only one plank betwixt its iniquity and the open street. And all this is for a moral! Heaven knows, Smith, I am no Puritan; but when I think upon the men who now call themselves the lights of the age, and look back upon the past, I am absolutely sick at heart, and could almost wish for a return of the days of Mrs Radcliffe and the Castle of Otranto. Now, my dear fellow, as I know you to be a thoroughly good-hearted man--not overgiven to liquor, although your estimate of beer is a just one--a constant husband, and, moreover, the father of five or six promising olive-branches, I do not for a moment suppose that you are likely to inweave any such tendencies in your tale. You would consider it low to make a prominent character of a scavenger; and although some dozen idiots who call themselves philanthropists would brand you as an aristocrat for entertaining any such opinion, I think you are decidedly in the right. But there is another tendency towards which I suspect you are more likely to incline. You are a bit of a Radical, and, like all men of genius, you pique yourself on elbowing upwards. So far well. The great ladder, or rather staircase of ambition, is open to all of us, and it is fortunately broader than it is high. It is not the least too narrow to prevent any one from approaching it, and after you have taken the first step, there is nothing more than stamina and perseverance required. But then I do not see that it is necessary to be perpetually plucking at the coat-tails, or seizing hold of the ankles of those who are before. Such conduct is quite as indecorous, and indeed ungenerous, as it would be to kick back, and systematically to smite with your heel the unprotected foreheads of your followers. Nor would I be perpetually pitching brickbats upwards, in order to show my own independence; or raising a howl of injustice, because another fellow was considerably elevated above me. In the social system, Smith, as it stands at present, has always stood, and will continue to stand long after Astley's is forgotten, it is not necessary that every one should commence at the lowest round of the staircase. Their respective fathers and progenitors have secured an advantageous start for many. They have achieved, as the case may be, either rank or fame, or honour, or wealth, or credit--and these possessions they are surely entitled to leave as an inheritance of their offspring. If we want to rise higher in the social scale than they did, we must make exertions for ourselves; if we are indolent, we must be contented to remain where we are, though at imminent risk of descending. But you, I take it for granted, and indeed the most of us who owe little to ancestral enterprise and are in fact men of the masses, are struggling forward towards one or other of the good things specified above, and no doubt we shall in time attain them. In the meanwhile, however, is it just--nay, is it wise--that we should mar our