ther, there was the irrevocable
answer--"No admittance, till you come better furnished." All who were
in this condition, the duke and duchess among them, were ordered to
stand aside with the thieves. The duchess declared that she had given
the finest parties in the season, and as it was universally agreed
that they had been the most tedious, and that no one had found any
pleasure there, a momentary doubt rose whether they might not have
answered some useful purpose in disgusting people with such modes of
entertainment; but no evidence of this was forthcoming: the world had
attended them because the world had nothing else to do, and she and
her guests had been alike unprofitable. Thus the large majority of the
saloon passengers was disposed of. The minister, the archbishop, the
lawyer, the banker, and others who although they had no material work
credited to them had yet been active and laborious in their different
callings, were passed to the superior judges.

Our turn came next,--ours of the second class,--and a motley gathering
we were. Busy we must all have been, from the multitude of articles
which we found assigned to us: manufacturers with their wares,
solicitors with their law-suits, doctors and clergymen with the bodies
and souls which they had saved or lost, authors with their books,
painters and sculptors with their pictures and statues. But the hard
test was applied to all that we had produced,--the wages which we had
received on one side, and the value of our exertions to mankind on the
other,--and imposing as our performances looked when laid out to be
examined, we had been paid, most of us, out of all proportion to what
we were found to have deserved. I was reminded of a large compartment
in the Paris Exhibition, where an active gentleman, wishing to show
the state of English literature, had collected copies of every book,
review, pamphlet, or newspaper which had been published in a single
year. The bulk was overwhelming, but the figures were only decimal
points, and the worth of the whole was a fraction above zero. A few of
us were turned back summarily among the thieves and the fine gentlemen
and ladies: speculators who had done nothing but handle money which
had clung to their fingers in passing through them, divines who had
preached a morality which they did not practice, and fluent orators
who had made speeches which they knew to be nonsense; philosophers who
had spun out of moonshine systems of the u