were Vealy days, though pleasant to remember, my old school-companions, in which you used to go to the dancing-school, (it was in a gloomy theatre, seldom entered by actors,) in which you fell in love with several young ladies about eleven years old, and (being permitted occasionally to select your own partners) made frantic rushes to obtain the hand of one of the beauties of that small society.  Those were the days in which you thought, that, when you grew up, it would be a very fine thing to be a pirate, bandit, or corsair, rather than a clergyman, barrister, or the like; even a cheerful outlaw like Robin Hood did not come up to your views; you would rather have been a man like Captain Kyd, stained with various crimes of extreme atrocity, which would entirely preclude the possibility of returning to respectable society, and given to moody laughter in solitary moments.  Oh, what truly asinine developments the human being must go through, before arriving at the stage of common sense!  You were very Vealy, too, when you used to think it a fine thing to astonish people by expressing awful sentiments,—­such as that you thought Mahometans better than Christians, that you would like to be dissected after death, that you did not care what you got for dinner, that you liked learning your lessons better than going out to play, that you would rather read Euclid than “Ivanhoe,” and the like.  It may be remarked, that this peculiar Vealiness is not confined to youth; I have seen it appearing very strongly in men with gray hair.  Another manifestation of Vealiness, which appears both in age and youth, is the entertaining a strong belief that kings, noblemen, and baronets are always in a condition of ecstatic happiness.  I have known people pretty far advanced in life, who not only believed that monarchs must be perfectly happy, but that all who were permitted to continue in their presence would catch a considerable degree of the mysterious bliss which was their portion.  I have heard a sane man, rather acute and clever in many things, seriously say, “If a man cannot be happy in the presence of his Sovereign, where can he be happy?”

And yet, absurd and foolish as is Moral Vealiness, there is something fine about it.  Many of the old and dear associations most cherished in human hearts are of the nature of Veal.  It is sad to think that most of the romance of life is unquestionably so.  All spooniness, all the preposterous idolization of some one who is just like anybody else, all love, (in the narrow sense in which the word is understood by novel-readers,) you feel, when you look back, are Veal.  The young lad and the young girl, whom at a picnic party you have discerned stealing off under frivolous pretexts from the main body of guests, and sitting on the grass by the river-side, enraptured in the prosecution of a conversation which is intellectually of the emptiest, and fancying that they two make all the world, and investing that spot with remembrances