perhaps even, next to the cat and the ape,
the merriest and the most waggish of
quadrupeds. Like all clever folks, he is fond of
idleness and dancing. He is a lounger,
overflowing with humour, and a pattern of
dexterity. These qualities are what have
made him so popular with the gamins of
Paris—a race of beings jocose by nature, and
born enemies of all work. Keep on good
terms with a bear, and you will find him full
of assiduity and delicate attentions. His
favourite exercises are wrestling and boxing;
but if you make a match with him, he will
never hug you more tightly than is absolutely
necessary to carry on the pretence of a serious
battle. If he throws you down in sport, he
will take good care to tumble the first upon
the ground, and serve as the mattrass to break
your fall. Far from fracturing your skull
with a paving-stone, to rid you of a fly, he will
strip your shirt from off your body, without
even touching your epidermis. At night, if
you are keeping watch on the deck of a
vessel, he will cheerfully offer you his warm
and shaggy coat for blanket and pillow, to
prevent the dampness of the night from giving
you a terrible cold in the head. He will then
abstain from making the slightest movement,
for fear of disturbing your slumbers; and he
will take good care that troublesome people
shall treat you with becoming respect. The
lieutenant of the ship De Flotte, who, at the
age of five-and-twenty had travelled
something like thirty thousand leagues over the
seas, and who has thoroughly studied the
animals of every latitude and of both
hemispheres, declares that he has reason to
congratulate himself enormously on the sociability
and friendship which he met with from the bear,
during his hyperborean peregrinations. Only,
he remarked, that in order to continue in
favour with the bear, and to maintain with
him relations of affectionate cordiality, it was
necessary to treat him on the footing of perfect
equality. It would seem that the bear will
not put up with those airs of superiority,
which people so often give themselves with
inferiors, still less with a disrespectful
gesture or a stroke of a cane. The bear is the
most ticklish of beasts on the point of honour;
and his susceptibility is perfectly legitimate.
The truth is, the bear enjoyed the pleasure of
reigning in the world before man made his
appearance on it, and, not caring to be
reminded of his misfortunes, he refuses to
accept our pity.

Of all the serious charges that are brought
against the bear, the one of which he will
find it hardest to wash his hands, is his
passion for honey. Sometimes the reason
is asked of this violent propensity, which
drives the bear to pillage the treasures
produced by attractive labour? The reason
is simple enough. The bear is the emblem
of savagery; and the savage is an idler,
a non-producer, an enemy of work, and
the right of out-of-door theft is one of the
seven articles of his charter. He plunders
the treasures of the industrious bee, to show
that in every "limbic" society (whether
Savagery, Patriarchate, Barbarism, or
Civilisation), the fruit of the labour of the
industrious is destined to become the booty of
do-nothings and unproductives. He never,
like the human savage, sets fire to a field of
sugar-cane, simply by way of a little pastime.

THE LENGTH OF THE QUAYS.

To an Englishman whose chief knowledge
of Ireland has been confined to what he has
been able to glean from books and
newspapers, and what he has gathered from the
testimony of travellers, and from the
conversation of Irishmen themselves, the first
sight of the city of Dublin cannot fail to
awaken in him an emotion of agreeable
disappointment. From all he has read and all he
has heard of the misery and destitution of
Ireland; of her squalid poverty and utter
prostration, physical and moral; of the decay
of her commerce, the stagnation of her inland
trade, the grovelling poverty of her people, the
neglect of her aristocracy, and the mismanagement
of her rulers; of the lamentable and
pitiable state indeed to which she has been
reduced by much misgovernment and more
national indolence—from what, in fine, he has
seen and may inductively argue from the
raggedness and wretchedness of the teeming
Irish colonies in London, and Liverpool, and
Glasgow, he may expect, on landing on
Dublin Quay, to find himself in a metropolis
of hovels occupied chiefly by beggars and
slaves, trampled upon by a few foreign tyrants,
and priest-ridden by a rampant clergy. He
may expect to see such nobles as are not
absentees in second-hand attire; the ruined
gentry growing and selling potatoes for a
subsistence; he might look in every street for a
repetition of Church Lane, St. Giles's, or
Fontenoy Street, Liverpool, with tattered
mendicants in every street, a pig in every parlour,
and a whiskey shop at every corner.

He lands. A magnificent city, numbering
more than two hundred and fifty thousand
inhabitants, stretches along the two banks of
a bright and unsullied river, in the midst of
some of the most beautiful scenery in the
world. Two magnificent lines of quays,
broken by bridges (of which there are seven
within the municipal boundary), and which
equal in architectural elegance, though of
course not in size, anything we can show on
the River Thames; streets of palaces; a bank
which is amongst the finest architectural
monuments in Great Britain; a splendid
palace of justice (the Four Courts); a
sumptuous Custom-House; a noble university;
two venerable cathedrals for the Protestant
form of worship and one for Catholic rites,
together with a crowd of churches and
chapels for every species of religious
denomination. Were I to state that he may walk