every day borne out by the success of fellows whose features have gone far to vulgarise the science. Ragamuffins who ought never to have aspired beyond the pea-and-thimble board at a country fair—knaves marked and impressed by the truthful hand of nature for the lowest offices of legerdemain have, trusting to the simplicity, the unsuspecting ingenuousness of a money-getting generation, to the marvellous innocency of the commercial body, made for themselves a reputation of the first class, or of very nearly the first class of the highest profession. Ultimately, in the advancement of society, these vulgar upstarts will be met by a greater number of competitors, elevated and accomplished with the graces of life, and the term swindler will be, as it ought to be, synonymous with gentleman. The commercial faculty will, on the other hand, be rendered more acute in its observation of human character; hence it will require a greater delicacy of style—more imposing and a more winning manner to arrive at any distinction—indeed, even to make a clear paltry five hundred a year as a swindler, than in these times will suffice to ensure to a tolerably industrious man an income of a thousand. This is inevitable. When the tens of thousands of noble spirits, heretofore absorbed by the professions, are left to trade upon their wits—when all society is more strongly marked, more arbitrarily divided into two classes, the swindlers and the swindled—when, instead of a violent and ruthless division of property, as infamously as ignorantly insisted upon by certain firebrands—there is a graceful exchange of elegant patronage on the one side, and a profound expression of thanksgiving respect on the other, the character of the successful swindler will rise to its ordained and natural elevation, and a Whitefeather (pardon the honest vanity) take his place with many illustrious names sufficiently obvious to the philosophical reader. The time is happily passing away when brute violence is to achieve national good—when the price of bread is to be beaten down by a bludgeon, or wages raised upon a pike. It is therefore a matter of deep regret to the contemplative man, and such I am not ashamed to confess myself, to perceive how many gifted persons are, by a premature nativity, ill-placed. How many men at the present day breathing national arson and patriotic pillage—men who have so profoundly studied the _meum_, that they are entirely ignorant of that of _tuum_—would, born a few years hence, have shed a lustre, have conferred a dignity upon even an illustrious and dignified profession. Let me not be asked to enumerate examples—I eschew the personal for the general. It is enough that the eye of the philosopher can perceive in many a sulphureous patriot the indefatigable swindler; that the sage, pondering on the inevitable changes of society, can detect in a present Bull-ring Brutus all the misapplied qualities of a future Isaac Solomons! Footnote 12: