at length it seemed to occupy the whole horizon.”  On his landing he is pestered with questions from the natives; but, thanks to the Hamiltonian system, “Popanilla, under these circumstances, was more loquacious than could have been Capt.  Parry.”  He announces himself as the “most injured of human beings;” the women weep, the men shake hands with him, and all the boys huzza:  he then narrates his ill-fortunes at Fantaisie, not forgetting the never-enough-to-be-lamented lock of hair.  Other danger awaits him, for “to be strangled was not much better than to be starved; and certainly with half a dozen highly respectable females clinging round his neck, he was not reminded, for the first time in his life, what a domestic bowstring is an affectionate woman.”  He is next joined by an “influential personage,” who informs him that he is in Hubbabub (London)—­the largest city, not only that exists, but that ever did exist, and the capital of the Island of Vraibleusia, the most famous island, not only that is known, but that ever was known.  “He provides himself with a purse, and exchanges his money with a banker, who offers him during his stay in Vraibleusia, the use of a couple of equipages, a villa, an opera box; insists upon sending to his hotel some pineapples and very rare wine; and gives him a perpetual ticket to his picture-gallery.”  Popanilla leaves his gold and takes the banker’s pink shells, for “no genteel person has ever anything else in his pocket.”  Then follow some quips on the shell question (currency), and Mr. Secretary Perriwinkle, the most eminent conchologist, and the “debt” of the richest nation in the world; although, “a golden pyramid, with a base as big as the whole earth and an apex touching the heavens, would not supply sufficient metal to satisfy the creditors.”  “The annual interest upon our debt exceeds the whole wealth of the rest of the world; therefore we must be the richest nation in the world.”

[Footnote 10:  “What boots it thee to call thyself a sun.”]

Our traveller being now settled at a splendid hotel in Hubbabub, Skindeep, his “gentleman in black,” drives him about the city in an elegant equipage.  The western migrations of fashion are humorously sketched, and the architecture of our metropolis comes in for a share of the author’s banter.  “In general, the massy Egyptian appropriately graced the attic stories; while the finer and more elaborate architecture of Corinth was placed on a level with the eye, so that its beauties might be more easily discovered.  Spacious colonnades were flanked by porticoes, surmounted by domes; nor was the number of columns at all limited, for you occasionally met with porticoes of two tiers, the lower one of which consisted of three, the higher one of thirty columns.  Pedestals of the purest Ionic Gothic, were ingeniously mixed with Palladian pediments; and the surging spire exquisitely harmonized with the horizontal architecture of the ancients.  But, perhaps, after all, the most charming effect was produced by the pyramids, surmounted by weathercocks.”