; and with few acquaintances; and if it
were but rendered into choice Latin, though there would be a little bother
in finding a Ciceronian word for "off-wheel," Marcellus himself, that great
master of sepulchral eloquence, could not show a better. Why I call this
little remark _moral_, is, from the compensation it points out. Here, by
the supposition, is that other creature on the one side, the beast of the
world; and he (or it) gets an epitaph. You and I, on the contrary, the
pride of our friends, get none.

But why linger on the subject of vermin? Having mounted the box, I took a
small quantity of laudanum, having already travelled two hundred and fifty
miles--viz., from a point seventy miles beyond London, upon a simple
breakfast. In the taking of laudanum there was nothing extraordinary. But
by accident it drew upon me the special attention of my assessor on the
box, the coachman. And in _that_ there was nothing extraordinary. But by
accident, and with great delight, it drew my attention to the fact that
this coachman was a monster in point of size, and that he had but one eye.
In fact he had been foretold by Virgil as--

"Monstrum. horrendum, informe, ingens cui lumen adempium."

He answered in every point--a monster he was--dreadful, shapeless, huge,
who had lost an eye. But why should _that_ delight me? Had he been one of
the Calendars in the Arabian Nights, and had paid down his eye as the price
of his criminal curiosity, what right had I to exult in his misfortune? I
did _not_ exult: I delighted in no man's punishment, though it were even
merited. But these personal distinctions identified in an instant an old
friend of mine, whom I had known in the south for some years as the most
masterly of mail-coachmen. He was the man in all Europe that could best
have undertaken to drive six-in-hand full gallop over _Al Sirat_--that
famous bridge of Mahomet across the bottomless gulf, backing himself
against the Prophet and twenty such fellows. I used to call him _Cyclops
mastigophorus_, Cyclops the whip-bearer, until I observed that his skill
made whips useless, except to fetch off an impertinent fly from a leader's
head; upon which I changed his Grecian name to Cyclops _diphrelates_
(Cyclops the charioteer.) I, and others known to me, studied under him the
diphrelatic art. Excuse, reader, a word too elegant to be pedantic. And
also take this remark from me, as a _gage d'amitie_--that no word ever
was or _can_ be peda