s well as for clowns from their hedging and ditching. The home of love,
and its thousand blessings, founded on mutual confidence, religion,
open-heartedness, communion of interest, absence of selfishness, and so
on: the honoured father, due subordination, and results; the loving
wife, obedient children, and cheerful servants. Absolute, though most
kind, monarchy the best government for a home; with digressions about
Austria and China, and such laudable paternal rule; and _contra_, bitter
castigation of republican misrule, its evils and their results, for
which see Old Athens and New York, and certain spots half-way between
them.

The pains of home: most various indeed, caused by all sorts of opposite
harms--too much constraint or too little, open bad example or impossible
good example, omissions and commissions, duty relaxed by indulgence, and
duty tightened into tyranny; but mainly and generally attributable to
the non-assertion or other abuse of parental authority. The spoiled
child, and his progress of indulgence, unchecked passions, dissipation,
crime, and ruin. Interested interlopers, as former friends, relatives,
flatterers, and busy parasites, undermining that bond of confidence
without which home falls to pieces; the gloomy spirit of reserve,
discouraging every thing like generous open-heartedness; menial
influences lowering their subject to their own base level; discords,
religious, political, and social; the harmful consequence of
over-expenditure to ape the hobbies or grandeur of the wealthier;
foolish education beyond one's sphere, as the baker's daughter taking
lessons in Italian, and opera-stricken butcher's-boys strumming the
guitar; immoral tendencies, gambling, drinking, and other dissipations;
and the aggregate of discomforts, of every sort and kind; with cures for
all these evils; and to end finally by a grand climax of supplication,
invocation, imprecation, resignation, and beatification, in the regular
crash of a stout-expiring overture.

It's all very well, objects reader, and very easy to consider this done;
but the difficulty is--not so much to do it, answers writer, as to
escape the bother of prolixity by proving how much has been done, and
how speedily all might be even completed, had poor poesy in these
ticketing times only a fair field and no disfavour; for there is at hand
good grist, ready ground, baked and caked, and waiting for its eaters.
But in this age of prose-devouring and verse-des