exquisite compensation maintains the balance: whereas that period
anticipated by the Pilgrim, when science shall have produced an
intellectual aristocracy, is indeed horrible to contemplate. For what
despotism is so black as one the mind cannot challenge? 'Twill be an
iron Age. Wherefore, madam, I cry, and shall continue to cry, 'Vive Lord
Mountfalcon! long may he sip his Burgundy! long may the bacon-fed carry
him on their shoulders!'

"Mr. Morton (who does me the honour to call me Young Mephisto, and
Socrates missed) leaves to-morrow to get Master Ralph out of a scrape.
Our Richard has just been elected member of a Club for the promotion of
nausea. Is he happy? you ask. As much so as one who has had the
misfortune to obtain what he wanted can be. Speed is his passion. He
races from point to point. In emulation of Leander and Don Juan, he
swam, I hear, to the opposite shores the other day, or some world-shaking
feat of the sort: himself the Hero whom he went to meet: or, as they who
pun say, his Hero was a Bet. A pretty little domestic episode occurred
this morning. He finds her abstracted in the fire of his caresses: she
turns shy and seeks solitude: green jealousy takes hold of him: he lies
in wait, and discovers her with his new rival--a veteran edition of the
culinary Doctor! Blind to the Doctor's great national services, deaf to
her wild music, he grasps the intruder, dismembers him, and performs upon
him the treatment he has recommended for dressed cucumber. Tears and
shrieks accompany the descent of the gastronome. Down she rushes to
secure the cherished fragments: he follows: they find him, true to his
character, alighted and straggling over a bed of blooming flowers. Yet
ere a fairer flower can gather him, a heel black as Pluto stamps him into
earth, flowers and all:--happy burial! Pathetic tribute to his merit is
watering his grave, when by saunters my Lord Mountfalcon. 'What's the
mattah?' says his lordship, soothing his moustache. They break apart,