Skindeep called upon Popanilla on the following morning in an elegant
equipage, and with great politeness proposed to attend him in a drive
about the city.
The island of Vraibleusia is one hundred and fifty miles in
circumference, two-thirds of which are covered by the city of Hubbabub.
It contains no other city, town, or village. The rest of the island
consists of rivers, canals, and railroads. Popanilla was surprised when
he was informed that Hubbabub did not contain more than five millions
of inhabitants; but his surprise was decreased when their journey
occasionally lay through tracts of streets, consisting often of
capacious mansions entirely tenantless. On seeking an explanation
of this seeming desolation, he was told that the Hubbabubians
were possessed by a frenzy of always moving on, westward; and that
consequently great quarters of the city are perpetually deserted. Even
as Skindeep was speaking their passage was stopped by a large caravan
of carriages and wagons heavily laden with human creatures and their
children and chattels. On Skindeep inquiring the cause of this great
movement, he was informed by one on horseback, who seemed to be the
leader of the horde, that they were the late dwellers in sundry squares
and streets situated far to the east; that their houses having been
ridiculed by an itinerant balladeer, the female part of the tribe had
insisted upon immediately quitting their unfashionable fatherland; and
that now, after three days’ journey, they had succeeded in reaching the
late settlement of a horde who had migrated to the extreme west.
Quitting regions so subject to revolutions and vicissitudes, the
travellers once more emerged into quarters of a less transitory
reputation; and in the magnificent parks, the broad streets, the
ample squares, the palaces, the triumphal arches, and the theatres of
occidental Hubbabub, Popanilla lost those sad and mournful feelings
which are ever engendered by contemplating the gloomy relics of departed
greatness. It was impossible to admire too much the architecture of this
part of the city. The elevations were indeed imposing. In general, the
massy Egyptian appropriately graced the attic-stories; while the finer
and more elaborate architecture of Corinth was placed on a level with
the eye, so that its beauties might be more easily discovered. Spacious
colonnades were flanked by porticoes, surmounted by domes; nor was the
number of columns at all limited, for you occasionally met with porticos
of two tiers, the lower one of which consisted of three, the higher one
of thirty columns. Pedestals of the purest Ionic Gothic were ingeniously
intermixed with Palladian pediments; and the surging spire exquisitely
harmonised with the horizontal architecture of the ancients. But
perhaps, after all, the most charming effect was produced by the
pyramids, surmounted by weather-cocks.
Popanilla was particularly pleased by some chimneys of Caryatides, and
did not for a moment hesitate in assenting to the assertion of Skindeep
that the Vraibleusians were the most architectural nation in the world.
True it was, they had begun late; their attention as a people having
been, for a considerable time, attracted to much more important affairs;
but they had compensated for their tardy attention by their speedy
excellence. *
* See a work which will be shortly published, entitled, ‘The
difference detected between Architecture and Parchitecture,’
by Sansovino the Second.
Before they returned home Skindeep led Popanilla to the top of a tower,
from whence they had a complete view of the whole island. Skindeep
particularly directed the Captain’s attention to one spot, where
flourished, as he said, the only corn-fields in the country, which
supplied the whole nation, and were the property of one individual. So
unrivalled was his agricultural science that the vulgar only accounted
for his admirable produce by a miraculous fecundity! The proprietor of
these hundred golden acres was a rather mysterious sort of personage. He
was an aboriginal inhabitant, and, though the only one of the aborigines
in existence, had lived many centuries, and, to the consternation of
some of the Vraibleusians and the exultation of others, exhibited no
signs of decay. This awful being was without a name. When spoken of by
his admirers he was generally described by such panegyrical periphrases
as ‘soul of the country,’ ‘foundation of the State,’ ‘the only real,
and true, and substantial being;’ while, on the other hand, those who
presumed to differ from those sentiments were in the habit of styling
him ‘the dead weight,’ ‘the vampire,’ ‘the night-mare,’ and other titles
equally complimentary. They also maintained that, instead of being
either real or substantial, he was, in fact, the most flimsy and
fictitious personage in the whole island; and then, lashing themselves
up into metaphor, they would call him a meteor, or a vapour, or a great
windy bubble, that would some day burst.
The Aboriginal insisted that it was the common law of the land that the
islanders should purchase their corn only of him. They grumbled, but
he growled; he swore that it was the constitution of the country; that
there was an uninterrupted line of precedents to confirm the claim; and
that, if they did not approve of the arrangement, they and their fathers
should not have elected to have settled, or presumed to have been
spawned, upon his island. Then, as if he were not desirous of resting
his claim on its mere legal merits, he would remind them of the
superiority of his grain, and the impossibility of a scarcity, in the
event of which calamity an insular people could always find a plentiful
though temporary resource in sea-weed. He then clearly proved to them
that, if ever they had the imprudence to change any of their old laws,
they would necessarily never have more than one meal a day as long as
they lived. Finally, he recalled to their recollection that he had made
the island what it was, that he was their mainstay, and that his counsel
and exertions had rendered them the wonder of the world. Thus, between
force, and fear, and flattery, the Vraibleusians paid for their corn
nearly its weight in gold; but what did that signify to a nation with so
many pink shells!