Now for a little entanglement of the subject. Who will sit for this aspirant for all the virtues—for civilisation? I look up to the portrait of the Chinese lady, who first set my thoughts upon this speculation. Surely she never got that placid do-nothing look from any long habit of toil and trouble; she never worked hard. I confess, Eusebius, as I question her, she does look a little more silly than I thought her. She never went the up-hill rough road. How should she? She was never shod for it; nay, were the truth told—for the painter has judiciously kept it out of sight—she had no proper feet to walk withal. They had been pinched to next to nothing. She never could have danced; would have been a sorry figure in a European ball-room; and in the way she must have stood, would have made but (as Goldsmith calls it) “a mutilated curtsey.” It is hard to give up a first idea. I proposed her as an emblem of civilisation—and why not? She does not represent civilisation in its progress—in its work; but in its result—its perfection. For look at her,—she stands not up with a bold impudence, like Luxury in the “Choice of Hercules,” puffed up and enlarged in the fat of pride, and redder and whiter than nature—a painted Jezebel. Quite the reverse. She is most delicately slender; her substance is of the purity of the finest China tea-cup. In fact, she seems to have been set up as the work of a whole nation’s toil,—as a sign, a model, of their civilisation. They who imagined such a creature, and set her upon her legs—yet I can hardly say that, considering the feet—must have made many after the same model, or seen many; and exquisite must have been the manners of such a piece of life-porcelain.