The only thing to be done or said in reply, I suppose, would be to apply the same principle of bold mystification on our own part.  I do not see why I should not write a book called “Etiquette in Fleet Street,” and terrify every one else out of that thoroughfare by mysterious allusions to the mistakes that they generally make.  I might say:  “This is the kind of man who would wear a green tie when he went into a tobacconist’s,” or “You don’t see anything wrong in drinking a Benedictine on Thursday?....  No, of course you wouldn’t.”  I might asseverate with passionate disgust and disdain:  “The man who is capable of writing sonnets as well as triolets is capable of climbing an omnibus while holding an umbrella.”  It seems a simple method; if ever I should master it perhaps I may govern England.

THE “EATANSWILL GAZETTE.”

The other day some one presented me with a paper called the Eatanswill Gazette.  I need hardly say that I could not have been more startled if I had seen a coach coming down the road with old Mr. Tony Weller on the box.  But, indeed, the case is much more extraordinary than that would be.  Old Mr. Weller was a good man, a specially and seriously good man, a proud father, a very patient husband, a sane moralist, and a reliable ally.  One could not be so very much surprised if somebody pretended to be Tony Weller.  But the Eatanswill Gazette is definitely depicted in “Pickwick” as a dirty and unscrupulous rag, soaked with slander and nonsense.  It was really interesting to find a modern paper proud to take its name.  The case cannot be compared to anything so simple as a resurrection of one of the “Pickwick” characters; yet a very good parallel could easily be found.  It is almost exactly as if a firm of solicitors were to open their offices to-morrow under the name of Dodson and Fogg.

It was at once apparent, of course, that the thing was a joke.  But what was not apparent, what only grew upon the mind with gradual wonder and terror, was the fact that it had its serious side.  The paper is published in the well-known town of Sudbury, in Suffolk.  And it seems that there is a standing quarrel between Sudbury and the county town of Ipswich as to which was the town described by Dickens in his celebrated sketch of an election.  Each town proclaims with passion that it was Eatanswill.  If each town proclaimed with passion that it was not Eatanswill, I might be able to understand it.  Eatanswill, according to Dickens, was a town alive with loathsome corruption, hypocritical in all its public utterances, and venal in all its votes.  Yet, two highly respectable towns compete for the honour of having been this particular cesspool, just as ten cities fought to be the birthplace of Homer.  They claim to be its original as keenly as if they were claiming to be the original of More’s “Utopia” or Morris’s “Earthly Paradise.”  They grow seriously heated over