yourselves Athenians, while you know nothing that the Athenians thought worth knowing, and dare not show your noses before the civilized world in the practice of any one art in which they were excellent. Modern Athens, sir! the assumption is a personal affront to every man who has a Sophocles in his library. I will thank you for an anchovy.

MR. MAC QUEDY.

Metaphysics, sir; metaphysics. Logic and moral philosophy. There we are at home. The Athenians only sought the way, and we have found it; and to all this we have added political economy, the science of sciences.

THE REV. DR. FOLLIOTT.

A hyperbarbarous technology, that no Athenian ear could have borne.

Premises

assumed without evidence, or in spite of it; and conclusions drawn from them so logi

cally, that they must necessarily be erro

neous.

MR. SKIONAR.

I cannot agree with you,

Mr. Mac Quedy,

that you have found the true road of metaphysics, which the Athenians only sought. The Germans have found it, sir: the sublime Kant, and his disciples.

MR. MAC QUEDY.

I have read the sublime Kant, sir, with an anxious desire to understand him, and I confess I have not succeeded.

THE REV. DR. FOLLIOTT.

He wants the two great requisites of head

and tail.

MR. SKIONAR.

Transcendentalism is the philosophy of

intuition, the development of universal convictions; truths which are inherent in the organization of mind, which cannot be obliterated, though they may be obscured, by superstitious prejudice on the one hand, and by the Aristotelian logic on the other.

MR. MAC QUEDY.

Well, sir, I have no notion of logic obscuring a question.

MR. SKIONAR.

There is only one true logic, which is the transcendental; and this can prove only the one true philosophy, which is also the transcendental. The logic of your Modern Athens can prove every thing equally; and that is, in my opinion, tantamount to proving nothing at all.

MR. CROTCHET.

The sentimental against the rational, the

intuitive against the inductive, the ornamental against the useful, the intense against the tranquil, the romantic against the classical; these are great and interesting controversies, which I should like, before I die, to see satisfactorily settled.

MR. FIREDAMP.

There is another great question, greater than all these, seeing that it is necessary to be alive in order to settle any question; and this is the question of water against human life. Wherever there is water, there is malaria, and wherever there is malaria, there are the elements of death. The great object of a wise man should be to live on a gravelly hill, without so much as a duck-pond within ten miles of him, eschewing cisterns and waterbutts, and taking care that there be no gravel-pits for lodging the rain. The sun

D

sucks up infection from water, wherever it

exists on the face of the earth.

THE REV. DR. FOLLIOTT.

Well, sir, you have for you

the authority

of the ancient mystagogue, who said: 'Eσriv

ὕδωρ ψυχῇ θάνατος

For my part I care not a

rush (or any other aquatic and inesculent vegetable) who or what sucks up either the water or the infection. I think the proximity of wine a matter of much more importance than the longinquity of water. You are here within a quarter of a mile of the Thames, but in the cellar of my friend, Mr. Crotchet, there is the talismanic antidote of a thousand dozen of old wine; a beautiful spectacle, I assure you, and a model of arrangement.

* Literally, which is sufficient for the present purpose, "Water is death to the soul." ORPHICA: Fr. XIX.