d, but for my
"sneer at 666," which, therefore, I am well pleased to have given. I am
also told that my name means the "'garden of death,' that place in which
the tree of knowledge was plucked, and so you are like your name 'dead' to
the fact that you are an Israelite, like those in Ezekiel 37 ch." Some
hints are given that I shall not fare well in the next world, which any one
who reads the chapter in Ezekiel will see is quite against his comparison.
The reader must not imagine that my prognosticator means _Morgan_ to be a
corruption of _Mortjardin_; he proves his point by Hebrew: but any
philologist would tell him the true derivation of the name, and how
_Glamorgan_ came to get it. It will be of much comfort to those young men
who have not got through to know that the tree of knowledge itself was once
in the same case. And so good bye to 666 for the present, and the
assumption that the enigma is to be solved by the united numeral forces of
the letters of a word.

It is worthy of note that, as soon as my Budget commenced, two guardian
spirits started up, fellow men as to the flesh, both totally unknown to me:
they have stuck to me from first to last. James Smith, Esq., finally
Nauticus, watches over my character in this world, and would fain preserve
me from ignorance, folly, and dishonesty, by inclosing me in a magic circle
of 3-1/8 diameters in circumference. The round man in the three-cornered
hole, finally William Thorn, M.D., takes charge of my future destiny, {160}
and tries to bring me to the truth by unfolding a score of meanings--all
right--of 666. He hints that I, and my wife, are servants of Satan: at
least he desires us both to remember that we cannot serve God and Satan;
and he can hardly mean that we are serving the first, and that he would
have us serve the second. As becomes an interpreter of the Apocalypse, he
uses seven different seals; but not more than one to one letter. If his
seals be all signet-rings, he must be what Aristophanes calls a
sphragidonychargocometical fellow. But--and many thanks to him for the
same--though an M.D., he has not sent me a single vial. And so much for my
tree of secular knowledge and my tree of spiritual life: I dismiss them
with thanks from myself and thanks from my reader. The dual of the
Pythagorean system was Isis and Diana; of the Jewish law, Moses and Aaron;
and of the City of London, Gog and Magog; of the Paradoxiad, James Smith,
Esq., and William Thorn, M.D.

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