Chance and the ingenuity of Baptiste had collected, on this occasion, as
party-colored and heterogeneous an assemblage of human passions,
interests, dialects, wishes, and opinions, as any admirer of diversity of
character could desire. There were several small traders, some returning
from adventures in Germany and France, and some bound southward, with
their scanty stock of wares; a few poor scholars, bent on a literary
pilgrimage to Rome; an artist or two, better provided with enthusiasm than
with either knowledge or taste, journeying with poetical longings towards
skies and tints of Italy; a _troupe_ of street jugglers, who had been
turning their Neapolitan buffoonery to account among the duller and less
sophisticated inhabitants of Swabia; divers lacqueys out of place; some
six or eight capitalists who lived on their wits, and a nameless herd of
that set which the French call bad "subjects;" a title that is just now,
oddly enough, disputed between the dregs of society and a class that would
fain become its exclusive leaders and lords.
These with some slight qualifications that it is not yet necessary to
particularise, composed that essential requisite of all fair
representation--the majority.
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