y. Indeed, the book is of
1852, and its subjects are almost all of the decade preceding. But some
are exceedingly refreshing, the dedication, of some length, to the great
caricaturist Daumier being not the least so. Yet it is not so unwise as
to disappoint the reader by being better than the text. "Lucas," the
circle-squarer, who explains how, when he was in a room with a lady and
her two daughters, he perceived that "this was all that was necessary
for him to attain the cubation of two pyramids," is very choice.
"Cambriel"--who not only attained the philosopher's stone and the
universal medicine, but ascertained that God is six feet six high, of
flame-coloured complexion, and with particularly perfect ankles--runs
him hard. And so does Rose Marius Sardat, who sent a copy of his _Loi
d'Union_, a large and nicely printed octavo, to every Parisian
newspaper-office, informing the editors that they might reprint it in
_feuilletons_ for nothing, but that he should not write the second
volume unless the first were a success. Some of us ought to be
particularly obliged to Rose Marius for holding that persons over
seventy are indispensable, and that, if there are not enough in France,
they must be imported. The difference of this from the callous
short-sightedness which talks about "fixed periods" is most gratifying.
But perhaps the crown and flower of the book is the vegetarian Jupille,
who wrote pamphlets addressed:

AUX GOURMANDS DE CHAIR!

decided that meat is of itself atheistical, though he admitted a "siren"
quality about it; and held that the fact of onions making human beings
weep attests their own "touching sensibility for us" (albeit he had to
admit again that garlic was demoniac). M. Jupille (who was a practical
man, and cooked cabbage and cauliflower so that his meat-eating visitor
could not but acknowledge their charm) explained St. Peter's net of
animal food with ease as a diabolic deception, but was floored by
crocodiles' teeth. And not the worst thing in the book is the last,
where a waxwork-keeper--a much less respectable person than Mrs. Jarley,
and of the other sex--falls in love with one of his specimens, waltzes
with her, and unwittingly presents a sort of third companion to one of
the less saintly kings of the early Graal legends, and to yet another
character of Dickens's, much less well known than Mrs. Jarley, the
hairdresser in _Master Humphrey's Clock_, who, to the disgust of his
female acquainta