morbid temperament concurring with a situation of visionary (yes! if you please, of fantastic) but still of most real distress. How much it would have astonished Lord Monboddo to find himself made answerable, virtually made answerable, by the evidence of secret tears, for the misery of an unknown child in Lancashire. Yet night and day these silent memorials of suffering were accusing him as the founder of a wound that could not be healed. It happened that the several volumes of his work lay for weeks in the study of our tutor. Chance directed the eye of my brother, one day, upon that part of the work in which Lord M. unfolds his hypothesis that originally the human race had been a variety of the ape. On which hypothesis, by the way, Dr. Adam Clarke's substitution of _ape_ for _serpent_, in translating the word _nachash_, (the brute tempter of Eve,) would have fallen to the ground, since this would simply have been the case of one human being tempting another. It followed inevitably, according to Lord M., however painful it might be to human dignity, that in this, their early stage of brutality, men must have had tails. My brother mused upon this revery, and, in a few days, published an extract from some scoundrel's travels in Gombroon, according to which the Gombroonians had not yet emerged from this early condition of apedom. They, it seems, were still _homines caudati_. Overwhelming to me and stunning was the ignominy of this horrible discovery. Lord M. had not overlooked the natural question--In what way did men get rid of their tails? To speak the truth, they never _would_ have got rid of them had they continued to run wild; but growing civilization introduced arts, and the arts introduced sedentary habits. By these it was, by the mere necessity of continually sitting down, that men gradually wore off their tails. Well, and what should hinder the Gombroonians from sitting down? _Their_ tailors and shoemakers would and could, I hope, sit down, as well as those of Tigrosylvania. Why not? Ay, but my brother had insisted already that they _had_ no tailors, that they _had_ no shoemakers; which, _then_, I did not care much about, as it merely put back the clock of our history--throwing us into an earlier, and therefore, perhaps, into a more warlike stage of society. But, as the case stood now, this want of tailors, &c., showed clearly that the process of sitting down, so essential to the ennobling of the race, had not commenced. My brother, with an air of consolation, suggested that I might even now, without an hour's delay, compel the whole nation to sit down for six hours a day, which would always "make a beginning." But the truth would remain as before, viz., that I was the king of a people that had tails; and the slow, slow process by which, in a course of many centuries, their posterity might rub them off,--a hope of vintages never to be enjoyed by any generations that are yet heaving in sight,--_that_ was to me the worst form of despair.