pull it down, nor enemies blow it up; it bears a charmed life, and none of woman born can break its integrity, even by the dissipation of a single fraction.  Show me the property in these perilous times that is equally compact and impregnable.  We can no longer become enriched for a quarter of an hour; we can no longer succeed in such splendid failures:  all our chances of making such a miss have vanished with the last of the Lotteries.

Life will now become a flat, prosaic routine of matter-of-fact; and sleep itself, erst so prolific of numerical configurations and mysterious stimulants to lottery-adventure, will be disfurnished of its figures and figments.  People will cease to harp upon the one lucky number suggested in a dream, and which forms the exception, while they are scrupulously silent upon the ten thousand falsified dreams which constitute the rule.  Morpheus will stifle Cocker with a handful of poppies, and our pillows will be no longer haunted by the book of numbers.

And who, too, shall maintain the art and mystery of puffing in all its pristine glory, when the lottery-professors shall have abandoned its cultivation?  They were the first, as they will assuredly be the last, who fully developed the resources of that ingenious art,—­who cajoled and decoyed the most suspicious and wary reader into a perusal of their advertisements by devices of endless variety and cunning,—­who baited their lurking schemes with midnight murders, ghost-stories, crim-cons, bon-mots, balloons, dreadful catastrophes, and every diversity of joy and sorrow, to catch newspaper-gudgeons.  Ought not such talents to be encouraged?  Verily the abolitionists have much to answer for!

And now, having established the felicity of all those who gained imaginary prizes, let us proceed to show that the equally numerous class who were presented with real blanks have not less reason to consider themselves happy.  Most of us have cause to be thankful for that which is bestowed; but we have all, probably, reason to be still more grateful for that which is withheld, and more especially for our being denied the sudden possession of riches.  In the Litany, indeed, we Call upon the Lord to deliver us “in all time of our wealth”; but how few of us are sincere in deprecating such a calamity!  Massinger’s Luke, and Ben Jonson’s Sir Epicure Mammon, and Pope’s Sir Balaam, and our own daily observation, might convince us that the Devil “now tempts by making rich, not making poor.”  We may read in the “Guardian” a circumstantial account of a man who was utterly ruined by gaining a capital prize; we may recollect what Dr. Johnson said to Garrick, when the latter was making a display of his wealth at Hampton Court,—­“Ah, David!  David! these are the things that make a death-bed terrible”; we may recall the Scripture declaration as to the difficulty a rich man finds in entering into the kingdom of heaven; and, combining all these denunciations against opulence, let us heartily