Have you seen Charles Matthews in “Used Up?” Sir Charles Coldstream represents us all. We are everlastingly seeking a sensation, and never finding it. Sir Charles’s valet’s description of him describes us all:—“He’s always sighing for what he calls excitement—you see, everything is old to him—he’s used up—nothing amuses him—he can’t feel.” And so he looks in the crater of Vesuvius and finds nothing in it, and the Bay of Naples he considers inferior to that of Dublin—the Campagna to him is a swamp—Greece a morass—Athens a bad Edinburgh—Egypt a desert—the pyramids humbugs. The same confession is on every one’s lips. The boy of sixteen, with a beardless chin, has a melancholy _blasé_ air; the girl gets wise, mourns over the vanity of life, and laughs at love as a romance; a heart—unless it be a bullock’s, and well cooked,—is tacitly understood to be a mistake; and conscience a thing that no one can afford to keep. Our young men are bald at twenty-five, and woman is exhausted still sooner. I am told Quakers are sometimes moved by the spirit. I am told mad Ranters sing, and preach, and roar as if they were in earnest. I hear that there is even enthusiasm amongst the Mormons; but that matters little. We are very few of us connected with such _outre_ sects, and the exceptions but prove the rule. But a truce to generalities. Let us give modern instances. Look at Jenkins, the genteel stockbroker. In autumn he may be seen getting into his brougham, which already contains his better-half and the olive-branches that have blessed their mutual loves. This brougham will deposit the Jenkinses, and boxes of luggage innumerable, at the Brighton Railway Terminus, whence it is their intention to start for that crowded and once fashionable watering-place. Jenkins has been dying all the summer of the heat. Why, like the blessed ass as he is, did he stop in town, when for a few shillings he might have been braced and cooled by sea breezes, but because of that monotony which forbids a man consulting nature and common sense. Jenkins only goes out of town when the fashionable world goes; he would not for the life of him leave till the season was over. Again, does ever the country look lovelier than when the snows of winter reluctantly make way for the first flowers of spring? Is ever the air more balmy or purer than when the young breath of summer, like a tender maiden, kisses timidly the cheek, and winds its way, like a blessing from above, to the weary heart? Does ever the sky look bluer, or the sun more glorious, or the earth more green, or is ever the melody of birds more musical, than then? and yet at that time the _beau monde_ must resort to town, and London drawing-rooms must emit a polluted air, and late hours must enfeeble, and bright eyes must become dull, and cheeks that might have vied in loveliness with the rose, sallow and pale.