Stuffed bums in the American Museum of Natural History would not be any
good. Any good, that is, as objects of study. Our children will
require to know, to see the past steadily and see it whole, the
_habits_ of bums, their manners and customs. So, as I say, my work
would be invaluable. The wastrel (as they say in England) has, of
course, been celebrated in the literature of the past from time
immemorial. I can't at the moment put my finger on any, but I have no
doubt there are bums in the pages of Homer, That Persian philosopher
who found paradise enow with a jug of wine and a book of verse beneath
a bough, Falstaff, Richard Swiveller, how they flock to the mind, they
of the care-free kidney! They are in the Books of the great Hebrew
literature. There was he that took his journey into a far country.
"Gil Blas" and all the early picaresque novels on into the pages of
"The Romany Rye" swarm with them. But what is wanting, what will be
needed, is a richly informed picture of the last of the race, those
now, like the Indian and the buffalo, fast passing away. There is only
one way in which such a book could be, or should be written.

"Peace be with the soul of that charitable and Courteous Author who
introduced the ingenious way of miscellaneous writing," wrote Lord
Shaftsbury in the opening paragraph of his "Miscellaneous Reflections."
Peace be with the souls of all those who, for the delight of the
anointed, have practised that most debonair of all the arts, the
ingenious way of miscellaneous writing! Now, as highly successful
novelists always say nowadays when interviewed for highly successful
newspapers, "I know very little about literature," but I fancy this
benign way of writing had its well-spring in those preposterous days,
now long fled, when men of reading were content to give their best
thoughts first to their friends and then--ten years or so
afterwards--to the "publick." Its period was the day of the