Wherever, Eusebius, this portrait was taken, it was, and is, an epitome, an emblem of high civilisation. It speaks so plainly of all exemption from toil and care, of the unapproachableness of danger. There is living elegance in a garden of peace. It is, in fact, the type of civilisation. What! will the economist, the philosopher of our day, be ready to say,—Civilisation amongst Chinese and Tartars! and that centuries perhaps ago. Civilisation is “The Nineteenth Century!” The glory of the Nineteenth Century is the Press. We are Civilisation. Very well, gentlemen; nevertheless it would be pleasant if you could exhibit a little more peace and quietness, a little less turmoil, a little more unadulterating honesty, a little less careworn look in your streets, as the mark of your boasted civilisation. You are doing wonders, and, like Katerfelto with his hair on end, are in daily wonderment at your own wonders. You steam—annihilate space and time. You have ripped open the bowels of knowledge, and well-nigh killed her in search of her golden egg. You are full, to the throat and eyes, of sciences and arts. You are hourly astonishing yourselves and the world. Nevertheless, you have one great deficiency as to the ingredients that make up civilisation; you are decidedly too conceited; you lack charity; you count bygone times and peoples as nothing and nobodies: yet you build a great Crystal Palace, and boast of it, as if it were all your own; whereas the whole riches of it, in the elegances of all arts, are imitations of the works of those bygone times and peoples. Who is satisfied with your model-civilisation? Eusebius, is not the question yet to be asked—What is it? in what does it consist? how is it to be obtained? True civilisation has no shams—we have too many, and they arise out of our swaggering and boasting; so that we force ourselves to assume every individual virtue, though we have it not. We are contemptuous; and contempt is a burr of barbarism sticking to us still, even in this “Nineteenth Century,” a phrase in the public mouth glorifying self-esteem. I must, for the argument, go back to the Chinese lady in her narrow japanned gilt frame. As I have drawn my curtains, Eusebius, at the dawn of day, and that placid beauty (though not to be admitted in any book of that name) has smiled upon me from lips so delicate, so unvoracious—did she pick grains of rice, like Amine in the Arabian tale?—I verily thought she must have lived in as civilised an age as ours. Yes—perhaps she was not very learned, excepting in Chinese romances, and very good learning that is: but neither you nor I, Eusebius, lay very great stress upon knowledge, nor call it “Power,” nor think that happiness necessarily grows out of it. One evil of it is, that it unromances the age; and romance—why not say it?—romance is a main ingredient in true, honest, unadulterated civilisation. You would prefer being as mad as Don Quixote, and be gifted with his romance, to