Before I went to Heliopolis I asked a Scotchman I found myself seated next to at dinner one day at the _table d’hôte_, whether it was worth one’s while to go? ‘I will tell you just how it is,’ he replied. ‘I have been there. There is nothing to see; but it will give you a pleasant afternoon. It is like going out a fishing. The day is fine. The country looks well. You have a pleasant friend, and a good luncheon, with cigars and whisky. You come home without having seen a fish; but you are not dissatisfied with yourself for having gone.’ Having again met this gentleman after I had been there, he asked me how I had liked Heliopolis? He seemed so thoroughly satisfied with his own matter-of-fact, and very intelligible, way of regarding the world, and all it contains, that I refrained from telling him what I had thought. In his presence I almost doubted whether any pearls, excepting his, were not counterfeits: at all events, I was sure they would appear so to him. This, however, was but a momentary misgiving. There are some other sorts which, though not so common, are quite as genuine as his; perhaps, too, (but when one writes in English this must not be said without expressions of humility, and of readiness to receive correction,) they may have been formed by animals, the ingredients of whose food were somewhat more varied than is the case with the ordinary mollusk. But, be this as it may, those that are of the rarer sort have the advantage that, while they do not in the least interfere with the enjoyment of the sunshine, the pleasant scene, the friend, the good cigar, and the old whisky (perhaps rather giving depth to the enjoyment, because refining it), they are in themselves, and even without these agreeable adjuncts, a source of never-failing enjoyment. They are, as was said of such things long ago, as good for the night as for the day. They go with us into the country, and accompany us on our travels. It may, however, be objected to them that, in this country, they generally make their possessor unpractical, and leave him poorer, except in ideas, than they found him. There is no denying that it is so here, very often. Is the reason of this that our governing class, whether we interpret those words to mean the class from which our legislators, and administrators, have hitherto very generally been taken, or the class that put them in their places, that is, the shopocracy (can we hope anything better from our new governing class, that of the British artizan?) have cared but little for these things? Influences of this kind have made us a money-worshipping people—not that we have loved money more than other people, but that money has had too much power amongst us—so that too many of us, like my Scotch acquaintance, have learnt to pooh-pooh everything which does not fetch money—that is to say, nature and history, which are the materials out of which truth is constructed; and art, poetry, philosophy, and science, which are the construction