unseen by newspapers, ladies, and monarchs, I attribute entirely to my unfortunately not having been born a dwarf.

I am nearer six feet than two; hinc illæ lacrymæ. I am not a stunted abortion-ergo, I have never been pronounced perfectly symmetrical." I am not a "delicate monster;" therefore, I have never been the companion of monarchs. When I think what a fate would have been mine had I only had the good luck of being born a repulsive exception to the general rules of nature, I look perhaps "more in sorrow than in anger" upon limbs of the average proportions and chiselled after the ordinary order of human architecture. Had I only measured something under a cloth-yard shaft, I should have a carriage to ride in, instead of tramping it on foot. I should have admiring crowds of fine ladies flocking to see me every morning. The Duke of Wellington and I might have had a chat on Waterloo. I might have spoken with the Queen, and gossipped with Louis Philippe. I might have made something which I could call a "progress" through Europe. Courts would have been my stages-newspapers my avantcoureurs. A baronet title would have raised me to rank, and my name would have been a household word in half the capitals of Europe. Alas! the last three feet of my growth spoiled everything. Stunted, I should have been adored: well-developed, I am neglected. I have no "magnificent presents " made to me by the greatest crowned heads of the world to exhibit to my morning visitors. My height has been my ruin-so it has been decreed by that enlightened public opinion whereof I am a humble admirer. I do not mean to say, that, were I twelve feet high, I should not be feted and caressed. Extremes meet-but unhappily I am between them, and therefore, not being a monster either one way or the other, a giant or a dwarf, I am left unsmiled on by Buckingham Palace unasked to Versailles.

There are a foolish lot of people ambitious of being noticed by monarchs and received at courts. They may not, it is true, abstractedly think much of the honour of kissing the hand of the one, or being told to make themselves at home in the other; but society, that sensible-profoundly-wise orderer of things, has ordained that the mass of mankind should look up with reverence to a conventional and chance-bestowed rank; and this being so, the ambitious, of whom I speak, regard the notice, the friendship, not the patronage of kings and queens as one of the conventional means society has decreed of bestowing its homage upon

those who deserve it. These unfortunates, then, entertaining this view of things regal, concluded-absurd people !—that it was by great mental gifts, and the production of great literary, scientific, and artistic works, that royal favour indicating national gratitude was to be procured.

They looked to various pages of the history of various nations, and found that this principle had been acted upon that science, and literature and art had been honoured, while they received royal favour; that queens had suggested subjects to a dramatist, and that emperors had picked up an artist's brushes when they fell from his palette. But we being a highly-civilized people have changed all this. It is not mental greatness, but bodily littleness, that kings and queens delight to honour now-a-days. Write like Shakspeare; but you must go to the Italian Opera if you wish to see the monarch-paint like Raffaelle, but you must be content to take a dauber's price if you wish your pictures to decorate a royal palace. You may have some chance of seeing the inside of Windsor, indeed, if you take to delineating the royal wardrobe and the royal kennel. There is a glimpse of hope if you fly your genius at such themes as lap-dogs, gloves, macaws, and hats; but there is nothing like a good degree of physical deformity—some monstrous malconstruction to excite the notice and display the taste of the fountain of honour. Write another "Hamlet," or paint another "Transfiguration." All very well. You may go and see Windsor Castle with the rest of the public. But be lucky enough to be only twenty-nine inches high, or to have three legs, or to present some other agreeable novelty of appearance of the kind, and you are a made man, loaded with regal gifts, weighed down by the gold of a discerning public. You can pass the winter -should you like it-in your hotel in the Chaussée d'Antin at Paris, and the summer in your rose-hid villa on the Lake of Como ! Times are hard. So say everybody. Prudent fathers of families think what they shall do with their children. Let me whisper a bit of advice. 66 Madam, you are giving that child wholesome food-cruel parent! You are not squeezing or distorting its limbs -unnatural mother! It may one day want the meal you are now so barbarously assuaging its hunger with. Don't you see that the innocent if so treated, has not the remotest chance-barring a miracle of good luck-of being stunted in its growth, of never attaining manly dignity or womanly beauty. Stint it, and it may peradventure be stunted. Give it gin: they say that excellent

beverage cramps an infant's growth. Never mind its moanings, its pukings, and its pinings. It may die-then it does so in a glorious cause but it may live-dwarfed—a wonder-raising monster. Be wise then-be the Prospero to rear a Caliban. Heed not its cries or convulsions. Some future day will well repay them-yea, some glorious epoch, seen afar off down the dim vista of time, when, decked with kingly gifts, the centre of a circle of warriors and statesmen, monarchs shall delight in, and nations ring with the sky-borne fame of your dwarfish offspring!"

A word in serious, sad earnest. Fathers and mothers of England, you have read the paragraph I have just penned with horror. Has it never struck you that by rushing in crowds, as you have done, to see and to pay for the show-a miserable object, a stunted infant, you have been in fact offering a premium to cupidity to unite with nature when she shows herself unkind, in order to produce again a something which shall be a world's wonder and an owner's profit? There have been many "infant phenomena on the stage and in the booth. The public has patronised these disgraceful, these-one would think, to a pure and natural mind-disgusting exhibitions. Who shall say how many poor infantine limbs have been clogged, how many poor infantine frames have been dosed and drugged to produce like monstrosities. If people will pay largely for the sight of what is unnatural, rest assured that the unnatural, so far as man can make it, will be manufactured for the market. Demand begets supply. If the public want dwarfs, every means will be employed to produce dwarfs.

Ladies, who have visited, who have kissed a dwarf, do you know what you have been about? Do you know that partial or faulty development is nothing but disease? You would not be amateurs in pathology. You would not flock admiringly round fungus hæmatodes, or expatiate in raptures on the wonderful merits of a case of ricketts. Cancer and crooked limbs are horrible, and you shrink from them. Dwarfishness, ladies, is not less disease, that there is nothing absolutely repulsive in its features. There must be some lack of natural power, of natural health when the body does not become developed. This want might be shown in a thousand hideous ways, in a thousand diseases. Sometimes it manifests itself in dwarfishness-the disease of littleness. Such cases will occur. And let me here add, that I do not in the least charge the exhibitors of these instances, now or lately before the

public, with having attempted or having aided in producing the effects by the exhibition of which they made money. But their success may induce others to be less scrupulous. Let a stop be put to the entire system. Let public opinion confess its error; and in future, when a dwarf is born, let its parents tend with holiest love the unhappy being thus arriving, a monstrous creature, into the world. Let its misfortune and their distress be veiled from the world. Let retirement be the lot of the being whom nature has prevented from mingling freely with its fellowcreatures. Let the brand be covered, the stigma hid. Let the secresy of private dwelling or public asylum enwrap it. Let us have no unfortunates-the victims at once of nature's mysterious displeasure-and the world's insolent and heedless curiosity.

A. B. R.

THE ORIGINAL GOOD WOMAN.

ALL the world knows that the title of the Original Good Woman is suggestive of a certain sign-board, exhibiting a delineation of the female form angelic, minus that story of the corporeal edifice which corresponds to the attic of a dwelling-house. The pictorial archetype of female excellence is a lady without a head. Now the head is considered to be the knowledge-box; the casket of understanding and wisdom; wherefore it is invested, metaphorically as well as physically, with a pre-eminence over the mere trunk, which contains less valuable property. The emblem, therefore, of the Original Good Woman represents her as deficient in the rational and knowing faculties. Its limner, accordingly, seems to have meant either to insinuate that a woman ought not to have mental powers, or to assert that she has them not; that she ought not, as a good woman, to have them, or that she has them not as a woman, and therefore an irrational creature; consequently that you, fair reader, are either good-for-nothing or stupid; both of which epithets we agree with you in retorting on himself. The wretch-the savage--the brute! Blue-Beard, who decapitated his inquisitive wives, was a gentleman to the fellow who executed the Original Good Woman.

Now the truth is, that if there was anything for which this

celebrated lady was distinguished, it was for the possession of those very qualities which this pictorial libeller has denied her. As a good woman, she was a good housewife. As a good housewife, she was skilled in cookery. There is reason in roasting an egg. Much more is the rational faculty involved in trussing a fowl, in curing a round of beef, in dressing a shoulder of mutton and onion sauce, and especially in jugging a hare; operations which every good woman is renowned for performing to admiration. What can be more thoughtful than the looking up of linen, the darning of hose, the sewing on of buttons? things which a woman of any pretensions to goodness is doing almost continually. Thought necessitates a headpiece. Your good woman, then, has a head, Mr. Smith: so has yours, Mr. Jones. But we need not remind you of that. You know what even the best of women stand you per annum in caps and bonnets.

No:-the man was a poor philosopher as well as punster, who said that the mens was the men's alone. All women have, at least, a sort of intellectual faculties; just as they have a peculiar style of limbs. The Original Good Woman was not an acephalous monster. In opposition to the daub that represents her as such, we will set up a sketch of her in pen-and-ink.

Not only can we affirm that her shoulders were really and truly surmounted with a head; but we might also, if we chose, state what the colour of her hair was. But we forbear. We have no desire to excite a rivalry between sweet auburn, raven black, flaxen, chesnut, golden, or even rufous: for we will not suppose even that tint to be out of the question. Not wishing to adjudicate, Paris-like, on an apple of discord, we will give no indication of the particular individual who is the lady's living representative. For, that there exists her exact counterpart at this present moment, though who she is neither here nor there, will readily be admitted by many bachelors, and, we would fain hope, by some husbands.

We must be allowed to dwell a little longer on this head. It was one, which, if there is any truth in craniology, would have turned that of Dr. Gall with admiration. All that we know about

it is, that it was a very handsome one. But if bumps are compatible with beauty, and configuration is indicative of character, it must have been quite mountainous in the nobler and more amiable regions, whilst in the more questionable districts it presented a quiet level. We conceive,-always supposing the