with all the ease, the grace, the carelessness imaginable; to laugh at, to play with the glittering mockeries, to follow them with his eye as if he could fascinate them with its lambent fire, or as if he had only to see that they kept time with the music on the stage—­there is something in all this which he who does not admire may be quite sure he never really admired anything in the whole course of his life.  It is skill surmounting difficulty, and beauty triumphing over skill.  It seems as if the difficulty, once mastered, naturally resolved itself into ease and grace, and as if, to be overcome at all, it must be overcome without an effort.  The smallest awkwardness or want of pliancy or self-possession would stop the whole process.  It is the work of witchcraft, and yet sport for children.

Some of the other feats are quite as curious and wonderful—­such as the balancing the artificial tree, and shooting a bird from each branch through a quill—­though none of them have the elegance or facility of the keeping up of the brass balls.  You are in pain for the result, and glad when the experiment is over; they are not accompanied with the same unmixed, unchecked delight as the former; and I would not give much to be merely astonished without being pleased at the same time.  As to the swallowing of the sword, the police ought to interfere to prevent it.

When I saw the Indian juggler do the same things before, his feet were bare, and he had large rings on his toes, which he kept turning round all the time of the performance, as if they moved of themselves.

The hearing a speech in Parliament drawled or stammered out by the honorable member or the noble lord, the ringing the changes on their commonplaces, which anyone could repeat after them as well as they, stirs me not a jot,—­shakes not my good opinion of myself.  I ask what there is that I can do as well as this.  Nothing.  What have I been doing all my life?  Have I been idle, or have I nothing to show for all my labor and pains?  Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them?  Is there no one thing in which I can challenge competition, that I can bring as an instance of exact perfection, in which others can not find a flaw?

The utmost I can pretend to is to write a description of what this fellow can do.  I can write a book:  so can many others who have not even learned to spell.  What abortions are these essays!  What errors, what ill-pieced transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions!  How little is made out, and that little how ill!  Yet they are the best I can do.