a huge room hotter than a glass-house, in a posture emulating the most
sanctified Faquir, with a throbbing head-ache, a breaking back, and
twisted legs, with a heavy tube held over one eye, and the other
covered with the unemployed hand, is, in Vraibleusia, called a public
amusement." In one morning's lionizing, too, he acquires "a general
knowledge of the chief arts and sciences, eats three hundred sandwiches,
and tastes as many bottles of sherry."

The frauds and fooleries of the joint stock company mania are, perhaps,
among the least successful portion of the volume. The "literature" is
somewhat better, as the establishment of a "Society for the Diffusion of
Fashionable Knowledge"--its first treatise, Nonchalance--dissertations
"on leaving cards," "cutting friends," "on bores," &c.--and a new novel
called "Burlington"--the last a scratch at Popanilla's publisher. The
"Clubs" are next recommended for those fond of solitude, and their satin
luxuries humorously quizzed; but "the Colonial System," which follows,
has more causticity. Popanilla, like all other great foreigners who
visit England, falls ill; his disorder is "unquestionably nervous;" he
is to count five between each word he utters, never ask questions, and
avoid society, and only dine out once a day. This regimen brings on a
slow fever; but his disorder is neither "liver," nor "nervous," but
"mind." He next falls in with an Essay on Fruit, from which he learns
that thousands of the Vraibleusians are dying with dyspepsia from eating
pine-apples, which are denounced as "stupid, sour, and vulgar."

Popanilla is ordered by his physician to Blunderland, where the women
are "angelic," and the men "the most light-hearted, merry, obliging,
entertaining fellows;" and where "instead of knives and forks being
laid for the guests at dinner, the plates are flanked by daggers and
pistols." A "row" springs up; "all the guests lay lifeless about the