No, my friends, I go (always, other things being equal) for the man who inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five generations. Above all things, as a child, he should have tumbled about in a library. All men are afraid of books, who have not handled them from infancy. Do you suppose our dear _didascalos_ over there ever read _Poli Synopsis_, or consulted _Castelli Lexicon_, while he was growing up to their stature? Not he; but virtue passed through the hem of their parchment and leather garments whenever he touched them, as the precious drugs sweated through the bat’s handle in the Arabian story. I tell you he is at home wherever he smells the invigorating fragrance of Russia leather. No self-made man feels so. One may, it is true, have all the antecedents I have spoken of, and yet be a boor or a shabby fellow. One may have none of them, and yet be fit for councils and courts. Then let them change places. Our social arrangement has this great beauty, that its strata shift up and down as they change specific gravity, without being clogged by layers of prescription. But I still insist on my democratic liberty of choice, and I go for the man with the gallery of family portraits against the one with the twenty-five-cent daguerreotype, unless I find out that the last is the better of the two. —I should have felt more nervous about the late comet, if I had thought the world was ripe. But it is very green yet, if I am not mistaken; and besides, there is a great deal of coal to use up, which I cannot bring myself to think was made for nothing. If certain things, which seem to me essential to a millennium, had come to pass, I should have been frightened; but they haven’t. Perhaps you would like to hear my LATTER-DAY WARNINGS. When legislators keep the law, When banks dispense with bolts and locks, When berries, whortle—rasp—and straw— Grow bigger _downwards_ through the box,— When he that selleth house or land Shows leak in roof or flaw in right,— When haberdashers choose the stand Whose window hath the broadest light,— When preachers tell us all they think, And party leaders all they mean,— When what we pay for, that we drink, From real grape and coffee-bean,— When lawyers take what they would give, And doctors give what they would take,— When city fathers eat to live, Save when they fast for conscience’ sake,— When one that hath a horse on sale Shall bring his merit to the proof, Without a lie for every nail That holds the iron on the hoof,— When in the usual place for rips Our gloves are stitched with special care, And guarded well the whalebone tips Where first umbrellas need repair,—