economy is heaven’s best boon to man.”  When the loose but gifted Byron lay in his Venetian exile he observed that, if it could be granted him to go back and live his misspent life over again, he would give his lucid and unintoxicated intervals to the composition, not of frivolous rhymes, but of essays upon political economy.  Washington loved this exquisite science; such names as Baker, Beckwith, Judson, Smith, are imperishably linked with it; and even imperial Homer, in the ninth book of the Iliad, has said: 

                    Fiat justitia, ruat coelum,
                    Post mortem unum, ante bellum,
                    Hic facet hoc, ex-parte res,
                    Politicum e-conomico est.

The grandeur of these conceptions of the old poet, together with the felicity of the wording which clothes them, and the sublimity of the imagery whereby they are illustrated, have singled out that stanza, and made it more celebrated than any that ever—­

["Now, not a word out of you—­not a single word.  Just state your bill and relapse into impenetrable silence for ever and ever on these premises.  Nine hundred, dollars?  Is that all?  This check for the amount will be honored at any respectable bank in America.  What is that multitude of people gathered in the street for?  How?—­’looking at the lightning-rods!’ Bless my life, did they never see any lightning-rods before?  Never saw ‘such a stack of them on one establishment,’ did I understand you to say?  I will step down and critically observe this popular ebullition of ignorance.”]

Three days Later.—­We are all about worn out.  For four-and-twenty hours our bristling premises were the talk and wonder of the town.  The theaters languished, for their happiest scenic inventions were tame and commonplace compared with my lightning-rods.  Our street was blocked night and day with spectators, and among them were many who came from the country to see.  It was a blessed relief on the second day when a thunderstorm came up and the lightning began to “go for” my house, as the historian Josephus quaintly phrases it.  It cleared the galleries, so to speak.  In five minutes there was not a spectator within half a mile of my place; but all the high houses about that distance away were full, windows, roof, and all.  And well they might be, for all the falling stars and Fourth-of-July fireworks of a generation, put together and rained down simultaneously out of heaven in one brilliant shower upon one helpless roof, would not have any advantage of the pyrotechnic display that was making my house so magnificently conspicuous in the general gloom of the storm.