a village which has undergone this process of being morticed into a town like a lump of rubble,--or converted into a stave of the great tun of Heidelberg in this manner--any country people that might be still to the fore, would be as ludicrous as useless; the coral cells of the villages must be cleared out before they attain the dignity of becoming reefs or atolls of a town. When this is done, the hardest step towards equality has, no doubt, been taken; the people of the country towns, a class the most hostile of all classes, at heart, to equality--have next to be attacked and, if possible, exterminated by the great town; this, however, is more a matter of time than of good management. At the same time, what one or two residency-towns have accomplished in this direction, is a good beginning at all events. Could we attain to our ideal, however--could we live to see the day when the two classes who are the most formidable opponents of equality--the peasants, and the people of the smaller towns--should have disappeared; and when not only the agricultural races but the lower nobility, the small proprietors, should be extinct--ah! then the world would be in the blissful enjoyment of an equality of a nobler sort than that which obtained in France, where it was merely a _plebeian_ one. There would be an absolute equality if pure nobility and collective humanity could rejoice in the possession of _one_ patent of nobility, and of real authentic _ancestors_. In Paris, the revolution wrote (as people did in the most ancient times) without capital letters; but if my golden age came to pass, the writing would be as it was in somewhat _later_ times than those just alluded to, _all_ capital letters, not, as at present, with capitals sticking up like steeples among quantities of small letters. But though such a lofty style, such an ennoblement of humanity as this may be nothing but a beautiful dream, and though we must be content with the minor consolation of seeing, in towns, the middle classes restricted to a single street, as is now the case with the Jews; even that would be a clear gain to the intellectual portion of mankind in the eyes of anyone who considers what an accomplished, capable set of people the higher nobility are.