u as you can, for fear
of the worst.

It was never good times in England since the poor began to speculate
upon their condition. Formerly they jogged on with as little reflection
as horses; the whistling ploughman went cheek by jowl with his brother
that neighed. Now the biped carries a box of phosphorus in his leather
breeches; and in the dead of night the half-illuminated beast steals his
magic potion into a cleft in a barn, and half the country is grinning
with new fires. Farmer Graystock said something to the touchy rustic
that he did not relish, and he writes his distaste in flames. What a
power to intoxicate his crude brains, just muddlingly awake, to perceive
that something is wrong in the social system; what a hellish faculty
above gunpowder!

Now the rich and poor are fairly pitted, we shall see who can hang or
burn fastest. It is not always revenge that stimulates these kindlings.
There is a love of exerting mischief. Think of a disrespected clod that
was trod into earth, that was nothing, on a sudden by damned arts
refined into an exterminating angel, devouring the fruits of the earth
and their growers in a mass of fire! What a new existence; what a
temptation above Lucifer's! Would clod be anything but a clod if he
could resist it? Why, here was a spectacle last night for a whole
country,--a bonfire visible to London, alarming her guilty towers, and
shaking the Monument with an ague fit: all done by a little vial of
phosphor in a clown's fob! How he must grin, and shake his empty noddle
in clouds, the Vulcanian epicure! Can we ring the bells backward? Can we
unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world?
There is a march of Science; but who shall beat the drums for its
retreat? Who shall persuade the boor that phosphor will not ignite?

Seven goodly stacks of hay, with corn-barns proportionable, lie smoking
ashes and chaff, which man and beast would sputter out and reject like
those apples of asphaltes and bitumen. The food for the inhabitants of
earth will quickly disappear. Hot rolls may say, "Fuimus panes, fuit
quartem-loaf, et ingens gloria Apple-pasty-orum." That the good old
munching system may last thy time and mine, good un-incendiary George,
is the devout prayer of thine, to the last crust,

CH. LAMB.

CV.

TO DYER.

_February_ 22, 1831.

Dear Dyer,--Mr. Rogers and Mr. Rogers's friends are perfectly assured
that you never intended any harm by an innocent couplet