er things being equal, are apt to attract those who can
afford the expensive luxury of beauty. The physical character of the
next generation rises in consequence. It is plain that certain
families have in this way acquired an elevated type of face and
figure, and that in a small circle of city-connections one may
sometimes find models of both sexes which one of the rural counties
would find it hard to match from all its townships put together.
Because there is a good deal of running down, of degeneration and
waste of life, among the richer classes, you must not overlook the
equally obvious fact I have just spoken of,--which in one or two
generations more will be, I think, much more patent than just now.

The weak point in our chryso-aristocracy is the same I have alluded to
in connection with cheap dandyism. Its thorough manhood, its
high-caste gallantry, are not so manifest as the plate-glass of its
windows and the more or less legitimate heraldry of its coach-panels.
It is very curious to observe of how small account military folks are
held among our Northern people. Our young men must gild their spurs,
but they need not win them. The equal division of property keeps the
younger sons of rich people above the necessity of military service.
Thus the army loses an element of refinement, and the moneyed upper
class forgets what it is to count heroism among its virtues. Still I
don't believe in any aristocracy without pluck as its backbone. Ours
may show it when the time comes, if it ever does come.

----These United States furnish the greatest market for intellectual
_green fruit_ of all the places in the world. I think so, at any rate.
The demand for intellectual labor is so enormous and the market so far
from nice, that young talent is apt to fare like unripe
gooseberries--get plucked to make a fool of. Think of a country which
buys eighty thousand copies of the "Proverbial Philosophy," while the
author's admiring countrymen have been buying twelve thousand! How can
one let his fruit hang in the sun until it gets fully ripe, while
there are eighty thousand such hungry mouths ready to swallow it and
proclaim its praises? Consequently, there never was such a collection
of crude pippins and half-grown windfalls as our native literature
displays among its fruits. There are literary green-groceries at every
corner, which will buy anything, from a button-pear to a pine-apple.
It takes a long apprenticeship to train a whole p