The most remarkable sliding-scale of which Fiction has any record is the rainbow on which Munchausen, with such inimitable ease, effected his railroad descent from mid-air; but Fact has her extraordinary sliding-scales too. Take a modern example in the one which carried Napoleon from Moscow to Elba, equalled only by that which bore him afterwards from Waterloo to St. Helena.

Life in its several stages is but a succession of sliding-scales. Take a bird's-eye view of society, and what do you see but two classes; one endeavouring to slide up an ascent, and another endeavouring not to slide down. The world, instead of being represented as round as an O, might more aptly be figured by the letter A, which is composed of two inclined planes; the way up being narrow and hard to climb, but the way down being broad and open enough.

There is the moral sliding-scale and the intellectual sliding-scale. On the one, we see a man passing, by regular degrees, from a meanness to a degradation; from a little shabbiness to a great crime; from a lie thought to a lie acted; from an evasion to a shuffle; from a shuffle to a swindle; from swindling to consummate depravity; from the first sixpence penuriously saved to the heaped hoards of avarice. On the other, we see the mind gradually drawn out from weakness to power; from dulness to brilliancy; from the frivolous dreams of childhood to the conceptions of a gigantic imagination; the heavy schoolboy ripening into the lively poet; the reckless truant settling into the wise and thoughtful student.

There is the sliding-scale of fortune, the sliding-scale of manners, the sliding-scale of appetite; penury slides into affluence, rustic modesty becomes town-bred impudence, the gourmand eats himself down to a dry crust. It is sad enough to see a gentlemen slide off his saddle-horse, and take to drawing a truck; but these declensions will happen, and they are not so distressing as it is to see a philosopher turning footman, an orator turning twaddler, or a patriot turning toady.

Then there is the sliding-scale theatrical. By what a natural and unerring sliding-scale does some popular tragedian come down at last from Richard the Third to the Lord Mayor! "I wore that very dress as Romeo," said a London player, of small parts, "when I starred it in the provinces." The romantic beauty of Juliet declines into the grotesque rheumatism of the Nurse.

We say nothing of the tradesman's scale, which is an affair of weights; nor of the scale-musical, which is one of measures. But of the sliding-scale which is best understood, and perhaps most freely acted upon in every great city and small town, our marginal series of "scenes from real life" will afford the best exemplification; and so we direct the reader to them.