(spirit of Saint Gothard, save us from a quietus so foreign to the deviser’s purpose!) but it has happily evaded a fishy consummation.  Trace it then to its lucky landing—­at Lyons shall we say?—­I have not the map before me—­jostled upon four men’s shoulders—­baiting at this town—­stopping to refresh at t’other village—­waiting a passport here, a license there; the sanction of the magistracy in this district, the concurrence of the ecclesiastics in that canton; till at length it arrives at its destination, tired out and jaded, from a brisk sentiment, into a feature of silly pride or tawdry senseless affectation.  How few sentiments, my dear F., I am afraid we can set down, in the sailor’s phrase, as quite sea-worthy.

Lastly, as to the agreeable levities, which, though contemptible in bulk, are the twinkling corpuscula which should irradiate a right friendly epistle—­your puns and small jests are, I apprehend, extremely circumscribed in their sphere of action.  They are so far from a capacity of being packed up and sent beyond sea, they will scarce endure to be transported by hand from this room to the next.  Their vigour is as the instant of their birth.  Their nutriment for their brief existence is the intellectual atmosphere of the bystanders:  or this last, is the fine slime of Nilus—­the melior Lutis,—­whose maternal recipiency is as necessary as the sol pater to their equivocal generation.  A pun hath a hearty kind of present ear-kissing smack with it; you can no more transmit it in its pristine flavour, than you can send a kiss.—­Have you not tried in some instances to palm off a yesterday’s pun upon a gentleman, and has it answered?  Not but it was new to his hearing, but it did not seem to come new from you.  It did not hitch in.  It was like picking up at a village ale-house a two days old newspaper.  You have not seen it before, but you resent the stale thing as an affront.  This sort of merchandise above all requires a quick return.  A pun, and its recognitory laugh, must be co-instantaneous.  The one is the brisk lightning, the other the fierce thunder.  A moment’s interval, and the link is snapped.  A pun is reflected from a friend’s face as from a mirror.  Who would consult his sweet visnomy, if the polished surface were two or three minutes (not to speak of twelve-months, my dear F.) in giving back its copy?

I cannot image to myself where about you are.  When I try to fix it, Peter Wilkins’s island comes across me.  Sometimes you seem to be in the Hades of Thieves.  I see Diogenes prying among you with his perpetual fruitless lantern.  What must you be willing by this time to give for the sight of an honest man!  You must almost have forgotten how we look.  And tell me, what your Sydneyites do? are they th**v*ng all day long?  Merciful heaven! what property can stand against such a depredation!  The kangaroos—­your Aborigines—­do they keep their primitive simplicity un-Europe-tainted,