am sorry to hear it, and perhaps it does deserve a despatch,
or friendly letter, once and away: but the Irish Giant, named of
Despair, is advancing upon London itself, laying waste all English
cities, towns and villages; that is the interesting Government despatch
of the day! I notice him in Piccadilly, blue-visaged, thatched in rags,
a blue child on each arm; hunger-driven, wide-mouthed, seeking whom he
may devour: he, missioned by the just Heavens, too truly and too sadly
their 'divine missionary' come at last in this authoritative manner,
will throw us all into Doubting Castle, I perceive! That is the
phenomenon worth protocolling about, and writing despatches upon, and
thinking of with all one's faculty day and night, if one wishes to have
the honor to be--anything but a Phantasm Governor of England just now!
I entreat your Lordship's all but undivided attention to that Domestic
Irish Giant, named of Despair, for a great many years to come. Prophecy
of him there has long been; but now by the rot of the potato (blessed be
the just gods, who send us either swift death or some beginning of
cure at last!), he is here in person, and there is no denying him, or
disregarding him any more; and woe to the public watchman that ignores
him, and sees Pacifico the Gibraltar Jew instead!"

What these strange Entities in Downing Street intrinsically are; who
made them, why they were made; how they do their function; and what
their function, so huge in appearance, may in net-result amount to,--is
probably known to no mortal. The unofficial mind passes by in dark
wonder; not pretending to know. The official mind must not blab;--the
official mind, restricted to its own square foot of territory in the
vast labyrinth, is probably itself dark, and unable to blab. We see the
outcome; the mechanism we do not see. How the tailors clip and sew, in
that sublime sweating establishment of theirs, we know not: that the
coat they bring us out is the sorrowfulest fantastic mockery of a coat,
a mere intricate artistic network of traditions and formalities, an
embroiled reticulation made of web-listings and superannuated thrums and
tatters, endurable to no grown Nation as a coat, is mournfully clear!--

Two kinds of fundamental error are supposable in such a set of Offices;
these two, acting and reacting, are the vice of all inefficient Offices
whatever.--_First_, that the work, such as it may be, is ill done in
these establishments. That it is