a loss) remember it without fatigue; it is upon oath, so that rascals and Dr. Johnsons cannot pick holes in it.  “Died through the visitation of intense stupidity, by impinging on a moonlight night against the off hind wheel of the Glasgow mail!  Deodand upon the said wheel—­two-pence.”  What a simple lapidary inscription!  Nobody much in the wrong but an off-wheel; and with few acquaintances; and if it were but rendered into choice Latin, though there would be a little bother in finding a Ciceronian word for “off-wheel,” Marcellus himself, that great master of sepulchral eloquence, could not show a better.  Why I call this little remark moral, is, from the compensation it points out.  Here, by the supposition, is that other creature on the one side, the beast of the world; and he (or it) gets an epitaph.  You and I, on the contrary, the pride of our friends, get none.

But why linger on the subject of vermin?  Having mounted the box, I took a small quantity of laudanum, having already travelled two hundred and fifty miles—­viz., from a point seventy miles beyond London, upon a simple breakfast.  In the taking of laudanum there was nothing extraordinary.  But by accident it drew upon me the special attention of my assessor on the box, the coachman.  And in that there was nothing extraordinary.  But by accident, and with great delight, it drew my attention to the fact that this coachman was a monster in point of size, and that he had but one eye.  In fact he had been foretold by Virgil as—­

  “Monstrum. horrendum, informe, ingens cui lumen adempium.”

He answered in every point—­a monster he was—­dreadful, shapeless, huge, who had lost an eye.  But why should that delight me?  Had he been one of the Calendars in the Arabian Nights, and had paid down his eye as the price of his criminal curiosity, what right had I to exult in his misfortune?  I did not exult:  I delighted in no man’s punishment, though it were even merited.  But these personal distinctions identified in an instant an old friend of mine, whom I had known in the south for some years as the most masterly of mail-coachmen.  He was the man in all Europe that could best have undertaken to drive six-in-hand full gallop over Al Sirat—­that famous bridge of Mahomet across the bottomless gulf, backing himself against the Prophet and twenty such fellows.  I used to call him Cyclops mastigophorus, Cyclops the whip-bearer, until I observed that his skill made whips useless, except to fetch off an impertinent fly from a leader’s head; upon which I changed his Grecian name to Cyclops diphrelates (Cyclops the charioteer.) I, and others known to me, studied under him the diphrelatic art.  Excuse, reader, a word too elegant to be pedantic.  And also take this remark from me, as a gage d’amitie—­that no word ever was or can be pedantic which, by supporting a distinction, supports the accuracy of logic; or which fills up a chasm for the understanding.