of that pleasant picture was made by the
twists and folds of the serpent's trail. But
paint and varnishing do wonders; and if you
cannot dig down your blackened monument of
angry passions, as you ought to do, perhaps the
next best thing is to make it look as much like
Carrara marble as you can. Which has a better
effect from the hill-tops, and is not defacing to
the landscape. But whitening sepulchres is a
perilous employment.

A church is not exactly the fitting place
where to hide the paint-pot, one would think;
and yet the church-pew has very often a large
supply hidden under its well-cushioned seat,
with a varnish-brush lying to the left all handy,
and a first-rate choice of colours. Church-
pews are thick with paint, and no expense
of wit and material spared to make plain and
ordinary woods do the duty of the costliest
and the rarest. One has to be contented with
a vast amount of stucco and painted hempen
canvas there; but, like the Treasury Bench,
perhaps the truth unvarnished would be worse,
so we may be content to be saved from greater
evils by the sacrifice of small veracities. Is it
for the good, quite, of simple souls, that those
small veracities should be stripped of their
paint and varnish, and the inharmonious mosaic
work underneath pointed out to all eyes? It
may be; but it is surely just a question, touching
the ultimate value of the present course.
Paint and varnish the beginnings and the ends of
letters; those much-abused conventionalisms,
which stand as rampant unveracities confessed by
all! " Dear sir " to one man whom your soul
despises, and against whom your gorge rises; and
"your obedient servant" to another, on whom
you are comfortably wiping your feet. Paint
and varnish, my dear friend, paint and varnish
every inch of it!— only to be defended on the
plea that the gorilladom of the Palace of Truth
would be a worse condition of things; and
Taranaki ransacked for steel to supply bowie-knives
and tomahawks not the best translation of
Plato's Model Republic or Sir Thomas More's
Utopia.

Paint and varnish, too, overlie the whole system
of hospitality, and the manner of entertaining
your friends, now in use; from the cumbersome
dinner, costing more than a month's
quiet issue of the household funds, to the
crowded soirée, where the lace flounces are torn,
and the silk trains are walked on, where
nobody speaks to anybody, and where the supper-
table is a scramble, and the drawing-room a
Babel; where there is no enjoyment, no
sociability, no real hospitality, and no true pleasure,
but only paint and varnish, and very coarse gilding
to look at, and the core just the deadest and
stupidest wooden puppet ever pulled by strings,
and made to dance to order. But what is not
paint and varnish, is the pleasant supper. If any
one wants to know the meaning of good company,
let him inaugurate a series of small suppers,
where the men have brains and can talk, and
the women are all amiable and pretty, perhaps
some of them too with brains and the power
of being vocal— let him compare his creed with
that other code of gilded magnificence, and
say which is best. He will get no credit
for the one, granted; he will make no show,
cut no dash, eclipse no one, rival no one, make
no one envious, and perhaps incite to no
emulation: but he will have drunk his pure spring
water out of a crystal goblet, which is better
than wine-merchant's wine turned over the lip
of a huge vase of gilt albata, studded with mock
jewels.

Paint and varnish the social orderings,
everywhere. Paint and varnish all the funeral
pomp, and all the marriage pomp, and all
the christening pomp, so much delighted in,
and in which weak men and women invest so
large an amount of social salvation. Paint and
varnish— and of what dim and mournful hue!—
the heavy silver plates, the silver handles, and
the polished oaken coffin, the pall and the
plumes and the mutes and the housings— all to
convey a wretched bit of senseless clay to its
last resting-place, where, in a few years, it
will have mingled with the dust, the oaken
coffin crumbling and decayed, the silver plates
and handles blackened and destroyed, and the
whole of that once grand and living humanity
compressed into a tibia and a skull, an os femoris
or a few scattered vertebrae, tossed out at
random by a sexton in his cups. Paint and
varnish— white lead and lake for the most part—
the marriage pomp of cake and carriage,
wedding breakfast and the prancing horses with
white favours at their ears. Why not be
content to come together in God's name and Love's,
without all this silly symbolism, which, though
it once meant something true and human, is
now but a mere piece of conventional acting,
meaning so much money squandered on the
occasion, and no more? What does it signify
to the world at large that Miss Sarah Jones
has married Mr, William Brown, she without
a penny-piece to bless herself withal, and he
with his clerk's salary of two hundred and fifty
pounds a year, paid quarterly, income-tax
deducted? The only persons interested on the
occasion are the respective fathers and mothers,
a stray sister or two, or perhaps a home-keeping
brother: it may also be that a young lady or so
— one or more— looks pale and is down-spirited,
perhaps has a cough, loses appetite and flesh,
and is often seen with wet eyelashes and a
swollen upper lip for some weeks during the
event, before and after; or that sundry young
gentlemen, in numbers proportioned to Miss
Sarah's personal charms, become suddenly moody
and Byronic, or spiritual in a melancholy sort,
and Emersonian; but beyond that very limited
circle who is there to care for the proceedings
of these two worthy young people? And oh!
why should they make street shows of
themselves, and spend no end of money on certain
rites and ceremonies, which, for all positive
value, are just so many " medicine bags," or
Numbo-Jumbo fetichisms, and no more?

Poor young mother! You let baby cut his
teeth on your best Trichinopoly chain now,