el. He asks
who are these plump gentlemen with light blue silk collars, and
well-rounded calves, whose haughty bearing seems to awe the beholders,
and he is told that he knew them of old, as wearing dusky black coats
and leather shorts; pleasant fellows in those days, and well versed in
punch and polemics. The hackney-coaches have been cut down into
covered cars, and the "bulky" watchmen reduced to new police. Let him
turn which way he will--let it be his pleasure to hear the popular
preacher, the eloquent lawyer, or the scientific lecturer, and if his
memory be only as accurate as his hearing, he will confess "time's
changes;" and when he learns who are deemed the fashionable
entertainers of the day--at whose boards sit lords and baronets most
frequently, he will exclaim with the poet--

"Pritchard's genteel, and Garrick's six feet high."

Well, well, it's bad philosophy, and bad temper, too, to quarrel with
what is; nowhere is the wisdom of Providence more seen than in the
universal law, by which everything has its place somewhere; the
gnarled and bent sapling that would be rejected by the builder, is
exactly the piece adapted for the knee timber of a frigate; the
jagged, ill-formed rock that would ill suit the polished portico, is
invaluable in a rustic arch; and, perhaps, on the same principle,
dull lawyers make excellent judges, and the people who cannot speak
within the limits of Lindley Murray, are admirable public writers and
excellent critics; and as Doctor Pangloss was a good man "because he
knew what wickedness was," so nothing contributes to the detection of
faults in others, like the daily practice of their commission by
ourselves; and never can any man predict failure to another with such
eloquence and impressiveness, as when he himself has experienced what
it is to "be damned."

Here I am in another digression, and sorry am I not to follow it out
further; but for the present I must not--so now, to try back: I will
suppose my absentee friend to have passed his "day in town," amazed
and surprised at the various changes about him; I will not bewilder
him with any glance at our politics, nor puzzle him with that game of
cross corners by which every one seems to have changed his place; nor
attempt any explanation of the mysterious doctrine by which the party
which affects the strongest attachment to the sovereign should exult
in any defeat to her armies; nor how the supporters of the government
contrib