abridgment of labour, which had excited great wonder and praise in the
neighbourhood. On the other hand, those rabid little tracts, which dealt
so summarily with the destinies of the human race, even when his growing
reason and the perusal of works more classical or more logical had led
him to perceive that they were illiterate, and to suspect that they
jumped from premises to conclusions with a celerity very different from
the careful ratiocination of mechanical science, had still, in the
citations and references wherewith they abounded, lured him on to
philosophers more specious and more perilous. Out of the tinker's bag he
had drawn a translation of Condorcet's "Progress of Man" and another of
Rousseau's "Social Contract." Works so eloquent had induced him to
select from the tracts in the tinker's miscellany those which abounded
most in professions of philanthropy, and predictions of some coming
Golden Age, to which old Saturn's was a joke,--tracts so mild and mother-
like in their language, that it required a much more practical experience
than Lenny's to perceive that you would have to pass a river of blood
before you had the slightest chance of setting foot on the flowery
banks on which they invited you to repose; tracts which rouged poor
Christianity on the cheeks, clapped a crown of innocent daffodillies on
her head, and set her to dancing a /pas de zephyr/ in the pastoral ballet
in which Saint-Simon pipes to the flock he shears; or having first laid
it down as a preliminary axiom that--

"The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,--
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,"

substituted in place thereof M. Fourier's symmetrical phalanstere, or Mr.
Owen's architectural parallelogram. It was with some such tract that
Lenny was seasoning his crusts and his radishes, when Riccabocca, bending