uper, fleecing the farmer, robbing a church, or
undertaking "the command of the Channel fleet at a moment's notice."
With Mr Secretary Chadwick, schooled in police courts, it will
metamorphose workhouse asylums for the destitute into parish prisons,
with "locks, bolts, and bars," for the safe keeping of unfortunate
outcasts found guilty of the felony of pauperism. With Dr Kay
Shuttleworth and the privy council, when the masses want bread, it will
invite to the "whistle belly" feast of roaring in _andante_, or
dissolving in _piano_, in full choral concert mobs at Exeter Hall; it
will induct into the new gipsy jargon scheme of education at Norwood,
where the scholar is introduced to the process of analysation before he
has learned to read and almost to articulate; or the miserables
initiated into the elements of the linear, the curve, and the
perspective in drawing, whose eyeballs are glaring in quest of the
perspective of a loaf. Oh! genius profound, and forecasting of privy
council philanthropy and utilitarian wisdom; more exquisite of
refinement than Nero, who only fiddled when Rome was blazing and
wretches roasting, thou, with the wizen wand of Cockney Hullah charmed
with Wilhem's incantations, canst teach piping voices how to stay
craving stomachs; how Kay upon Jacotot may analytically demonstrate that
fast and feasting are both but synonymes of one common termination, the
difference squared by time alone, and meaning ten or threescore and ten
as the case may be. Misery is but a mockery of language after all; for
have I not heard it rampant with lungs, and hoarse with disciplined
harmony in Exeter Hall, as Hullah cut capers with his tiny truncheon,
with Royalty itself, heroic field-marshals, and grave ministers of
state, in seeming ecstasy at the sleight of hand? Just as I have heard
and seen in the _barracones_ of Bozal negroes for sale, when, at the
crack of the black negro-driver's whip, and not unfrequent application
of the lash, the flagging gang of exhausted slavery has ever and again
set up that chant of revelry, run mad, and danced that dance of
desperation, which was to persuade the atrocious dealers in human flesh
how sound of wind and limb they were, and the bystanders how happy.

Think not that charlatanic genius rests content with triumphs even so
transcendent as these. It disports itself also in "self-supporting"
colonization; it runs riot in the ruin of "penny-postage;" it would be
gloriously self-suic