tied up by the head and tail to the steps of the
imperial throne.

Many are the hobby-horses of men—passing
away from history and going now into private
pastures to note what toys and playthings
are attached to domestic and personal establishments.
One man has the hobby-horse of fishing.
He will sit on a rock the whole day through,
getting sunburnt and blistered, throwing a minnow
at the end of a line into the water and watching
the rare bobbing underneath of a float, or whipping
a stream with an artificial fly, and getting
a wet jacket for the pleasure or a handful of
trout weighing an ounce and a fraction each.
Another man wears out his strength and his
buckskins in the saddle, and thinks life not
worth having without a fox scouring across the
country and a pack of hounds in full cry after
him. A third hangs his hobby-horse about with
old masters, with which the first requisite is
faith and the desideratum a picture-cleaner.
He has a Rembrandt as black as soot and
utterly impossible to decipher, which he values
next thing to his life, but about which Wardour-
street could tell some queer tales if it chose;
he has a Jordaens loaded with fleshy fruit not
half so good as Lance's, and dotted about
with flowers as fleshy as the fruit which Miss
Mutrie would be ashamed to own; yet his
Jordaens comes only second to his Rembrandt,
though a trifle more authentic. Then he has
an ugly bit of ugly life by Jan Steen, also
unapproachable; and an olive-green landscape by
Berghem, for which in his estimation a king's
crown would not be too much to pay; all of
which pieces of canvas make the garniture of
his hobby, whereof he cannot be sufficiently
proud or appreciative. This was dear old
Savage Landor's hobby; as was the possession
of rare books and Spanish manuscripts that of
Southey. Another man has his hobby of pictures
certainly, but pictures of all ages and both kinds—
modern and ancient—"my collection, sir," as if
his copies of La Cenci and La Seggiola, and his
originals by Brown and Smith, represented the
last results of civilisation and the extremest
point of human knowledge. However, these are
innocent hobbies, if a little wearisome to us the
spectators by the monotony of their caperings.

Another man drives his hobby into the
fields and hedges and makes it browse on
ferns and wild flowers—botany in the
concrete; parading his Wardian case, or his hortus
siccus, or his open-air fernery with the latest
varieties which need a magnifying-glass to see
how they are varieties at all, or his newly
discovered species of stinging-nettle, as the finest
and most beautiful of the hobbies cherished by
man—as, indeed, the only hobby worth dandling,
and almost the only object in life worth living
for. Another has his stuck all about, with
butterflies' wings and beetles' backs; another
clothes his with feathers; another with horns;
another with skins of foreign beasts; and a few
devote theirs to the raising of monster rhubarb
or magnificent cabbages—to roses as big as
peonies, and to strawberries as fat as plums.

Any of these are better than the hobby of
grand friends which afflicts certain people—the
"my lord" and "my lady," and "the eminent
Mr. This," and "the celebrated Mrs. That,"
whose names are hung like bells round the
collar of the hobby, making a fine jingling and a
tinkling in the ears of the grosser multitude.
This is not at all an uncommon hobby, but one
of which it is no ill nature to say, that the sooner
it is cut up into firewood whenever found capering
and braying, the better for all rational
individuals within earshot and eyeshot. Moral
philosophy makes also a hobby of formidable
dimensions, and with a collar of jangling bells
heralding its approach, of graver tones and
heavier metal than those which tell the world
that we are snobs and patronised by swells. So
does physiology; so does phrenology; so do,
indeed, all the 'ologies when used as hobbies and
not as carriers—as playthings wherewith to
amuse a vacant hour, and not as cart-horses for
ploughing up the stiff loam and preparing good
ground for the reception of fertile seed.
Perhaps of these phrenology, as a hobby, is the
biggest bore of all, and the most irritating;
exciting in one an ardent desire to knock the
rider down—the organ of combativeness being,
as a rule, pretty well developed behind most
Anglo-Saxon ears, and its manner of action
lawfully demonstrable to men riding their
phrenological hobby over one's own skull. One of the
greatest bores I know, or ever wish to see, is a
man who is always astride a phrenological hobby,
and to whom the most subtle and complex
workings of character are so many cut and dried
manifestations of organs with no more mystery
about them and no more wonder, than that a
thread jerked across a loom should present
itself in the result as so much cloth, with or
without pattern according to the cards. It may be
so; but to those who are not phrenologists this
exposition of the genesis of character is but a
cold study and a comfortless side-blow of Fate.

Their health is a grand hobby with some
people; or rather their belief in their diseased
and unhealthy condition, and their proximity to
and fitness for "the bourne whence," &c. I
know certain people, who, if they were
suddenly translated to a state of health so robust
and vigorous that even they themselves could
not possibly bemoan their afflicted state, would
have positively nothing to do, nothing to talk
of, and not the ghost of a hobby to ride. These
hobby-riders are terrible companions, even to
doctors accustomed to the hospital and the
"theatre;" but to the uninitiated, who speak
of symptoms and ailments with a lowered voice
and the undefinable accent belonging to a
forbidden subject, they are appalling; habit
inducing a familiarity with painful subjects
(revolting would be a better term), from which we
who are exempt shrink in dismay. And the funny
part of the matter is, that the more horrible the
disease, and the more distressing the symptoms,
the prouder they are of their hooby; the higher
the capers they make him cut, and the louder
his neighings and his brayings: distinction, in