ship, dear nincompoops, nothing more; you make up a circle around a self-important centre that just happens to want you to complete the spokes of the social wheel. People must have society-acquaintances,-double-knocks at the door,-occasionally well-filled drawing-rooms; they would be nobodies, like you, if they could not cram their rooms to suffocation once or twice in the year, and weld a few scores of welldressed people into a hot uncomfortable motionless mass of perpendicular inanity. Society is just that. The fashionable season is just a round of that kind of thing. You dress, and order out your carriage, or hire a cab, to enjoy a jam and a suffocating heat or a draught, and a superficial talk with the interesting individual against whom it may be your good fortune to be thrust; and when you have been winnowed in and out again, you may just go as you came, and nobody thinks any more about you, unless it has been your good luck to tread on some sensitive toe, or on the skirt of some superfluous dress, and then you get a memento and an emphatic benison to boot. This is the humbug social, and society likes this kind of humbug. You don't like it; you can't be natural, and yet you must be natural, 'tis your nature to be natural. You can't talk for talking-sake; you will answer kind domestic inquiries with interesting particulars,-what a time your wife had of it, and how the baby got through its teething, and what a narrow escape three of your other darlings had in a severe attack of confluent smallpox, from which they are not yet fully recovered; and you are surprised that your interesting acquaintance, at this touching communication, instinctively starts and worms himself into another part of the room, and you try to follow him, dear natural souls, to tell him another little bit of domestic interest, and you find that you can't get near him, that nobody is able to make way for you, and you get jammed closer and closer in the crush of social friendship till you can bear the crush no longer, and [At this moment of our unfinished discourse to nincompoops we awoke, and were sensible that we had been suffering from nightmare.] SERMON XIII. BACK BITERS. "And it's, oh! that some splenetic folks I could name, If they must deal in acids, would use but the same In such innocent graphical labours : In the place of the virulent spirit wherewith- QUITE right, so say we, Thomas Hood,acid for etching. We could heartily wish that everybody who has any nitric acid in his constitution would just reserve it for that ornamental and useful graphic art. Etching is an artistic impossibility without a powerful N corrosive, and nitric acid is just the agent for biting and eating into the copper-plate. There are raw places in abundance in a finished etching through which the aquafortis may find its way and secure its grip. Bottle up the acid of your malevolence for the purposes of etching. In the name of all that's generous and human don't pour it over the surface of your social friendships. There are many raw places there, no doubt, and your nitric acid will find them out; but men and women,-though they may have an abundant coating to conceal the metal of their true personality, don't like the cracks in their waxen surface too curiously pried into, and nitric acid, even in dilution, will bite in wherever there's a crack, or raw place, and leave its corrosive mark. Again, we say, if you are so disagreeably organized as to secrete aquafortis, bottle it for etching purposes,spare humanity the scarifying effects of your virulent spirit. There are insects and animals in this world of ours which, if we did not know something about the wonderful economy of nature, we might imagine to be sent by some malevolent being to be the special torments of others of the animal races. The gad-fly, without doubt, has some valuable qualities, but if our domestic cattle could reason about their existence they would probably conclude that they were created for no other purpose than to deposit their eggs in their poor lacerated backs, and create swellings and abscesses for their special misery. The swarm of gnats in most climates, and their more malignant fellows known as mosquitos in tropical regions, have their service in the economy of nature, but they are sore pests for all that to the human race. The poor Laplanders can scarcely venture out of their miserable cabins in their brief summer-time without smearing their faces and hands with tar as a measure of defence against the swarming myriads of gnats, and as for the West-Indians, they would be bitten to death by their cursed mosquitos, but for the precaution of their gauzes and draperies; and then when we ascend higher in the animal kingdom and come to the weasel species, the ferrets and polecats, what tyrants are they in the rabbitwarren and poultry-yard. All these insects |