ods and New Zealanders; Actaeons and Avanese, Attilas, Roderics, and
all the Ercles' vein or that of mad Cambyses, Hindoos and Fuegians,
Greece, Egypt, Etruria, and Troy, in those old days when funds and taxes
were not invented, but people had to fight for their dinner, and be
their own police: so in a due course of circumconsideration to more
modern conditions, from ourselves as central civilization, to Cochin
China, and extreme Mexico, to Archangel and Polynesia.

Divers national peculiarities of the _physique_ of homes; as, Tartars'
tents, Esquimaux snow-pits, Caffre kraals, Steppe huts, South-sea
palm-thatch, tree-villages, caves, log-cabins, and so forth. Then, a
wide view of the homes of higher society, first Continental, afterwards
British through all the different phases of comfort to be found in
heath-hovels, cottages, ornees, villas, parsonage-houses, squirealities,
seats, town mansions, and royal palaces. Thus, with a contrastive peep
or two about the feverish neighbourhood of a factory, up this musty
alley, and down that winding lane, we should have considered briefly all
the external accidents of home. The miserable condition of the homeless,
whether rich or poor; an oak with its tap-root broken, a house on
wheels, a boat without a compass, and all that sort of thing: together
with due declamation about soldiers spending twenty years in India,
shipwrecked Robinson Crusoes far from native Hull, cadets going out
hopelessly forever, emigrants, convicts, missionaries, and all other
absentees, voluntary or involuntary. Tirades upon abject poverty, wanton
affluence, poor laws, mendicancy, and Ireland; not omitting some
thrilling cases of barbaric destitution.

Now come we lawfully to descant upon matters more mental and
sentimental--the _metaphysique_ of the subject--the pleasures and pains
of Home. As thus, most cursorily: the nursery, with its dear innocent
joys; the school-boy, holiday feelings and scholastic cruelties; the
desk-abhorring clerk; the over-worked milliner; the starving family of
factory children, and of agricultural labourers, and of workers in coal
mines and iron furnaces, with earnest exhortations to the rich to pour
their horns of plenty on the poor. England, once a safer and a happier
land, under the law of charity: now fast verging into a despotic
centralized system, kept together by bayonets and constables' staves.
Home a refuge for all; for queens and princes from their cumbrous state,
a