ceased to exist, though
there are some very pretty pocket properties, which are their worthy
successors. But the classes of tastes, feelings, and opinions, which
were successively brought into play in these little tales, remain
substantially the same. Perfectibilians, deteriorationists,
statu-quo-ites, phrenologists, transcendentalists, political
economists, theorists in all sciences, projectors in all arts, morbid
visionaries, romantic enthusiasts, lovers of music, lovers of the
picturesque, and lovers of good dinners, march, and will march for
ever, _pari passu_ with the march of mechanics, which some facetiously
call the march of the intellect. The fastidious in old wine are a race
that does not decay. Literary violators of the confidences of private
life still gain a disreputable livelihood and an unenviable notoriety.
Match-makers from interest, and the disappointed in love and in
friendship, are varieties of which specimens are extant. The great
principle of the Right of Might is as flourishing now as in the days
of Maid Marian: the array of false pretensions, moral, political, and
literary, is as imposing as ever: the rulers of the world still feel
things in their effects, and never foresee them in their causes: and
political mountebanks continue, and will continue, to puff nostrums
and practise legerdemain under the eyes of the multitude: following,
like the "learned friend" of Crotchet Castle, a course as tortuous as
that of a river, but in a reverse process; beginning by being dark and
deep, and ending by being transparent.

The Author of "Headlong Hall".

_March_ 4, 1837.

H E A D L O N G H A L L

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CHAPTER I
The Mail

The ambiguous light of a December morning, peeping through the windows
of the Holyhead mail, dispelled the soft visions of the four insides,
who had slept, or seemed to sleep, through the first seventy miles of
the road, with as much comfort as may be supposed consistent with the
jolting of the vehicle, and an occasional admonition to _remember the
coachman_, thundered through the open door, accompanied by the gentle
breath of Boreas, into the ears of the drowsy traveller.

A lively remark, that _the day was none of the finest_, having
elicited a repartee of _quite the contrary_, the various knotty points
of meteorology, which usually form the exordium of an English
conversation, were successively discussed and exhausted; and, the ice
being