l motion of popularity! If a man
love ease, let him be most unpopular. The Managers did the impossible to
assist and advance the intercourse between the two nations. They behaved
in a liberal and enlightened manner, and a deputation of liberal and
enlightened merchants consequently waited upon them with a vote of
thanks. They issued so many pink shells that the price of the public
funds was doubled, and affairs arranged so skilfully that money was
universally declared to be worth nothing, so that every one in the
island, from the Premier down to the Mendicant whom the lecture-loving
Skindeep threatened with the bastinado, was enabled to participate, in
some degree, in the approaching venture, if we should use so dubious a
term in speaking of profits so certain.

Compared with the Fantaisian connection, the whole commerce of the world
appeared to the Vraibleusians a retail business. All other customers
were neglected or discarded, and each individual seemed to concentrate
his resources to supply the wants of a country where they dance by
moonlight, live on fruit, and sleep on flowers. At length the
first fleet of five hundred sail, laden with wonderful specimens
of Vraibleusian mechanism, and innumerable bales of Vraibleusian
manufactures; articles raw and refined, goods dry and damp, wholesale
and retail; silks and woollen cloths; cottons, cutlery, and camlets;
flannels and ladies' albums; under waistcoats, kid gloves, engravings,
coats, cloaks, and ottomans; lamps and looking-glasses; sofas,
round tables, equipages, and scent-bottles; fans and tissue-flowers;
porcelain, poetry, novels, newspapers, and cookery books; bear's-grease,
blue pills, and bijouterie; arms, beards, poodles, pages, mustachios,
court-guides, and bon-bons; music, pictures, ladies' maids, scrapbooks,
buckles, boxing-gloves, guitars, and snuff-boxes; together with a
company of opera-singers, a band of comedians, a popular preacher,
some quacks, lecturers, artists, and literary gentlemen, principally
sketch-book men, quitted, one day, with a favourable wind, and amid the
exultation of the inhabitants, the port of Hubbabub!

When his Excellency Prince Popanilla heard of the contents of this
stupendous cargo, notwithstanding his implicit confidence in the
superior genius and useful knowledge of the Vraibleusians, he could
not refrain from expressing a doubt whether, in the present undeveloped
state of his native land, any returns could be made proporti