To follow professional starving
Is very hard following, I guess,
Yet harder than mere want of carving
Is the thing on your notice I press.

To follow a Nimrod is hard,
When plashing through puddles you spank it;
Or to follow a lead, when the card
Is not in your hand—the deuce thank it.

And I've heard that a flea in a blanket
Is a very hard matter to follow;
And very hard driving they rank it
A certain brute given to wallow.

'Tis hard 'hind a huge van to ride
In a Hansom, stuck fast till you swear,
In the midst of a jam in Cheapside,
"While you're anxious to reach Grosv'nor-square.

I know many hard things to do:
'Tis hard, when you're wrong'd, to say " thankee,'
'Tis hard to bamboozle a Jew—
But very much harder, a Yankee.

And hard 'tis to take up your bills
Without money; and hard to get credit
When your failure the newspapers fills,
And all your acquaintance have read it.

'Tis then hard to follow, I grant,
The remains of a wealthy relation,
Who has left his " own people" in want,
And his millions has willed to the nation.

But I see you are wearied with guessing,
I'll tell you what 'tis and be done,
Perplexity's always distressing,
So here is the answer my son:

Of all things we know, great or small,
In sea or in air, hill or hollow,
On this-here terrestrial ball,
Good advice is the hardest to follow.

BACK TO SCOTLAND.

I WONDER how long the facetious cockney
will go on making jokes about the Scotchman's
aversion to going back to his native land! This
sharp sauce has been kept now for nearly three
centuries, and it is as pungent and hot i' the
mouth as when it was first bottled in the English
vials of wrath. We have sunk many differences,
forgotten many animosities, buried deep
in oblivion many bones of contention which
have long since crumbled to dust; but this
taunt is still ready on our tongues even after all
sense of its truth and applicability has faded
from our minds. Nothing seems to last so
long as a national prejudice, especially when it
finds expression in a popular witticism. When
our enemies or rivals are concerned, we are apt
to love a joke better than the truth, and often
to sacrifice truth to the petty purpose of raising
a laugh. I wonder how many centuries of
opportunity the world has lost through joking!
Look back to Italy in the fifteenth century, and
note how the seeds of political and social disunion
were sown in that country by the
Pasquinaders. Venice made jokes at the
expense of Naples, Naples at the expense of Rome,
Rome at the expense of Milan. A score of
states and districts in Italy were kept apart by
the habit of ridiculing each other's provincialisms.
The empire of the Cæsars was split into
parishes by the laughter excited by village wits.
Grand-duchies and duchies, with their petty
princes and paltry pretensions, were the results
of this badinage, and all the might of France
has not been able to bind up the bundle of sticks
which was thus shaken asunder. How long
have feelings of jealousy and hatred been
sustained between England and France by facetious
recriminations, by senseless jokes, and extravagant
caricatures. What were the sort of notions
that so long estranged us? That Frenchmen
were frog-eating foreigners, poor, half-starved
despicable creatures, who could not stand up
before an Englishman for a moment. Did we
not boast that our Englishman could thrash
three Frenchmen any day? The idea of a
Frenchman managing a ship, or training a racehorse,
sent us into convulsions of laughter.
Then, from the other side, John Bull was viewed
as a big fat beast, who swore loudly and drank
deeply, and sold his wife at Smithfield. We
held these notions, and held them so long,
because we studied each other in the pages of
the caricaturists. Even now, when the French
have an iron-clad fleet equal to our own, and a
horse from France has won the highest honours
of the English turf, the idea still lingers that a
Frenchman is a ridiculous person, to be laughed
at, and caricatured, and despised.

Among the wrongs which England has
inflicted upon Ireland, may be reckoned the jokes
which have been coined and passed into currency
at the expense of poor Paddy. How few of us .
know anything of the serious aspects of Irish
life; how few of us have been across the Channel
to see the country and the people for ourselves?
Who ever reads the history of Ireland? We
get our ideas of Irishmen from collections of
Irish bulls, from newspaper paragraphs about
evictions and the shooting of landlords, from
jig dancers at music-halls, and from pathetic
stage peasants in frieze bobtail coats and caved-in
hats, who twirl shillelaghs and shout "hurroo!"
We have joked about Paddy until we regard
him entirely as a comic person, addicted to
poteen, potatoes, and sedition. Pat will come
from Cork with his coat buttoned behind to the
end of the chapter; and I am sure if he were to
appear with his coat buttoned before, we should
all be much disappointed, and refuse to
recognise him.

Scotland can well afford to be joked about.
She is apt to say, " Let those laugh who win."
With her armour of thistles and self-esteem she
is proof against the petty shafts of aimless
ridicule. One good reason for her self-complacency,
is the fact that those petty shafts go
very wide of the mark. We cannot admit this
joke about our steps being always turned
towards England, and never going back, into our
heads, because we are a matter of fact people;
and the matter of fact is simply this—hear it
ye Saxon jokers—that there are more Englishmen
in Scotland than there are Scotchmen in