MASTER ZERUBBABEL, THE ANTIQUARY; AND HOW HE FOUND OUT THE "NOOSE LARNING." Antiquaries are scarce now-a-days. Don't mistake me, reader; I know that there is an abundance of writers on things which are ancient—ay, and more, that certain pragmatical folk pretend now to know more exactly how every thing went on two thousand years ago, nay four thousand years ago, than was known a few generations since by the first scholars in Europe. But don't say I question the likelihood of people knowing more about the ancients the farther time removes us from them,—because that would be literary heresy, and would bring upon an unlucky wight the hot persecution of the orthodox. But—I repeat it—Antiquaries are scarce now-a-days. I mean, your real thorough-bred ones, if I may say so—the fine old fellows who forgot their breakfasts and dinners, walked out in their night-caps, went to bed in their inexpressibles,—in brief, did all manner of queer absent things by reason that they were ever present, in mind, with the long bearded Druids, or the starched Romans, or the waggish Athenians, or the broth-supping Spartans, or some other of the peoples who have been dead and buried hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Talk of antiquaries!—where are your lean, skeleton, paragons of patience now, who can dwell seven years, with ecstasy, on the contemplation of a nail proven to have been attached to a horse-shoe of ten centuries old,—or who will write you, fasting, twenty folio sheets on the discovery of an urn of Roman coins, or the opening of a British tumulus? The race is now extinct: it has been driven out of existence by the newer and more civilised race of the gentlemen antiquaries,—just as the aborigines of New Holland and North America are following where the Peruvians have already gone, into the realm of nought, before the European grasp-alls.