ompetitive Excruciations? The fortunate
candidates whose heads and livers you have turned upside down for life?
Not you. You are really passing the Crammers and Coaches. If your
principle is right, why don't you turn out to-morrow morning with the
keys of your cities on velvet cushions, your musicians playing, and your
flags flying, and read addresses to the Crammers and Coaches on your
bended knees, beseeching them to come out and govern you? Then, again,
as to your public business of all sorts, your Financial statements and
your Budgets; the Public knows much, truly, about the real doers of all
that! Your Nobles and Right Honourables are first-rate men? Yes, and so
is a goose a first-rate bird. But I'll tell you this about the
goose;--you'll find his natural flavour disappointing, without stuffing.

Perhaps I am soured by not being popular? But suppose I AM popular.
Suppose my works never fail to attract. Suppose that, whether they are
exhibited by natural light or by artificial, they invariably draw the
public. Then no doubt they are preserved in some Collection? No, they
are not; they are not preserved in any Collection. Copyright? No, nor
yet copyright. Anyhow they must be somewhere? Wrong again, for they are
often nowhere.

Says you, "At all events, you are in a moody state of mind, my friend."
My answer is, I have described myself as a public character with a blight
upon him--which fully accounts for the curdling of the milk in _that_
cocoa-nut.

Those that are acquainted with London are aware of a locality on the
Surrey side of the river Thames, called the Obelisk, or, more generally,
the Obstacle. Those that are not acquainted with London will also be
aware of it, now that I have named it. My lodging is not far from that
locality. I am a young man of that easy disposition, that I lie abed
till it's absolutely necessary to get up and earn something, and then I
lie abed again till I have spent it.

It was on an occasion when I had had to turn to with a view to victuals,
that I found myself walking along the Waterloo Road, one evening after
dark, accompanied by an acquaintance and fellow-lodger in the gas-fitting
way of life. He is very good company, having worked at the theatres,
and, indeed, he has a theatrical turn himself, and wishes to be brought
out in the character of Othello; but whether on account of his regular
work always blacking his face and hands more or less, I cannot say.

"