out plenty of bacon? We shall become a
ruined Nation!--Surely, my friends, plenty of bacon is good and
indispensable: but, I doubt, you will never get even bacon by
aiming only at that. You are men, not animals of prey, well-used
or ill-used! Your Greatest-Happiness Principle seems to me fast
becoming a rather unhappy one.--What if we should cease babbling
about 'happiness,' and leave _it_ resting on its own basis, as it
used to do!

A gifted Byron rises in his wrath; and feeling too surely that
he for his part is not 'happy,' declares the same in very violent
language, as a piece of news that may be interesting. It
evidently has surprised him much. One dislikes to see a man and
poet reduced to proclaim on the streets such tidings: but on the
whole, as matters go, that is not the most dislikable. Byron
speaks the _truth_ in this matter. Byron's large audience
indicates how true it is felt to be.

'Happy,' my brother? First of all, what difference is it whether
thou art happy or not! Today becomes Yesterday so fast, all
Tomorrows become Yesterdays; and then there is no question
whatever of the 'happiness,' but quite another question. Nay,
thou hast such a sacred pity left at least for thyself, thy very
pains once gone over into Yesterday become joys to thee.
Besides, thou knowest not what heavenly blessedness and
indispensable sanative virtue was in them; thou shalt only know
it after many days, when thou art wiser!--A benevolent old
Surgeon sat once in our company, with a Patient fallen sick by
gourmandising, whom he had just, too briefly in the Patient's
judgment, been examining. The foolish Patient still at intervals
continued to break in on our discourse, which rather promised to
take a philosophic turn: "But I have lost my appetite," said he,
objurgatively, with a tone of irritated pathos; "I have no
appetite; I can't eat!"--"My dear fellow," answered the Doctor
in mildest tone, "it isn't of the slightest consequence;"--and
continued his philosophical discoursings with us!

Or does the reader not know the history of that Scottish iron
Misanthrope? The inmates of some town-mansion, in those Northern
parts, were thrown into the fearfulest alarm by indubitable
symptoms of a ghost inhabiting the next house, or perhaps even
the partition-wall! Ever at a certain hour, with preternatural
gnarring, growling and screeching, which attended as running
bass, there began, in a horrid, semi-articulate, u