absurd. "Mr. Escot.—I should be sorry, Sir, to advance any opinion that you would not think absurd. "Mr. Panscope.- Death and fury, Sir"Mr. Escot - Say no more, Sir. "Mr. Panscope.-Apology, Sir! That apology is quite sufficient. "Mr. Escot. Even so, Sir. You have lost your temper, which I consider equivalent to a confession that you have the worst of the argument." In the evening Mr. Milestone shows his portfolio, containing designs for the improvement of Lord Littlebrain's park, to Mr. Chromatic's daughters and the Squire. Here is a part of the conversation which ensues: "Mr. Milestone.-This is the summit of a hill covered, as you perceive, with wood and with those mossy stones scattered at random under the trees. “Miss Tenorina.-What a delightful spot to read in on a summer's day! The air must be so pure, and the wind must sound so divinely in the tops of those old pines! "Mr. Milestone.- Bad taste, Miss Tenorina; bad taste, I assure you. Here is the spot improved. The trees are cut down, the stones are cleared away; this is an octagonal pavilion exactly on the centre of the summit, and there you see Lord Littlebrain on the top of the pavilion enjoying the prospect with a telescope. "Squire Headlong.- Glorious, egad! "Mr. Milestone.- Here is. a rugged mountainous road, leading through impervious shades: the ass and the four goats characterise a wild uncultured scene. Here, as you perceive, it is totally changed into a beautiful gravel-road, gracefully curving through a belt of limes: and there is Lord Littlebrain driving four-in-hand. "Squire Headlong.— Egregious, by Jupiter! "Mr. Milestone. Here is Littlebrain Castle, a Gothic, moss-grown structure, half-bosomed in trees. Near the casement of that turret is an owl peeping from the ivy. "Squire Headlong. And devilish wise he looks. "Mr. Milestone. Here is the new house, without a tree near it, standing in the midst of an undulating lawn: a white, polished, angular building, reflected to a nicety in this waveless lake: and there you see Lord Littlebrain looking out of the window. "Squire Headlong.— And devilish wise he looks too. You shall cut me a giant before you go." Is there not something of the flavor of Sheridan in these colloquies ? The next day, after breakfast, the three philosophers, the optimist, the pessimist, and the "statu-quo-ite," as Peacock calls him, take a walk, during which a discussion arises about manufactories in their relation to human happiness, which I give, as a sample of the argumentation these three are constantly carrying on: "Mr. Foster.-What think you of the little colony we have just been inspecting; a city, as it were, in its cradle? "Mr. Escot. With all the weakness of infancy, and all the vices of maturer age, I confess the sight of these manufactories, which have, suddenly sprung up, like fungous excrescences, in the bosom of these wild and desolate scenes, impressed me with as much horror and amaze ment as the sudden appearance of the stocking manufactory struck into the mind of Rousseau, when, in a lonely valley of the Alps, he had just congratulated himself on finding a spot where man had never been. "Mr. Foster. The manufacturing system is not yet purified from some evils which necessarily attend it, but which I conceive are greatly overbalanced by their concomitant advantages. Contemplate the vast sum of human industry to which this system so essentially contributes ; seas covered with vessels, ports resounding with life, profound researches, scientific inventions, complicated mechanism, canals carried over deep valleys and through the bosoms of hills; employment and existence thus given to innumerable families, and the multiplied comforts and conveniences of life diffused over the whole community. "Mr. Escot. You present to me a complicated picture of artificial life, and require me to admire it. Seas covered with vessels; every one of which contains two or three tyrants, and from fifty to a thousand slaves, ignorant, gross, perverted, and active only in mischief. Ports resounding with life: in other words, with noise and drunkenness, the mingled din of avarice, intemperance, and prostitution. Profound researches, scientific inventions: to what end? To contract the sum of human wants? to teach the art of living on a little? to disseminate independence, liberty, and health? No; to multiply factitious desires, to stimulate depraved appetites, to invent unnatural wants, to heap up incense on the shrine of luxury, and accumulate expedients of selfish and ruinous profusion. Complicated machinery: behold its blessings. Twenty years ago, at the door of every cottage sate the good woman with her spinning-wheel: the children, if not more profitably employed than in gathering heath and sticks, at least laid in a stock of health and strength to sustain the labors of maturer years. Where is the spinning wheel now, and every simple and insulated occupation of the industrious cottager? Wherever this boasted machinery is established, the children of the poor are deathdoomed from their cradles. Look for one moment at midnight into a cotton-mill, amidst the smell of oil, the smoke of lamps, the rattling of wheels, the dizzy and complicated motions of diabolical mechanism: contemplate the little human machines that keep play with the revolutions of the iron work, robbed at that hour of their natural rest, as of air and exercise by day; observe their pale and ghastly features, more ghastly in that baleful and malignant light, and tell me if you do not fancy yourself on the threshold of Virgil's hell, where Continuò auditæ voces, vagitus et ingens, As Mr. Escot said this, a little rosy-cheeked girl with a basket of heath on her head came tripping down the side of one of the rocks on the left. The force of contrast struck even on the phlegmatic spirit of Mr. Jenkison, and he almost inclined for a moment to the doctrine of deterioration. Mr. Escot continued: "Nor is the lot of the parents more enviable. Sedentary victims of unhealthy toil, they have neither the corporeal energy of the savage, nor the mental acquisitions of the civilised man. Mind, indeed, they have none, and scarcely animal life. They are mere automata, component parts of the enormous machines which administer to the pampered appetites of the few, who consider themselves the most valuable portion of a state, because they consume in indolence the fruits of the earth, and contribute nothing to the benefit of the community. "Mr. Fenkison. That these are evils cannot be denied; but they have their counterbalancing advantages. That a man should pass the day in a furnace and the night in a cellar, is bad for the individual, but good for others who enjoy the benefit of his labor." Here, it will be perceived, there is no longer any trace of the spirit of Sheridan, but we have risen to a different atmosphere of thought, and have a taste of such politico-economical discussion as appeared at a later day in Bulwer's England and the English, mingled with something of that glowing rhetoric which we find in the latter-day Utopian writings of the great rhapsodist, Ruskin. The philosophers are interrupted further on in their talk by a tremendous explosion, which they discover to have been caused by Mr. Milestone's blowing up some rocks near a ruined tower in the Squire's grounds, as the first step towards the prosecution of his plan for improving the scenery by applying the principles of picturesque gardening. At the same time, Mr. Cranium happens to be on the top of the tower, and in his sudden fright at the explosion springs into the air. Fortunately, he is on his descent lodged in the boughs of an ash and gently dropped thence into the waters below, whence he is rescued by Mr. Escot. Now Mr. Escot had been a lover of his daughter, frowned upon by the father; and the next chapter gives his reflections during the ensuing night on the attitude a philospher should maintain toward the passion of love, with an interview he had the next morning with the sexton of a little mountain-chapel in the neighborhood, which results in his procuring from the sexton the skull of Cadwallader. A few chapters more bring us to Mr. Cranium's phrenological lecture, parts of which may amuse the reader: "Physiologists have been much puzzled to account for the varieties of moral character in men, as well as for the remarkable similarity of habit and disposition in all the individual animals of every other respective species. A few brief sentences, perspicuously worded and scientifically arranged, will enumerate all the characteristics of a lion, or a tiger, or a wolf, or a bear, or a squirrel, or a goat, or a horse, or an ass, or a rat, or a cat, or a hog, or a dog; and whatever is physiologically predicated of any individual lion, tiger, wolf, bear, squirrel, goat, horse, ass, hog, or dog, will be found to hold true of all lions, tigers, wolves, bears, squirrels, goats, horses, asses, hogs, and dogs, whatsoever. Now, in man the very reverse of this appears to be the case; for he has so few distinct and characteristic marks which hold true of all his species, that philosophers in all ages have found it a task of infinite difficulty to give him a definition. Hence one has defined him to be a featherless biped, a definition which is equally applicable to an unfledged fowl; another, to be an animal which forms opinions, than which nothing can be more inaccurate, for a very small number of the species form opinions, and the remainder take them upon trust, without investigation or inquiry. "Again, man has been defined to be an animal that carries a stick: an attribute which undoubtedly belongs to man only, but not to all men always; though it uniformly characterises some of the graver and more imposing varieties, such as physicians, oran-outangs, and lords in waiting. "We cannot define man to be a reasoning animal, for we do not dispute that idiots are men; to say nothing of that very numerous description of persons who consider themselves reasoning animals, and are so denominated by the ironical courtesy of the world, who labor, nevertheless, under a very gross delusion in that essential particular. "It appears to me that man may be correctly defined an animal, which, without any peculiar or distinguishing faculty of its own, is, as it were, a bundle or compound of faculties of other animals, by a distinct enumeration of which any individual of the species may be satisfactorily described. "Here is the skull of a Newfoundland dog. You observe the organ of benevolence, and that of attachment. Here is a human skull, in which you may observe a very striking negation of both these. organs; and an equally striking development of those of destruction, cunning, avarice, and self-love. This was one of the most illustrious statesmen that ever flourished in the page of history. . "It is obvious, from what I have said, that no man can hope for worldly honor or advancement who is not placed in such a relation to external circumstances as may be consentaneous to his peculiar cerebral organs; and I would advise every parent who has the welfare of his son at heart, to procure as extensive a collection as possible of the skulls of animals, and before determining on the choice of a profession, to compare with the utmost nicety their bumps and protuberances with those of the skull of his son. If the development of the organ of destruction point out a similarity between the youth and the tiger, let him be brought up to some profession (whether that of a butcher, a soldier, or a physician, may be regulated by circumstances) in which he may be furnished with a license to kill; as, without such license, the indulgence of his natural propensity may lead to the untimely rescission of his vital thread 'with edge of penny cord and vile reproach.' If he show an analogy with the jackal, let all possible influence be used to procure him a place at court, where he will infallibly thrive. If his skull bear a marked resemblance to that of the magpie, it cannot be doubted that he will prove an admirable lawyer; and if with this advantageous conformation be combined any similitude to that of an owl, very confident hopes may be formed of his becoming a judge. The Squire now gives a ball, at which Mr. Escot thus gives his sentiments in regard to dancing: "The wild and original man is a calm and contemplative animal. . . Imagine this tranquil and passionless being occupied in his first meditation on the simple question of Where am I? whence do 1 come? and what is the end of my existence? Then suddenly place before him a chandelier, a fiddler, and a magnificent beau in silk stockings and pumps, bounding, skipping, swinging, capering and throwing himself into ten thousand attitudes, till his face glows with fever and distils with perspiration: the first impulse excited in his mind by such an apparition will be that of violent fear, which by the reiterated perception of its harmlessness will subside into simple astonishment. Then let any genius sufficiently powerful to impress on his mind all the terms of the communication, impart to him that after a long process of ages, when his race shall have attained what some people think proper to denominate a very advanced stage of perfectibility, the most favored and distinguished of the community shall meet by hundreds to grin and labor and gesticulate like the phantasma before him from sunset to sunrise, while all nature is at rest; and that they shall consider this a happy and pleasurable mode of existence, and furnishing the most delightful of all possible contrasts to what they will call his vegetative state. Would he not groan from his inmost soul for the lamentable condition of his posterity?" Mr. Jenkison sums up his views on the subject in the following words: "There is certainly a great deal to be said against dancing: there is also a great deal to be said in its favor. The first side of the question I leave for the present to you; on the latter I may venture to allege that no amusement seems more natural and more congenial to youth than this. It has the advantage of bringing young persons of both sexes together in a manner which its publicity renders perfectly unexceptionable, enabling them to see and know each other. better than perhaps any other mode of general association. Tête-àtêtes are dangerous things. Small family-parties are too much under mutual observation. A ball-room appears to me almost the only scene uniting that degree of rational and innocent liberty of intercourse which it is desirable to promote as much as possible between young persons, with that scrupulous attention to the delicacy and propriety of female conduct which I consider the fundamental basis of all our most valuable social relations." Mr. Escot's reply to this is based on the fact that in fashionable life the ball-room becomes the peculiar field for the display of all forms of hypocrisy, deception and artifice. At the end of the third set the company adjourns to the supperroom, which is thus briefly described : "The centre of the largest table was decorated with a model of Snowdon surmounted with an enormous artificial leek, the leaves of angelica and the bulb of blanc-mange. A little way from the summit was a tarn or mountain-pool, supplied through concealed tubes with |