from them, and, unless worth be joined with wealth, such will ever be the case. Let the poor man, then, rejoice that he at least is treated with solid sincerity, while the rich man is eternally fed with the moonshine of flattery, although both prove as unsatisfactory as the dietary awarded to Tantalus.

Money is, in fine, the realisation of the imaginary lever of Archimedes; the world (that is, our world, comprising the commercial, political, shop-keeping, money-grubbing, calculating, paltry pounds-shillingsand-pence people) is readily depressed or elevated by its action. Their loyalty is even selfish. We remember how aptly poor Tom Dibdin combined these two feelings in a toast which he once gave with great applause at a public dinner: "May the man who supports his sovereign, never want a sovereign to support himself!"

NOTE THE SECOND.

THE ways of attaining money are so various, so trodden, and so macadamised, that the goal may be reached by the "meanest of mankind;" and he must be either an arrant fool, or-a very honest man, who remains poor.

Alchymy has been scoffed at and ridiculed as a bubble of the brain. Now, this sneering contempt is the offspring of pure ignorance or disappointed ambition. That which incompetency and want of skill are unable to obtain is decried and despised; the true secret has never been divulged by the adepts. But in

VOL. II.

L

this liberal and enlightened age we should be ashamed, nay, we should hold ourselves criminal, to conceal any knowledge we have acquired that may be turned to the advantage of our fellow-labourers.

WE HAVE DISCOVERED THE TRUE SECRET, and we will freely impart it. All those furnace and blowpipe moles in human shapes, velvet-capped and barnacled, who have worked in smoke and obscurity, have truly laboured in the dark. All their manipulations have been made with the "noble " metals; their experiments have ultimately ended in smoke; while the poor alchymists have only got-the vapours!

Besides, they are or were mean, covetous, grasping, illiberal men, who sought not the good of their kind, but their own individual profit; and right pleasant is it in our "mind's eye" to observe the gradual evaporation of their ingots!

Reader! they were on the wrong scent; nay, they were totally ignorant of the appropriate bait for the fish for which they so patiently angled. Truly, they might as well have fished for red-herrings with a toasting-fork. But we will no longer keep you in suspense. We have, we must confess, a sort of feminine incontinency of secrets.

The alchymists were wont to use the noble metals as a base. We, on the contrary, know that a base metal, or rather a compound of base metals, is the egg from which the golden pheasant is hatched, the popular name of it is

Really the great, the paramount importance of what we are about to divulge, affects our lingual muscles to

that degree that we should inevitably stutter in the delivery, were it not a simple monosyllable, or had we not the favourable facility of communicating through a goose-quill, grateful, or to-be-grateful reader, it

is

WE venture to offer a few maxims, with a running commentary, for the encouragement and edification of the money-grubbing youth-the sum of whose existence is one of addition or multiplication.

This is a particularly pretty phrase; sounding very like the monitory voice of Economy, or the shrill treble of her starched, old maiden sister, Prudence. It is no such thing. It is the voice of hypocritical cant,—a trite saying of the family of the Skinflints, and is practically worked out in every bargain where a poor dealer is compelled to sell to a purchaser with a long purse and a short allowance of conscience; and is jocosely described by the narrow-minded save-alls as "putting on the screw."

As they continually grow more hardened, and there is no hope of their becoming penitent, we heartily wish these "penny-getters" may obtain gratuitous apartments in the Penitentiary, as narrow and ill-furnished as their own minds.

"Penny and penny laid up make many"

is a mere fact of simple addition; and the rusty old saw wherewith the young miser commences to cut a figure in the world, picking up pence, as magpies do silver spoons, for the sole pleasure of hiding them in holes and corners-a monomania, or rather, a moneymania, which is incurable. These men heap dunghills, but never scatter the manure over the land, (although no class of men look more after the till,) being notoriously tenacious of" forking out."

When the renowned Harvey was investigating the ebb and flow of the ruby tide of life, had he been surrounded by such bloodless flints as these, he would never have discovered the "circulation,"-for your

veritable high-dried miser effectually dams the current of what monetary writers term the " circulating medium." But why offer pomegranates to the lips of a statue? Unavailing are the words of the wise breathed in the ears of those who are wilfully deaf as adders. The evil bears its own punishment; for the "auri sacra fames," the accursed thirst for gold—is insatiable and unquenchable.

NOTE THE FOURTH.

"Ma poche est un trésor; sous mes précieuses mains le cuivre devient or."-Nouveau Comus.

"Money makes the mare to go."

Un

YOUNG men love maids, and old men money. fortunately, it must be confessed, however humiliating to our philosophic spirit, that money is essentially a necessary of life in this "nation of shopkeepers,"-as Napoleon sneeringly designated us. A great man was he; but not a "finished gentleman," nor a "sovereign"