Philosophers and anatomists have quarrelled for centuries as to the residence of the soul.  Some have vowed that it lived here—­some there; some that, like a gentleman with several writs in pursuit of him, it continually changed its lodgings; whilst others have lustily sworn that the soul was a vagrant, with no claim to any place of settlement whatever.  Nevertheless, a vulgar notion has obtained that the soul dwelt on a little knob of the brain; and that there, like a vainglorious bantam-cock on a dunghill, it now claps its wings and crows all sorts of triumph—­and now, silent and scratching, it thinks of nought but wheat and barley.  The first step to knowledge is to confess to a late ignorance.  We avow, then, our late benighted condition.  We were of the number of sciolists who lodged the soul in the head of man:  we are now convinced that the true dwelling place of the soul is in the head’s antipodes.  Let SOLOMON himself return to the earth, and hold forth at a political meeting; SOLOMON himself would be hooted, laughed at, voted an ass, a nincompoop, if SOLOMON spoke from the platform with a hole in his breeches!

PLATO doubtless thought that he had imagined a magnificent theory, when he averred that every man had within him a spark of the divine flame.  But, silly PLATO! he never considered how easily this spark might be blown out.  At this moment, how many Englishmen are walking about the land utterly extinguished!  Had men been made on the principle of the safety-lamp, they might have defied the foul breath of the world’s opinion—­but, alas! what a tender, thin-skinned, shivering thing is man!  His covering—­the livery of original sin, bought with the pilfered apples—­is worn into a hole, and Opinion, that sour-breathed hag, claps her blue lips to the broken web, gives a puff, and—­out goes man’s immortal spark!  From this moment the creature is but a carcase:  he can eat and drink (when lucky enough to be able to try the experiment), talk, walk, and no more; yes, we forgot—­he can work; he still keeps precedence of the ape in the scale of creation—­for he can work for those who, thickly clothed, and buttoned to the throat, have no rent in their purple, no stitch dropped in their superfine, to expose their precious souls to an annihilating gust, and who therefore keep their immortal sparks like tapers in burglars’ dark-lanthorns, whereby to rob and spoil with greater certainty!

Gentle reader, think you this a fantastic chapter on holes?  If so, then of a surety you do not read those instructive annals of your country penned by many a TACITUS of the daily press—­by many a profound historian who unites to the lighter graces of stenography the enduring loveliness of philosophy.