that I suspect the best fellows then were not good fellows at all.  And what did the son of Lysimachus make by being recalled from banishment?  He died so poor, that he was buried at the public charge, and left a couple of daughters as out-door pensioners upon public charity.  The Athenians, I aver, were a duncified race; and it would have pleased me hugely to have been in the neighborhood when Alcibiades rescinded his dog’s charming tail,—­a fine practical protest, although unpleasant to the dog.  Virtue may be well enough by way of variety; but for a good, steady, permanent pleasure, commend me to Avarice!  Yes, O my Bobus, I, who was once, as to money, “still in motion of raging waste,” and, like Timon, “senseless of expense,”—­I, who have many a time borrowed cash of you with amiable recklessness, and have never asked you to take it back again,—­I, who have had many a race with the constable, and have sometimes been overtaken,—­I, who have in my callow days spoken disrespectfully of Mammon in several charming copies of verses,—­I am waxing sordid.  I am for the King of Lydia against Solon.  How do I know that the insolent Cyras was not blandished out of his bloodthirsty intention of roasting his deposed brother by a little cash which the son of Gyges had saved out of the wide, weltering wreck of his wealth, and had concealed in his boots?  Royal palms were not wholly free from pruritus even then.  Why has this silly world still persisted in putting long ears upon Midas?  I do not know whether he sang better or worse than Apollo; and I am sure it is much better, and bespeaks more sense, to play the flute ill than to play it well.  Depend upon it, his Majesty of Phrygia has been very much abused by the mythologists.  With that particular skill of his, during an epidemic of the brevitas pecuniaria, (Angl. shorts,) he would have been just the person to coax into one’s house of accompt, at five minutes before two o’clock in the afternoon, to work a little involuntary transmutation,—­to change the coal-scuttle into ingots, and the ruler into a great, gorged, glittering rouleau.  So little would his auricular eccentricity have hindered his welcome, that I verily believe he would have been heartily received, if he had come with ensanguined chaps straight from the pillory, and had left both ears nailed to the post.

Don’t talk to me about filthy lucre!  Pray, when would Sheikh Tahar, that eminent Koordish saint, have become convinced that he was a great sinner, if they had not carried about the contribution-boxes in the little New England churches?  Do you think it has cost nothing to demonstrate to the widows of Scindiah the folly of suttee?  Don’t you know that it has been an expensive work to persuade the Khonds of Goomsoor to give up roasting each other in the name of Heaven?  Very fine is Epictetus,—­but wilt he be your bail?  Will Diogenes bring home legs of mutton?  Can you breakfast upon the simple