_2d Stud._ Good!--only, so should the poet's muse have been universally acceptable, says Bluphocks, _et canibus nostris_ ... and Delia not better known to our literary dogs than the boy Giovacchino! _1st Stud._ To the point, now. Where's Gottlieb, the new-comer? Oh,--listen, Gottlieb, to what has called down this piece of friendly vengeance on Jules, of which we now assemble to witness the winding-up. We are all agreed, all in a tale, observe, when Jules shall burst out on us in a fury by and by: I am spokesman--the verses that are to undeceive Jules bear my name of Lutwyche--but each professes himself alike insulted by this strutting stone-squarer, who came along from Paris to Munich, and thence with a crowd of us to Venice and Possagno here, but proceeds in a day or two alone again--oh, alone indubitably!--to Rome and Florence. He, forsooth, take up his portion with these dissolute, brutalized, heartless bunglers!--so he was heard to call us all. Now, is Schramm brutalized, I should like to know? Am I heartless? _Gottlieb._ Why, somewhat heartless; for, suppose Jules a coxcomb as much as you choose, still, for this mere coxcombry, you will have brushed off--what do folks style it?--the bloom of his life. Is it too late to alter? These love-letters now, you call his--I can't laugh at them. _4th Stud._ Because you never read the sham letters of our inditing which drew forth these. _Gott._ His discovery of the truth will be frightful. _4th Stud._ That's the joke. But you should have joined us at the beginning: there's no doubt he loves the girl--loves a model he might hire by the hour! _Gott._ See here! "He has been accustomed," he writes, "to have Canova's women about him, in stone, and the world's women beside him, in flesh; these being as much below, as those above, his soul's aspiration: but now he is to have the reality." There you laugh again! I say, you wipe off the very dew of his youth. _1st Stud._ Schramm! (Take the pipe out of his mouth, somebody!) Will Jules lose the bloom of his youth? _Schramm._ Nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this world: look at a blossom--it drops presently, having done its service and lasted its time; but fruits succeed, and where would be the blossom's place could it continue? As well affirm that your eye is no longer in your body, because its earliest favorite, whatever it may have first loved to look on, is dead and done with--as that any affection is lost to the soul when its first object, whatever happened first to satisfy it, is superseded in due course. Keep but ever looking, whether with the body's eye or the mind's, and you will soon find something to look on! Has a man done wondering at women?--there follow men, dead and alive, to wonder at. Has he done wondering at men?--there's God to wonder at: and the faculty of wonder may be, at the same time, old and tired enough with respect to its first object, and yet young and fresh sufficiently, so far as concerns its novel one. Thus ...