dreadfully by taking this course; we shall
get indignantly reprimanded by the critics,
and flatly contradicted by the lecturers; but
we shall also, sooner or later, get a collection
of pictures bought for us that we, mere
mankind, can appreciate and understand. It may
be a revolutionary sentiment, but I think
that the carrying out of this reform (as well
as of a few others) is a part of the national
business which the people of England have
got to do for themselves, and in which
no big-wig whomsoever will assist them.
There is a great deal of social litter
accumulating about us; suppose, when we
start the business of setting things to rights,
that we try the new broom gently at first,
by sweeping away a little High Art, and
having the temerity to form our own opinions?

MR. SPECKLES ON HIMSELF.

HEREAFTER, men will tell each other of
three poets in a single nation— Shakspeare,
Milton, and Speckles: to make the
third of whom Nature had joined the
other two. This is a junction in the line
of poetry not recognised at present. That
which is Not-I does not understand me,
but I understand myself. It may be said,
too, that—while four of my six epics are still
in manuscript, while two hundred of my
tragedies are not only unacted, but also
unpublished, and I have issued not more than
thirty volumes of my lyric verse—the
materials for an estimate of my poetical genius
are not yet fully laid before the country.
Posterity will, I am convinced, do me justice.
Speckles, whose daily diet is humble-pie, has
had more than a flask of water from the
springs of Helicon. It saturates his soul.

It is not only in metaphysics and in poetry
that I have proved my strength. I have
made in vain some of the greatest mechanical
discoveries of the present age. I have
planned how to send huge steamers across
the Atlantic, sped by a motive power of the
simplest kind—a single hen. Instead of the
thirty, fifty, or a hundred horses, whose
power is commonly applied to engines, and
the mules used by some spinners, I am
able to show how wheels may be adjusted
capable of being set into motion by a hen of
ordinary strength. As hens, who are tough
of muscle, would be preferred for this
service, there would be none left but tender
chickens for the dinner-table; and, on this fact
I shall rely, whenever I bring out my plan,
for a great deal of popular support. A hen-
coop and a bushel of corn will box and feed
my engine power. In me, gentlemen, you
recover a Watt, a Milton, and a Bacon; but
unluckily, the Watt, Milton, and Bacon, of
the twentieth century. By a mistake I have
appeared in the nineteenth, and it is only for
that reason that I am not fully appreciated.

There are people who say they wish me
well; but who say also, that it would be
absurd to expect from me a connected
narrative, for that I should exalt and be-praise
myself till doomsday if I were not stopped.
But I appeal to an enlightened public. How
can I tell you anything if I know nothing,
and how can I know anything if I am
blind to my own character. Do you know
what the absolute in cognition is?
"Object plus subject is the absolute in cognition;
matter mecum is the absolute in cognition;
thoughts or mental states, together
with the self or subject, are the absolute in
cognition." I do not say this of myself, but
have it from a distinguished professor.

How, then, do I know that there ever was
such a man as my uncle Badham, the chemist?
He may have existed only in my mind as the
idea of a rich uncle who was more desperately
offended than anybody, at my having been
born a boy; but who nevertheless stood my
godfather and my friend. After him I was
christened Badham Speckles, and to him, at
the age of fourteen, I was apprenticed. I
was more certain of the existence of six
tragedies and a farce which I had written at
that time, than of the existence of my uncle,
at whose table I sat, and in whose bed I
slept, and at whose counter I served. The
tragedies I had created. They were substantive
portions of myself; but Uncle Badham,
(if Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne was right; as I
took him then to be) may have been a phantom
—an idea of mine. His beef and potatoes
were also ideas, good ideas; his rhubarb and
bitter aloes, his pestle and mortar, scammony
and Castile soap were bad ideas. Rochester
—where we seemed to live—was built out of
my own ideas, and peopled by creatures of
my own. Hearing, seeing, touching, tasting,
feeling, as everybody knows, is quite
inadequate to prove the existence of anything
or any body, except only oneself.

Yet the phantoms moving in that dream-
figure, the world, complained of me
sometimes, for being dreamy. I, a Speckles,
a direct descendant, as the slight corruption
of the family name proves, from the great
Sophocles—myself the then author of six
tragedies—was contemned even by the
nursemaids of Rochester, who came to me for
dill-water and castor-oil. I had a little
printing-press, which I kept under my bed;
and, by the help of which, I printed many of
my own fugitive pieces upon fragments of
shop-paper. Many a mixture did I send out
folded in immortal verse. My uncle's
customers found stanzas in powder-papers,
mottoes in bottle caps, poetry even in blisters,
genius in everything. They laughed in their
phantom way; my uncle groaned, and shook
his finger at me, like a warning ghost. On
one occasion he caused to sweep upon me the
figure of a hair-dresser, who forced me into
a chair, and cut away the rich, clustering hair
that hung over my shoulders. At the same
time he declared that he would turn me out
of doors if ever I wrote another line of