“If a family, where it is first established, should commence with such a record of their own efforts and plans, and the various dealings of Providence towards them, the father and the mother carrying it on jointly until the children are old enough to take the pen, they would find the work a source of great improvement and pleasure. It would tend to keep distinctly in view the great objects for which they ought to live; and repeatedly recognizing, as they doubtless would do, the hand of God, they would feel more sensibly and more constantly their dependence upon him.” CHAPTER CCXLI. THE DOCTOR'S UTOPIA DENOMINATED COLUMBIA.—HIS SCHEME ENTERED UPON—BUT ‘LEFT HALF TOLD’ LIKE ‘THE STORY OF CAMBUSCAN BOLD.’ I will to satisfy and please myself, make an Utopia of mine own, a new Atlantis, a poetical commonwealth of mine own, in which I will freely domineer, build cities, make laws, statutes, as I list myself. And why may I not? BURTON. The Doctor's plan would have provided materials for a moral and physiological Cadastre, or Domesday Book. This indeed is the place for stating what the reader, knowing as much as he knows of our Philosopher, will not be surprised to hear, that Dr. Dove had conceived an Utopia of his own. He fixed it an island, thinking the sea to be the best of all neighbours, and he called it Columbia, not as pretending that it had been discovered by his “famous namesake,” but for a reason which the sagacious may divine. The scheme of his government had undergone many changes, although from the beginning it was established upon the eternal and immutable principles of truth and justice. Every alteration was intended to be final; yet it so happened that, notwithstanding the proposed perpetuity of the structure, and the immutability of the materials, he frequently found cause to exercise the imperscriptible and inalienable right of altering and improving his own work. He justified this, as being himself sole legislator, and moreover the only person in existence whose acceptance of the new constitution was necessary for its full establishment; and no just objection, he said, could be advanced against any of these changes, if they were demonstrably for the better, not merely innovations, but improvements also; for no possible revolution however great, or however suddenly effected, could occasion the slightest evil to his Commonwealth. Governments _in nubibus_ being mended as easily as they are made, for which, as for many other reasons, they are so much better than any that are now actually existing, have existed, or ever will exist.