At all events the Boy has taken the Ass's place on the ladder. The change may have arisen out of that tenderness for the brute creation which is too amiable a feeling—when in excess—to pass unadmired. There is a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; and to risk a donkey's life on a ladder, for the sport of a heedless crowd, might be dangerous to the mountebank. In this age, society at large knows what is due to donkeys; we can all enter into their feelings. But as there is no law, and no moral principle, against the elevation of a human urchin, even to the top stave of the ladder, there is no reason why the sport should not continue. Philosophers will explain to you, that a boy is a free agent, and has a right to be balanced on a human chin, if he likes; but a donkey has no will of his own at all—except—except when you've hired him for an hour, at Ramsgate, and are endeavouring to persuade yourself that you're trotting him out of the town.

The last boy we saw balanced was worthy of the chin that sustained him. The mountebank to be sure was a miracle, and could have balanced anything. If the books of the Bank of England were to get into disorder, every sum confused, and every figure out of its place—he could balance them. But the boy was at least two miracles rolled into one—a more than Siamese prodigy—a boy, and yet an ass too. He looked more like one than the reality, his predecessor. He evidently felt the past importance of his elevation, high above his compeers. He seemed quite conscious that every inhabitant, not of that simply, but of the next parish, was gazing at him in profound amazement. He turned no glance, whether of contempt or benignant pity, on the open eyes and mouths around, but looked unutterable things at the knocker of a door opposite.

This, however, was only at the commencement of the performance, while the spectators were being coaxed to contribute, and while several among them, not knowing exactly what they were doing, were giving a half-penny. But when the ladder was deliberately hoisted up, and fixed on the chin, then came the utter hopelessness of presenting a true resemblance of the ass's face—the boy's we mean;—of the conscious pride in its own blankness, of its self-complacency, tinged with a slight touch of fear, amounting only to a pleasurable excitement! He was a boy picked out of the crowd around,—yet he was matchless. You saw at once that he was not employed by the mountebank—that he was not paid for being balanced. There was something in his look that distinguished him at a glance from the hired professor. It might be supposed that, the boy not being hired, there would be a little difficulty in procuring a substitute for the ass: not so; only blow a trumpet or beat a drum in the street, and you are surrounded in less than no time with able and willing volunteers. This boy entered into the soul of the ass's part; he did not hug, and hang on the ladder mechanically, or like one who had done the same thing a dozen times before, that very day. There was the freshness of the young aspiration, the delicious novelty of the first grand step in life—in the attempt. It was young Ambition (as Brutus says) just mounting his ladder. He was animated by the glorious intoxication of getting up in the world. He looked direct forward; not at, but through, the brick wall opposite, into futurity. If one of his schoolfellows had called out, "Master's a coming;" or, "Here's your father with the cartwhip;" or, "Bill, I'm blessed if here arn't the woman what we stole the apples on;"—no, even these notes of alarm would have failed to disturb his equanimity—or his equilibrium. "Have a slice o' cold pudden, Bill?" might have communicated perhaps to some part of his frame a momentary touch of human weakness—we can't say positively—boys are but men;—but nothing short of such an appeal to the weak side of his nature could have disturbed his rapt and lofty musings.

Since the days of the Hebrew with which we set out, when the Ass on the Ladder was but a fiction, history has recorded the doings—we had almost said the sayings—of scores of wonderful quadrupeds. We have had gifted horses, who should have been elected F.R.S.'s; learned pigs, who should have been chosen LL.D.'s; humane dogs, who merit statues like Howard's; and industrious fleas, who do the work of hot water in putting lobsters to the blush. But such an ass as the Lad on the Ladder eye never beheld but that once. His face spread before our curious and inquiring gaze, like a map of the world, and we traced in recollection an infinite variety of character. What it more immediately suggested was the expression in the face of a successful candidate at the moment of "chairing," elevated in some fantastic car, surrounded with banners bearing patriotic mottoes and devices, and accompanied by roaring raggamuffins. It also conjured up a vision of a youthful aspirant, fresh from the office or the shop, strutting in Richard, or fretting in Hamlet, before eight long sixes, and a full bench of aunts, in a private theatre.

The ass on the ladder brings to memory a thousand other spectacles. When we behold an orator (to listen is impossible) flourishing his arms on the hustings, and ever and anon placing his hand upon his crimson waistcoat, or declaiming for an hour together before a private company to the exclusion of conversation, in full force of lungs, but in virtue of no mental superiority, we are forcibly reminded of the ass on the ladder.

When we see a sprig of fashion, who only obtained his nobility yesterday, and whose worth, if put up to auction, would be dear at the price of a mushroom, insolently claiming precedence of the untitled bearer of an ancient and honourable name; or when we observe the high-born, starched up to the eyes, sneering at humble birth, however associated with merit, and cutting modest respectability for a parvenu; in these cases we cannot help thinking of the ass on the ladder.

When we see a vulgar jack, in virtue of his office raised to the rank of gentleman, treating a poor suitor, who asks for his own, as if he were a beggar asking alms; or a sleek-headed, rosy-gilled idiot, who lives only in his own breeches-pocket, pretending to patronise talent because he doles out, for its exercise, what scarcely keeps its possessor from starving, we are very apt to call to recollection the ass on the ladder.

When a connoisseur, influential by position, sits down to decide, in just ten minutes, upon the merits of a work of art or science, which has cost the producer years of anxious study and ceaseless labour; or when a military despot lives but to harass, irritate, and torture the sensitive and honourable minds of those ill-fated officers, who, superior perhaps in everything else, happen to be below him in rank and fortune,—we immediately recur for a parallel to the ass on the ladder.

When we see a millionnaire, who has crawled along the road to riches until he can't stand upright, grasping with usurious hands at the little still retained by those who helped him to rise; or when a sudden puff of fortune has blown an adventurer into power and affluence, and we see him so giddy that he doesn't know his own poor relations, and actually can't recognise in broad daylight the struggling friend who lent him five pounds three months before,—then, and under all similar circumstances, we are sure to think of the ass on the ladder.

When we behold a gentleman turning jockey or stage-coachman, quitting the legislature for the stable or the cockpit, winking at the worst vices until he becomes himself tainted, and devoting his time and money to the destruction of his own health and the demoralisation of his hangers-on; or when we see a barrister, bullying with conscious impunity a trembling, blushing, inexperienced witness (perhaps a woman) until common sense becomes confused, truth begins to contradict herself, and honesty steps out of the witness-box, looking very much like a rogue,—why, who can fail to associate with spectacles like these, the ass on the ladder?

But it is not merely in the army and on the stage, at the bar and in literature, in the walks of commerce and in the world of fashion, that we daily detect some living prototype of the long-eared animal in the ascendant. If public meetings exhibit them, public schools do so no less abundantly. There is a great deal of ladder-climbing going on at the universities; and not a proctor in the precincts of learning but could tell many tales of asinine ambition. Who more irresistibly calls to mind the ass on the ladder than the noble knocker-wrencher, or the gentlemanly bell-destroyer, when brought up—many staves up the ladder now—before a magistrate, and indulgently allowed to take his choice—a fine of forty shillings, or a month at the treadwheel? When the noble and gentlemanly sport extends to the pummelling of police-officers, only stopping within an ace of manslaughter, then the animal may be said to have reached the topmost stave—an elevation where every kick with which he indulges himself in his playful humour adds incalculably to his own imminent danger. The higher the ascent, the greater the ass. We have seen many instances, more melancholy than ludicrous, of asses falling from the very top.

For ourselves, we must candidly confess to a painful consciousness of having been—occasionally, and for not many days together—yet of having been, ere now, beyond all mistake, upon the ladder adverted to. Nay, emboldened by the virtuous frankness of this self-criminating admission, we even venture to put it to our (male) readers, whether they cannot recollect having had their own feet, at some time of their lives, on the first round of the ladder; whether they do not feel sensible of having placed just one foot on that lowest step of the ascent—one only—for we would not dare to insinuate that they ever got farther, lest they should turn upon us with the mortifying, and perhaps not altogether mistaken discovery, that we ourselves, even in this moment of moralising, have reached the top of it!