this nice little joke? Would
you like to have the name "American" go down to all time, defined as
Webster[B] defines Sybarite?

A-M[)E]R'I-CAN, _n._ [Fr. _Americain_, Lat. _Americanus_, from
Lat. _America_, a continent noted for the effeminacy and
voluptuousness of its inhabitants.] A person devoted to luxury
and pleasure.

Should you think that was quite fair for your great-grandson's
grandson's descendant in the twenty-seventh remove to read, who is going
to be instructed about Queen Victoria and William the Conqueror?

Worst of all, and most frequently quoted, is the story of the
coppersmiths. The Sybarites, it is said, ordered that the coppersmiths
and brass-founders should all reside in one part of the city, and bang
their respective metals where the neighbors had voluntarily chosen to
listen to banging. What if they did? Does not every manufacturing city
practically do the same thing? What did Nicholas Tillinghast use to say
to the boys and girls at Bridgewater? "The tendency of cities is to
resolve themselves into order."

Is not Wall Street at this hour a street of bankers? Is not the Boston
Pearl Street a street of leather men? Is not the bridge at Florence
given over to jewellers? Was not my valise, there, bought in Rome at the
street of trunk-makers? Do not all booksellers like to huddle together
as long as they can? And when Ticknor and Fields move a few inches from
Washington Street to Tremont Street, do not Russell and Bates, and
Childs and Jenks, and De Vries and Ibarra, follow them as soon as the
shops can be got ready?

"But it is the motive," pipes up the old gray ghost of propriety, who
started this abuse of the Sybarites in some stupid Spartan black-broth
shop (English that for _cafe_), two thousand two hundred and twenty-two
years ago,--which ghost I am now belaboring,--"it is the motive. The
Sybarites moved the brass-founders, because they wanted to sleep after
the brass-founders got up in the morning." What if they did, you old rat
in the arras? Is there any law, human or divine, which says that at one
and the same hour all men shall rise from bed in this world? My
excellent milkman, Mr. Whit, rises from bed daily at two o'clock. If he
does not, my family, including Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, will
not have their fresh milk at 7.37, at which time we breakfast or pretend
to. But because he rises at two, must we all rise at two, and sit
wretchedly whining on our r