sketch it in at home at our study table, all fair
smooth lines and tones. We cannot then place
ourselves atop of the Pincian Hill, with all the
roofs of the city at our feet, looking literally
like a heap of shattered potsherds, having a
general rickety and yellowish baked clay aspect.
We have no thought then but that the monster
temple is dark, and crushing, and ponderous,
instead of being, as it is, a light and airy casket.
There is under the broken potsherds much more
to charm than you wot of, though not strictly
according to preconceived pattern; yet much
that will disenchant.

GIANTS THEIR OWN KILLERS.

THE present writer has a heavy charge to bring
against the British Public. He accuses it of
neglecting the giants. In its youthful days, it
enjoys the services of these benevolent men; they
are as much an institution as the British Lion,
the man in armour, or the javelin men; but it
cherishes the British Lion, it upholds the javelin
men, and it ungratefully forgets the giants.

Not the giants of whom the Knight of the
Rueful Countenance was wont to discourse
beneath the cork-trees of La Mancha; nor those
of whom Spenser sang in his sweet, dreamy,
half-finished tales; nor the giants thirty-six feet high
found near queenly Athens; nor the monster
Mazarino, whose head was the size of a large
cask, and whose teeth weighed five ounces each;
nor the ancient King of Dauphiny, whose
mortal remains rest in a tomb thirty teet long:
the said remains being twenty-five feet in length,
with teeth the size ot an ox's foot, and a
shin-bone measuring four feet—which means that,
like Mazarino and divers others, he was not a
giant at all, but an extinct mole or mammoth,
or something of that kind; nor Philargipæ,
the "great gigant of Great Britaine;" nor the
hairy giants of the South Sea; nor those slain by
our immortal Jack; nor a thousand others, for
the old monks and chroniclers were somewhat
given to credulity, and knew not the bones of a
hippopotamus from those of a giant.

No, it is the real domestic giant whose
interests are here represented. The writer appears
in behalf of the melancholy but benignant-looking
giant of the caravan, such as he rises up
amidst the dreams of bygone times when the
writer was admitted to the privilege of seeing
him for twopence, fittingly dressed in a rather
antique and very faded suit, and generally
accompanied by some other prodigies of nature,
which the public was also graciously permitted
to view for this ridiculously small sum.

Many a time and oft have we all wondered
whether the giant always lived in that small
yellow house on wheels, with the bird-cage,
regulation chimney, and brass knocker, Whether
all through life he continued to give an account
of himself every quarter of an hour; whether he
ever grew tired of showing the size of his foot,
and having his sides poked and his legs pinched
by sceptical old gentlemen who won't be put
down; whether, when he grew old, he still continued
to walk about the streets at two in the
morning, lighting his pipe at the lamps; whether
he married the giantess, or the pig-faced lady,
and retired to live in his castle.

In his youthful days the writer wanted to be
a giant himself, and several times thought he
had discovered an infallible method of attaining
the object of his ambition; such as over-feeding,
stretching by dint of violent jerks from beams,
&c., to the great amazement of his relations and
friends. He failed egregiously.

For this failure he feels grateful. Apart
from the fact that the giant is essentially short-lived,
and that he is generally a poor credulous
blundering creature, he is the most unhappy
of all the tribe of wonders. The pig-faced
lady may hide her facial angles behind a Shetland
veil; the albino can dye her hair and
wear spectacles; the living skeleton may now
assume any size he likes, by the help of balloon
sleeves and pegtops; the dwarf is petted and
kissed, retires with a fortune, and a wife three
times his size. To the giant alone is denied,
alike the pleasure of retirement and the bliss of
connubial life. He is interdicted from appearing
in public except when there is no public to
appear in. He pines while living, and dies of
his own greatness ere half the span of life is run.

The unmerited neglect of these eminent men
has rendered it rather difficult to procure
authentic information respecting them. Such
little scraps as have been gotten together by a
faithful admirer, are now presented to a repentant
British public.

Ireland has long been famous for producing
exotics of this kind; and perhaps the largest
skeleton to be found is that of O'Brien, or
Byrne, in the College of Surgeons. This ambitious
young gentleman came over to England
and exhibited himself as the Irish giant, and,
having died, was dissected and labelled with
this title. But at the very time when he was
being converted into an interesting specimen of
osteology, the real O'Brien and real Irish giant
was alive and as well as a giant can be. His
name was Patrick Cotter, which he bore till
some one persuaded him that he was a
descendant of the far-famed Brien Born, upon
which he took the name of O'Brien, and agreed
with his friends that he very much resembled
his ancestor. His genealogy was never very
strictly inquired into, and, as his father was a
bricklayer, the family must have lost caste, as
well as changed their name. He was brought
over to England by a rascally showman, who, in
order to coerce him into signing articles of
slavery for three years, trumped up a fictitious
claim for debt; and he would have been sent to
Bristol gaol, had not an English gentleman,
seeing this simple-minded creature in a state
of dire bewilderment and distress, not only
rescued him from the clutches of the showman,
but enabled him to set up for himself,
whereby he realised thirty pounds in ten days.
he continued at this work from time to time
for twenty-live years, and then, having realised
a nice fortune, retired to Bristol, where two