carried about in a parrot's cage. "This,"
remarks Wanley, in his Wonders of the
Little World, "would have passed my belief
had I not been told by a gentleman of a clear
reputation, that he saw a man at Sienna,
about two years since, not exceeding the
same stature. A Frenchman he was, of the
county of Limosin, with a formal beard, who
was likewise shown in a cage for money, at
the end whereof was a little hatch into which
he retired, and when the assembly was full
came forth and played on an instrument."
The very thing we have all seen at the fairs,
substituting the simulacrum of a three-storied
house for a cage, and not forgetting
the modern improvements of the diminutive
inmate ringing a bell, and firing a pistol
out of the first-floor window!

And after banquetting on these bygone
dwarfs, who were scholars and gentlemen,
as well as monstrosities, for was not Alypius,
cited above, a famous logician and
philosopher? and did not Richard Gibson, Esq.,
teach Queen Anne the art of drawing, and
proceed on a special mission to Holland to
impart artistic instruction to the Princess of
Orange? after dwelling on the dwarfs who
formed part of the retinue of William of
Normandy when he invaded England, and
who held the bridle of the Emperor Otho's
horse; after remembering the dwarfs whom
Dominichino and Rafaelle, Velasquez and
Paul Veronese have introduced in their
pictures; after this rich enjoyment of
dwarfish record I am thrown back on
General Tom Thumb. I grant the General,
and the Commodore, and their ladykind a
decent meed of acknowledgment. I confess
them calm, self-possessed, well bred, and
innocuous; but I have no heart to attend
their "levées." Nutt, in the caricature of
a naval uniform, does not speak to my
heart; I have no ambition to see Thumb
travestied as the late Emperor Napoleon—
that conqueror could, upon occasion, cause
himself to appear even smaller than Thumb
—nor am I desirous of purchasing
photographic cartes de visite of Minnie Warren.
My dwarf is the gorgeously attired little
pagod of the middle ages; the dwarf who
pops out of a pie at a court banquet; the
dwarf who runs between the court jester's
legs and trips him up; the dwarf of the
king of Brobdingnag, who is jealous of
Gulliver, and souses his rival in a bowl of
cream, and gets soundly whipped for his
pains. Or, in default of this pigmy, give
me back the dwarf of my youth in his sham
three-storied house, with his tinkling bell
and sounding pistol.

It is not to be, I presume. These many
years past I have moodily disbursed in
divers parts of the world sundry francs,
lire, guilders, florins, thalers, reals, dollars,
piastres, and mark-banco for the sight of
dwarfs; but they (Thumb and his company
included) have failed to come up to my
standard of dwarfish excellence. Did you
ever meet with anything or anybody that
could come up to that same standard?
Man never is, but always to be blest; still,
although my dreams of dwarfs have not as
yet been fully realised, I have been able to
enjoy the next best thing to fulfilment. I
call to mind perhaps the wonderfullest
dwarfs' house existing on the surface of
this crazy globe. It is a house in the
construction and the furniture of which many
thousands of pounds were expended; and
it was built by a king for his son. It is
for this reason that I have called the
diminutive mansion "The Palace of King
Pippin."

King Pippin's Palace is in Spain, and
has been shamefully neglected by English
tourists in that interesting country. For
my part I think that it would be a great
advantage to picturesque literature if the
Alhambra and the Alcazar, the Bay of
Cadiz, and the Rock of Gibraltar, the
Sierra Morena and the Mezquita of
Cordova, the Cathedral of Burgos, and the
Bridge of Toledo, could be eliminated
altogether from Spanish topography. By
those means travellers in Spain would have
a little more leisure to attend to a number
of "cosas de España" which are at present
passed by almost without notice. Among
them is this incomparable dwarf house of
mine. You will observe that I have
excluded the Escorial from the catalogue of
places which English sight-seers in the
Peninsula might do well, for a time, to
forget. The Real Monasterio de San
Lorenzo must needs be visited, for King
Pippin's Palace is a dependency of that
extraordinary pile. Few tourists have the
courage to admit, in print at least, that
this palace-monastery, or monastery-palace
of the Escorial is a gigantic bore. When
it was my lot to visit it, my weariness
began even before I had entered its halls;
for in the railway carriage which conveyed
our party from Madrid to the "Gridiron
station" there was a fidgetty little
Andalusian, a maker of guitar strings, I think
he was, at Utrera, who was continually
rebounding on the cushions like a parched
pea in a fire-shovel, and crying out to us,
"El edificio, caballeros, donde está el edificio?"