Dunscore'; so that books inevitably made his topics.

"He had names of his own for all the matters familiar to his
discourse. Blackwood's was the 'sand magazine'; Fraser's nearer
approach to possibility of life was the 'mud magazine'; a piece
of road near by that marked some failed enterprise was 'the grave
of the last sixpence.' When too much praise of any genius
annoyed him, he professed hugely to admire the talent shown by
his pig. He had spent much time and contrivance in confining the
poor beast to one enclosure in his Pen; but pig, by great
strokes of judgment, had found out how to let a board down, and
had foiled him. For all that, he still thought man the most
plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked Nero's death,
_Qualis artifex pereo!_ better than most history. He worships a
man that will manifest any truth to him. At one time he had
inquired and read a good deal about America. Landor's principle
was mere rebellion, and _that,_ he feared, was the American
principle. The best thing he knew of that country was, that in
it a man can have meat for his labor. He had read in Stewart's
book, that when he inquired in a New York hotel for the Boots, he
had been shown across the street, and had found Mungo in his own
house dining on roast turkey.

"We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and he disparaged
Socrates; and, when pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a
hero. Gibbon he called the splendid bridge from the old world to
the new. His own reading had been multifarious. Tristram Shandy
was one of his first books after Robinson Crusoe and Robertson's
America, an early favorite. Rousseau's Confessions had
discovered to him that he was not a dunce; and it was now ten