None of your Egyptian pyramids, to entomb subscribers’ capitals. No overgrown colonnades of stone, {23a} like an alderman’s gouty legs in white cotton stockings, fit only to use as rammers for paving Tottenham Court Road. This house is neither after the model of a temple in Athens, no, nor a _temple_ in _Moorfields_, but it is built to act English plays in: and, provided you have good scenery, dresses, and decorations, I daresay you wouldn’t break your hearts if the outside were as plain as the pikestaff I used to carry when I was a sergeant. _Apropos_, as the French valets say, who cut their masters’ throats {23b}—_apropos_, a word about dresses. You must, many of you, have seen what I have read a description of, Kemble and Mrs. Siddons in Macbeth, with more gold and silver plastered on their doublets than would have kept an honest family in butchers’ meat and flannel from year’s end to year’s end! I am informed, (now mind, I do not vouch for the fact), but I am informed that all such extravagant idleness is to be done away with here. Lady Macbeth is to have a plain quilted petticoat, a cotton gown, and a _mob cap_ (as the court parasites call it;—it will be well for them if, one of these days, they don’t wear a mob cap—I mean a _white cap_, with a _mob_ to look at them); and Macbeth is to appear in an honest yeoman’s drab coat, and a pair of black calamanco breeches. Not _Sala_manca; no, nor _Talavera_ neither, my most Noble Marquess; but plain, honest, black calamanco stuff breeches. This is right; this is as it should be. _Most thinking people_, I have heard you much abused. There is not a compound in the language but is strung fifty in a rope, like onions, by the Morning Post, and hurled in your teeth. You are called the mob; and when they have made you out to be the mob, you are called the _scum_ of the people, and the _dregs_ of the people. I should like to know how you can be both. Take a basin of broth—not _cheap soup_, _Mr. Wilberforce_—not soup for the poor, at a penny a quart, as your mixture of horses’ legs, brick-dust, and old shoes, was denominated—but plain, wholesome, patriotic beef or mutton broth; take this, examine it, and you will find—mind, I don’t vouch for the fact, but I am told—you will find the dregs at the bottom, and the scum at the top. I will endeavour to explain this to you: England is a large _earthenware pipkin_; John Bull is the _beef_ thrown into it; taxes are the _hot water_ he boils in; rotten boroughs are the _fuel_ that blazes under this same pipkin; parliament is the _ladle_ that stirs the hodge-podge, and sometimes—. But, hold! I don’t wish to pay _Mr. Newman_ {24a} a second visit. I leave you better off than you have been this many a day: you have a good house over your head; you have beat the French in Spain; the harvest has turned out well; the comet keeps its distance; {24b} and red slippers are hawked about in Constantinople for next to nothing; and for