I have conceived of a suburban colony of houses where a man might live and be natural and healthy-minded among his neighbours; where he might, if he chose, walk about in cool, backwoods dress, a shirt, breeks, and wide-brimmed hat--or no hat--in hot weather, without inciting derision, or becoming a pariah. But Villadom cares nothing for naturalness, nor liberty of opinion and conduct; and, unconscious of the madness of its severe conventionality, it deems those insane who cultivate ideas and try to live up to them. What! is there one man in ten in this great sheep-pen who would like to be seen blacking his own boots or sweeping the snow from the front of his house? No, they prefer to ill-pay some man's daughter to do all their irksome and dirty work. What does Villadom read, talk of, and think upon? The fathers read the newspapers, the mothers and daughters peruse "John Halifax," and such like literature of the Pap-boat and Pumplighter sort; and the talk is of money, the neighbours, and the back-parlour window curtains and carpets--all good themes enough in their season, but not the only things in life of vast importance. The denizens of Villadom tell you that they have their livings to earn, dinners to cook, and houses to control; therefore there is no time for cultivating their intellects, and developing their sense of the beautiful in nature and art. No time! It is the old plea of the men and women who squander hours in tittle-tattle and loafing. Gerald Massey, a bargeman's son, and a fag in a factory; Elihu Burritt, a blacksmith; Thomas Edward, a shoemaker; Walt Whitman, a compositor; Bradlaugh, a soldier, and afterwards a clerk; James Hosken, a postman, not to mention a hundred other hard-working men, found time to read, and think, and improve themselves. It is the _will_, and not the leisure, that is lacking in Villadom, the will to be something better than mere Respectables in the eyes of society.