suffrage, and elytric acclamation, one May twilight, carried
it, that they would fly over the Lake of Zug; and flew _short_, to the
great disfigurement of the Lake of Zug,--[Greek: Kantharon limen]--over
some leagues square, and to the close of the cockchafer democracy for
that year. Then, for tyranny, the old fable of the frogs and the stork
finely touches one form of it; but truth will image it more closely than
fable, for tyranny is not complete when it is only over the idle, but
when it is over the laborious and the blind. This description of
pelicans and climbing perch, which I find quoted in one of our popular
natural histories, out of Sir Emerson Tennant's _Ceylon_, comes as near
as may be to the true image of the thing:--

"Heavy rains came on, and as we stood on the high ground, we observed a
pelican on the margin of the shallow pool gorging himself; our people
went towards him, and raised a cry of 'Fish, fish!' We hurried down, and
found numbers of fish struggling upward through the grass, in the rills
formed by the trickling of the rain. There was scarcely water to cover
them, but nevertheless they made rapid progress up the bank, on which
our followers collected about two baskets of them. They were forcing
their way up the knoll, and had they not been interrupted, first by the
pelican, and afterwards by ourselves, they would in a few minutes have
gained the highest point, and descended on the other side into a pool
which formed another portion of the tank. In going this distance,
however, they must have used muscular exertion enough to have taken them
half a mile on level ground; for at these places all the cattle and wild
animals of the neighbourhood had latterly come to drink, so that the
surface was everywhere indented with footmarks, in addition to the
cracks in the surrounding baked mud, into which the fish tumbled in
their progress. In those holes, which were deep, and the sides
perpendicular, they remained to die, and were carried off by kites and
crows."[70]

127. But whether governments be bad or good, one general disadvantage
seems to attach to them in modern times--that they are all _costly_.[71]
This, however, is not essentially the fault of the governments. If
nations choose to play at war, they will always find their governments
willing to lead the game, and soon coming under that term of
Aristophanes, "[Greek: kapeloi aspidon]," "shield-sellers." And when
([Greek: pem epi pemati])[72] the shi