Consider the wasp, oh, STANLEY! mark its nest of paper.—­(it is said, on wasp’s paper you are wont to write your thoughts on Ireland)—­and resolutely seize a trowel!

Look to the bee, oh, COLONEL SIBTHORP!  See how it elaborates its virgin wax, how it shapes its luscious cone—­and though we would not trust you to place a brick upon a brick, nevertheless you may, under instruction, mix the mortar!

Ponder on the rat and its doings, most wise BURDETT—­see how craftily it makes its hole—­and though you are too age-stricken to carry a hod, you may at least do this much—­sift the lime.

But wherefore thus particular—­why should we dwell on individuals?  Pole-cat, weasel, ferret, hedgehog, with all your vermin affinities, come forth, and staring reproachfully in the faces of all prorogued Members, bid them imitate your zeal and pains, and—­the masons having struck—­build their Houses for themselves.

(We make this proposal in no thoughtless—­no bantering spirit.  He can see very little into the most transparent mill-stone who believes that we pen these essays—­essays that will endure and glisten as long, ay as long as the freshest mackerel—­if he think that we sit down to this our weekly labour in a careless lackadaisical humour.  By no means.  Like Sir LYTTON BULWER, when he girds up his loins to write an apocryphal comedy, we approach our work with graceful solemnity.  Like Sir LYTTON, too, we always dress for the particular work we have in hand.  Sir LYTTON wrote “Richelieu” in a harlequin’s jacket (sticking pirate’s pistols in his belt, ere he valorously took whole scenes from a French melo-drama):  we penned our last week’s essay in a suit of old canonicals, with a tie-wig askew upon our beating temples, and are at this moment cased in a court-suit of cut velvet, with our hair curled, our whiskers crisped, and a masonic apron decorating our middle man.  Having subsided into our chair—­it is in most respects like the porphyry piece of furniture of the Pope—­and our housekeeper having played the Dead March in Saul on our chamber organ (BULWER wrote “The Sea Captain” to the preludizing of a Jew’s-harp), we enter on our this week’s labour.  We state thus much, that our readers may know with what pains we prepare ourselves for them.  Besides, when BULWER thinks it right that the world should know that the idea of “La Vailiere” first hit him in the rotonde of a French diligence, modest as we are, can we suppose that the world will not be anxious to learn in what coloured coat we think, and whether, when we scratch our head to assist the thought that sticks by the way, we displace a velvet cap or a Truefitt’s scalp?)

Reader, the above parenthesis may be skipped or not.  Read not a line of it—­the omission will not maim our argument.  So to proceed.