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month. Why cannot these Prophets of Evil take up some other theme of national humiliation? Why not give a list of the people, with names and addresses, who have drawn blanks in the Frankfort Lottery? Why not of those who regard Mr Seward as the model of a polite letter-writer?

Now for my umbrella; I'm off for a walk.

A NEW CAREER.

It is a very hopeful consideration, that as the world moves on the march of discovery is always opening some new sphere for the employment of human skill and human intelligence, so that occupations which at first only engaged the attention of a few individuals, as it were specially fitted for the task, become by degrees fashioned into regular professions-careers as distinctively marked as any of the recognised walks by which men stamp their social station. Photography, the telegraph, the various forms of manufacture of gutta-percha, are instances of what I mean, whose followers are numbered by tens of thousands.

It is very pleasant to reflect on this. It is gratifying to think that with the spread of knowledge there is a spread of the means of supporting life: nor is it less agreeable to find that what were

regarded as the luxuries of the rich but a few years back, have now become the adjuncts of even humble fortune. Nothing more decidedly evidences the march of civilisation than the number of a man's wants. Simplicity is savagery; this we may rely on; and I was much struck the other day by the force of this fact, as I saw an Italian shepherd with a red umbrella and blue spectacles tending his sheep on the slope of the Apennines. How unlike, if you will, the picturesque Melibus; but how far less exposed to rheumatism than Tityrus, as he lay on the wet grass under his beech-tree!

I am old enough to remember the anxious discussion there used to be about overstocked professions and careers crammed to excess. I can recall a time when people spoke of thatching their barns with unemployed barristers, and making corduroy roads with idle curates. We hear very little about these things now. Grumbles there are about under pay occasionally; but it is rare to hear a man say there are too many doctors or too many attorneys. Novelwriting, indeed, is perhaps the only career actually overstocked: but the fiction-writers have their uses too; they have banished from society in a great degree the colloquial novelist-the most intense bore in creation-so that we should be grateful to them, as we are to the dogs in Constantinople: there

are no other scavengers, and but for them the streets would be impassable.

I like, then, to think that if I were beginning life again I should have a wider field for my choice of a career, and that there are now a number of pleasant pasturages which, in the time of my boyhood, were dried up and unprofitable wastes. I like to feel that a number of men who like myself never felt a vocation for regular labour, need no longer be a burden on their richer relatives, and that while the great highways of the world are as wide as ever, there are scores of bypaths, and even some little short cuts, to Fortune, well suited to those who are not hard walkers, or over-well prepared for the road. The capable men will always take care of themselves. For your clever fellow I have no more sympathy than I have a sense of charity for the rich man. Neither needs what I should give him; all my interest, all my anxiety, is for those hopeless creatures who can do nothing. Stupid as boys, stupider as men, they grow up to be the reproach of their friends for not having "done something for them." How few families without one of these shooting-jacketed, cigar-smoking, dreary nonentities, who gazes at his own image in 'Punch,' and thinks it the caricature of his friend--fellows with no other aptitudes than for eating, and with a settled melan

choly of disposition that seems to protest against the wrongs the world is doing them.

It is for these incurables I want an asylum. Hitherto we have been satisfied to send them to our colonies; we have shipped them to New Zealand, Australia, Vancouver Island-wherever there was talk of gold to be grubbed we have despatched them: not hopefully, indeed, far from it; but with that craving for momentary relief that makes a man glad to renew his bill without distressing himself at the instant how he is to meet it eventually; and, like the bill, these fellows come back to us with a heavier debt to pay-their manners a little coarser, their hands a little harder, more given to brandy, and less burthened with scruples. Sydney or Auckland or Brisbane, or wherever it was, was a humbug -no place for a gentleman: the settlers were all scoundrels. Life was a general robbery there, and throat-cutting and garotting were popular pastimes. What scores of such stories have I heard from these green-eyed, yellow-faced, long-necked creatures, to whom emergency had never suggested manhood, nor any necessity called forth a single quality of energy or independence!

Bad as they were before, they are far worse now. They have veneered their indolence with the coarse habits of a lawless, undisciplined existence, and

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