al admiration! You ought to have seen that, sir, for I
frankly admit, sir, that no rabble can be worse than ours, and that
we are all going to the devil, as fast as ever we can. No, sir, a most
miserable rabble, sir.--But as for this street, and our houses, and our
cats, and our dogs, and certain exceptions--you understand me, sir--it
is quite a different thing. Pray, Mogul, who is the greatest personage,
now, in your nation?"

"Perhaps I ought to say the Duke of Wellington, sir."

"Well, sir, allow me to ask if he lives in a better house than that
before us?--I see you are delighted, eh? We are a poor, new nation of
pitiful traders, sir, half savage, as everybody knows; but we DO flatter
ourselves that we know how to build a house! Will you just step in
and see a new sofa that its owner bought only yesterday--I know him
intimately, and nothing gives me so much pleasure as to show his new
sofa."

I declined the invitation on the plea of fatigue, and by this means got
rid of so troublesome an acquaintance. On leaving me, however, he begged
that I would not fail to make his house my home, swore terribly at the
rabble, and invited me to admire a very ordinary view that was to be
obtained by looking up the Wide-path in a particular direction, but
which embraced his own abode. When Mr. Wriggle was fairly out of
earshot, I demanded of the brigadier if Bivouac, or Leaplow, contained
many such prodigies.

"Enough to make themselves very troublesome, and us ridiculous,"
returned Mr. Downright. "We are a young nation, Sir John, covering a
great surface, with a comparatively small population, and, as you are
aware, separated from the other parts of the monikin region by a belt
of ocean. In some respects we are like people in the country, and we
possess the merits and failings of those who are so situated. Perhaps
no nation has a larger share of reflecting and essentially respectable
inhabitants than Leaplow; but, not satisfied with being what
circumstances so admirably fit them to be, there is a clique among us,
who, influenced by the greater authority of older nations, pine to be
that which neither nature, education, manners, nor facilities will just
yet allow them to become. In short, sir, we have the besetting sin of
a young community--imitation. In our case the imitation is not always
happy, either; it being necessarily an imitation that is founded on
descriptions. If the evil were limited to mere social absurdities, it
m