to disinter that character.
What! a class that is to be in want from no fault of its own, and yet
greedily eager to receive from strangers; and to be quite respectable,
and at the same time quite devoid of self-respect; and play the most
delicate part of friendship, and yet never be seen; and wear the form of
man, and yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature:--and all
this, in the hope of getting a belly-god Burgess through a needle's eye!
Oh, let him stick, by all means: and let his polity tumble in the dust;
and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin
to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of
man! For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness, there can be no
salvation: and the fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel
of reason to the fool who looks for the Deserving Poor!

V

And yet there is one course which the unfortunate gentleman may take. He
may subscribe to pay the taxes. There were the true charity, impartial
and impersonal, cumbering none with obligation, helping all. There were
a destination for loveless gifts; there were the way to reach the pocket
of the deserving poor, and yet save the time of secretaries! But, alas!
there is no colour of romance in such a course; and people nowhere
demand the picturesque so much as in their virtues.

V

THE LANTERN-BEARERS

I

These boys congregated every autumn about a certain easterly
fisher-village, where they tasted in a high degree the glory of
existence. The place was created seemingly on purpose for the diversion
of young gentlemen. A street or two of houses, mostly red and many of
them tiled; a number of fine trees clustered about the manse and the
kirkyard, and turning the chief street into a shady alley; many little
gardens more than usually bright with flowers; nets a-drying, and
fisher-wives scolding in the backward parts; a smell of fish, a genial
smell of seaweed; whiffs of blowing sand at the street-corners; shops
with golf-balls and bottled lollipops; another shop with penny pickwicks
(that remarkable cigar) and the _London Journal_, dear to me for its
startling pictures, and a few novels, dear for their suggestive names:
such, as well as memory serves me, were the ingredients of the town.
These, you are to conceive posted on a spit between two sandy bays, and
sparsely flanked with villas--enough for the boys to lodge in with their
subsidiary parents, not eno