hear what you understand, and not to hear what you don't understand; and especially to pretend you can do a great deal more than you can; often to have for a very great secret that there is no secret; to shut yourself up to mend pens and seem profound, when you are only empty and hollow; to play well or ill the part of a personage; to spread abroad spies and pensioned traitors; to melt seals, intercept letters, and try to ennoble the poverty of the means by the importance of the ends--may I die if that isn't all there is of politics." It is a good hit of Susan's when she says that vapors are "a disease of quality," only to be taken in boudoirs. A poor woman whose cause is coming on at court remarks that selling judgeships is a great abuse. "You are right," says the dolt of a magistrate; "we ought to get them for nothing." And how a Paris audience, in the temper of 1789, must have relished the hits at the hereditary principle: "It is no matter whence you came; the important question is, whither are you bound?" "What have you done, my lord, to merit so many advantages--rank, fortune, place? You took the trouble to be born, nothing more." We can fancy, too, how such touches as this might bring down the house: "I was thought of for an office, but unfortunately I was fit for it. An arithmetician was wanted; a dancer got it." All men, as Mr. Carlyle observes, laughed at these jests, and none louder than the persons satirized--"a gay horse-racing Anglo-maniac noblesse loudest of all."