become millionaires and paupers alternately once a fortnight--
living one week in a palace and the next in a workhouse, and having
perpetually to be sold up, and then to buy a new house and
refurnish, &c.--so that artificial means for stopping inventions
will be adopted; and partly by the fact that though all inventions
breed in geometrical ratio, yet some multiply more rapidly than
others, and the backwardness of one art will impede the forwardness
of another. At any rate, so far as I can see, the present is about
the only comfortable time for a man to live in, that either ever
has been or ever will be. The past was too slow, and the future
will be much too fast.

Another thing which we do not bear in mind when thinking of the
Alps is their narrowness, and the small extent of ground they
really cover. From Goschenen, for example, to Airolo seems a very
long distance. One must go up to the Devil's Bridge, and then to
Andermatt. From here by Hospenthal to the top of the pass seems a
long way, and again it is a long way down to Airolo; but all this
would easily go on to the ground between Kensington and Stratford.
From Goschenen to Andermatt is about as far as from Holland House
to Hyde Park Corner. From Andermatt to Hospenthal is much the same
distance as from Hyde Park Corner to the Oxford Street end of
Tottenham Court Road. From Hospenthal to the hospice on the top of
the pass is about equal to the space between Tottenham Court Road
and Bow; and from Bow you must go down three thousand feet of zig-
zags into Stratford, for Airolo. I have made the deviation from
the straight line about the same in one case as in the other; in
each, the direct distance is nine and a half miles. The whole
distance from Fluelen, on the Lake of Lucerne, to Biasca, which is
almost on the same level with the Lago Maggiore, is only forty