f
gambling, the only alembic which in these plodding days sublimized our
imaginations, and filled them with more delicious dreams than ever
flitted athwart the sensorium of Alnaschar.

Never can the writer forget, when, as a child, he was hoisted upon a
servant's shoulder in Guildhall, and looked down upon the installed and
solemn pomp of the then drawing Lottery. The two awful cabinets of iron,
upon whose massy and mysterious portals the royal initials were
gorgeously emblazoned, as if, after having deposited the unfulfilled
prophecies within, the King himself had turned the lock, and still
retained the key in his pocket,--the blue-coat boy, with his naked arm,
first converting the invisible wheel, and then diving into the dark
recess for a ticket,--the grave and reverend faces of the commissioners
eying the announced number,--the scribes below calmly committing it to
their huge books,--the anxious countenances of the surrounding
populace,--while the giant figures of Gog and Magog, like presiding
deities, looked down with a grim silence upon the whole
proceeding,--constituted altogether a scene which, combined with the
sudden wealth supposed to be lavished from those inscrutable wheels, was
well calculated to impress the imagination of a boy with reverence and
amazement. Jupiter, seated between the two fatal urns of good and evil,
the blind goddess with her cornucopia, the Parcae wielding the distaff,
the thread of life, and the abhorred shears, seemed but dim and shadowy
abstractions of mythology, when I had gazed upon an assemblage
exercising, as I dreamt, a not less eventful power, and all presented to
me in palpable and living operation. Reason and experience, ever at
their old spiteful work of catching and destroying the bubbles which
youth delighted to follow, have indeed dissipated much of this illusion;
but my mind so far retained the influence of that early impression, that
I have ever since continued to deposit my humble offerings at its
shrine, whenever the ministers of the Lottery went forth with type and
trumpet to announce its periodical dispensations; and though nothing has
been doled out to me from its uudiscerning coffers but blanks, or those
more vexatious tantalizers of the spirit denominated small prizes, yet
do I hold myself largely indebted to this most generous diffuser of
universal happiness. Ingrates that we are, are we to be thankful for no
benefits that are not palpable to sense, to recognize