But they are nothing more.
More solid merit than theirs, in the eyes of the student of language,
belongs to the humbler products of the popular fancy--words more
pointed, more pithy and more graphic, but more fleeting.

ANOTHER DEFUNCT MONOPOLY.

The patent on sewing-machines has passed into limbo with the patent on
the revolver and the steam-engine and the patent on gunpowder, if Friar
Bacon ever entered his caveat, paid his fee, fought the pirates through
the courts and took one out--a point on which history, which chronicles
the minutest military or judicial homicide and the most contemptible
court-intrigue of his day, forgets to inform us. His last possible
renewal, however, would have in any case died out long ago, and left his
valuable contribution to human happiness as common property as the
contrivance of the blind, bedevilled, rich and unhappy originator of the
sewing-machine.

This great change extinguishes a tribe of agents as numerous and
troublesome as any that roams the Upper Missouri or the Lower Colorado.
As numerous, did we say? It outnumbered all the septs of the Sioux--did
more travelling and peopled more lodges. It had its peculiar literature
and its peculiar vehicles. We have known a single contract made with a
Western carriage-factory for five hundred sewing-machine wagons, for the
use of one out of the fifteen or twenty companies. All these gay and
jaunty equipages go into quod, like the tumbrils and ambulances left
over in 1865, and with them, into yet more helpless disuse, a mass of
literature, written, printed and oral, great beyond computation. It is a
fossil industry whereof even the bones have suddenly perished. To its
credit, be it said, it died game, struggling to the last, its
battlefield the lobbies of Congress and the halls of the Patent Office.
Gold and greenbacks were shed like water, but not much blood save the
blood of the grape. All was in vain. The little needle, with an eye near
the point, the sharp steel weapon of Howe that so long held at bay all
assailants, puzzled a succession of judges of first and second instance,
original and appellate, and enriched a generation of attorneys, was
forced finally to succumb. All the world and his wife--his wife
especially--may make and use a needle with any style or position of hole
without paying a cent of royalty for the inestimable privilege. That
historic implement has the largest liberty, and may disport itself in an
infinity of s