his method.  So argue also, probably, the popular poets, to whose “luxuriant fancy” everything suggests anything, and thought plays leap-frog with thought down one page and up the next, till one fancies at moments that they had got permission from the higher powers, before looking at the universe, to stir it all up a few times with a spoon.  It is notorious, of course, that poets and preachers alike pride themselves upon this method of astonishing; that the former call it, “seeing the infinite in the finite;” the latter—­“pressing secular matters into the service of the sanctuary,” and other pretty phrases which, for reverence’ sake, shall be omitted.  No doubt they have their reasons and their reward.  The style takes; the style pays; and what more would you have?  Let them go on rejoicing, in spite of the cynical pedants in the Saturday Review, who dare to accuse (will it be believed?) these luminaries of the age of talking merely irreverent nonsense.  Meanwhile, so evident is the success (sole test of merit) which has attended the new method, that it is worth while trying whether it will not be as taking in the novel as it is in the chapel; and therefore the reader is requested to pay special attention to the following paragraph, modelled carefully after the exordiums of a famous Irish preacher, now drawing crowded houses at the West End of Town.  As thus;—­“It is the pleasant month of May, when, as in old Chaucer’s time, the—­

  “Smale foules maken melodie,
  That slepen alle night with open eye
  So priketh hem nature in their corages. 
  Then longen folk to goe on pilgrimages,
  And specially from every shire’s end
  Of Englelond, to Exeter-hall they wend,”

till the low places of the Strand blossom with white cravats, those lilies of the valley, types of meekness and humility, at least in the pious palmer—­and why not of similar virtues in the undertaker, the concert-singer, the groom, the tavern-waiter, the croupier at the gaming-table, and Frederick Augustus Lord Scoutbush, who, white-cravated like the rest, is just getting into his cab at the door of the Never-mind-what Theatre, to spend an hour at Kensington before sauntering in to Lady M——­’s ball?

Why not, I ask, at least in the case of little Scoutbush?  For Guardsman though he be, coming from a theatre and going to a ball, there is meekness and humility in him at this moment, as well as in the average of the white-cravated gentlemen who trotted along that same pavement about eleven o’clock this forenoon.  Why should not his white cravat, like theirs, be held symbolic of that fact?  However, Scoutbush belongs rather to the former than the latter of Chaucer’s categories; for a “smale foule” he is, a little bird-like fellow, who maketh melodie also, and warbles like a cock-robin; we cannot liken him to any more dignified songster.  Moreover, he will sleep all night with open eye; for he will not be in bed till five to-morrow morning; and pricked he is, and that sorely, in his courage; for he is as much, in love as his little nature can be, with the new actress, La Signora Cordifiamma, of the Never-mind-what Theatre.