bun-shop, or slapping his commercial
connections on the back, in places where
merchants most do congregate. He is not thin;
he is not parchment-faced; he is scarcely
cautious, and he is certainly not cold. Let
him hear of a thoroughly new and
adventurous investment, and it stirs his heart— for
he has one—like a trumpet. He is in no
way dependent on a bundle of flimsy letters,
for the telegraph and other advanced
contrivances supply him with the broad facts of
intelligence; and his business is conducted
on insurances and systems that secure him
from much anxiety with regard to his
ventures. His capital is only a curse to him
when it lies idle at his banker's; and the
occupation that gives it activity, is at once to
him a pleasure and a profit. His imagination
is far too rich, far too active, far too
practical; as he often finds to his cost,
when the palace of enterprise he has raised
with his wealth, often sinks before his eyes,
leaving no trace but a bleak dry desert of
barren sand. Then it is that his ground-
down work-people pass gaily over to another
master, without a thought of unselfish
sympathy for their late unfortunate employer.

Such is the real, living, breathing capitalist
that we may see any hour of the day, any day
of our lives; and it is time that his puppet-
caricature should be consigned to the limbo
of nightmares, monstrosities, and walking lies.

The next puppet requiring decent burial is
that well-known comic puppet, the fat
alderman. We made him wheezy and short-
breathed! we gave him small pigs' eyes, and
a stomach like a feather-bed; we made his
life a perpetual succession of feasts; we
told him his decision on turtle was final;
and we called him by the funny names of
Waddle or Gobble. He was the only
puppet in the world who ever dined, or
thought of dining, and the only one who ever
reached the weight of eighteen stone. We
made his face as purple as a winter's sun
seen through a fog; and we always gave him
three chins, and sometimes four. We forgot,
when we displayed him sleeping after a City
banquet in his brougham, which he almost
filled, that he was only an alderman in his
public capacity, while in private he was
necessarily a capitalist (and, perhaps, a
money-lender), whom we had only just
represented as excessively lean. Our audience,
luckily for us, had short memories, as well as
weak observation, and the contradiction
passed without discovery or comment. We
give him the gout, and then he was
excessively amusing, for gout is essentially a comic
disease. The more testy, the more red-faced,
the more helpless we made him; the more
tea-urns we made to drip boiling water upon
his legs, and the more unruly boys we made
to stamp upon his agonised toes, the more
was our strong sense of humour relished by
our patrons, and extolled by the critical
beadles who guard the Temple of Fame.

A few almost imperceptible touches
converted him into the chairman of a vestry,
or some eminent parochial representative of
the people, and the old high-tory obstructive
freedom-hating sneerers at municipal
liberty, and opposers of free government,
laughed loudly at our amusing power of
comic characterisation, and secretly blessed
us for aiding their designs. Every blow that
we dealt to the City which in the old days
had been the stout and unflinching champion
of right against dishonesty and might, every
shaft of shallow ridicule which we aimed
at the parish,—a copy of the City— were joy
and satisfaction to their re-actionary hearts.

All this time the real alderman has been
walking briskly about his City, unconscious
of the load of fat with which we have
invested him. He has been working officially
and mercantilely his good twelve hours every
day, unoppressed by the sense of drowsiness
that accompanies a multitude of chins. He is
more ignorant of the qualities of turtle, and
less solicitous about his dinner, than many
a Grub Street author of the present day,
whose puppet-representative, by the way,
requires quite as much alteration as that of
the alderman, the capitalist, the money-
lender, and the miser.

We look upon ourselves as guides and
instructors of the people, and we have dazzled
and deceived them with a set of unnatural
scarecrows. We have held up a puppet spy,
and a puppet Jesuit, with sneak and villain
written on their faces, and while our
believers have been gazing upon these
deceptive pictures, the real spy and the real Jesuit
have worked laughingly in the broad light
of day, indebted to us for the shelter of an
effective disguise.

These, with many other monsters of our
hands, have gone abroad into the world, and
the world still believes them to be solid gods,
though they are more empty than the air.
It is our duty, as their creators, to stand
upon the edge of that narrow stream which
divides the present from the past, and as they,
one by one, attempt to cross, to smite them
down, and bury them for ever from the light.

THE EASTERN KINGDOM.

In the time of Kublai Khan, and the
Abyssinian maid playing on a dulcimer,
somewhere about the year twelve hundred
and eighty, Marco Polo, the Venetian
traveller, discovered a large island off Cathay,
or China. This island, called by him Zipangu,
but by the natives Nippon, is the same which,
filtered through the alembic of Chinese
pronunciation, we at the present day call
Japan, or, the Kingdom of the Origin of
the Sun; that is, the Eastern Kingdom.
Marco Polo's island off Cathay was not
believed in. Mixed up with so much that
was curious, valuable, and true in the account
of his travels, were such manifest absurdities,