est of all Easy-chairs secure for
life against being gently pushed on his wheels from chimney-nook to
window-corner, when the sunshine may have extinguished the fire, and the
blue sky tempts the _Paterfamilias_, or him who is but an uncle, to lie
back with half-shut eyes, and gaze upon the cheerful purity, even like a
shepherd on the hill. But these little occasional disarrangements serve
but to preserve the spirit of permanent arrangement, without which the
very virtue of domesticity dies. What sacrilege, therefore, against the
Lares and Penates, to turn a whole house topsy-turvy, from garret to
cellar, regularly as May-flowers deck the zone of the year! Why, a
Turkey or a Persian, or even a Wilton or a Kidderminster carpet, is as
much the garb of the wooden floor inside, as the grass is of the earthen
floor outside of your house. Would you lift and lay down the greensward?
But without further illustration--be assured the cases are kindred--and
so, too, with sofas and shrubs, tent-beds and trees. Independently,
however, of these analogies, not fanciful, but lying deep in the nature
of things, the inside of one's tabernacle, in town and country, ought
ever to be sacred from all radical revolutionary movements, and to lie
for ever in a waking dream of graceful repose. All our affections
towards lifeless things become tenderer and deeper in the continuous and
unbroken flow of domestic habit. The eye gets lovingly familiarised with
each object occupying its own peculiar and appropriate place, and feels
in a moment when the most insignificant is missing or removed. We say
not a word about children, for fortunately, since we are yet unmarried,
we have none; but even they, if brought up Christians, are no dissenters
from this creed, and however rackety in the nursery, in an orderly-kept
parlour or drawing-room how like so many pretty little white mice do
they glide cannily along the floor! Let no such horror, then, as a
_flitting_ ever befall us or our friends! O mercy! only look at a long
huge train of waggons, heaped up to the windows of the first floors,
moving along the dust-driving or mire-choked streets with furniture from
a gutted town-house towards one standing in the rural shades with an
empty stomach! All is dimmed or destroyed--chairs crushed on the
table-land, and four-posted beds lying helplessly with their astonished
feet up to heaven--a sight that might make the angels weep!

People have wondered why we, an old