the South Sea House to the Secretary of State, for passports and other assistance to follow and secure Mr. Samuel Price, who had fraudulently received and carried off £70,000 of the said Company's and from other offices.

On the evening of Mr. Price's embarkation, his wife had been seized, on her return from Harwich, with sixty-four bank notes and several India bonds on her person.

A reward of 200 ducats, with an advertisement and description of Mr. Price, was inserted in the Amsterdam and French papers, and he was apprehended and brought to England to take his trial at the Old Bailey, where Mr. Giffard had been bound over to appear as a witness for the prosecution under pain of imprison

ment.

As Honoria had always advised her husband to remove his business from Mr. Samuel Price, Thomas Giffard feared to tell her the truth, and also desired to spare her from any share in his own deep anxiety.

So the evil his reserve had worked deepened from this day. Going forth to London without lightening his care by her counsel, Thomas Giffard rode from his own door, and Honoria held up the boy for a parting kiss after he was in the saddle.

When she had watched man and horse, and waved her hand in answer to the last backward glance her husband threw on her and his children before the bend in the road hid him from their view, she went up to that window in the house from which she could see him longest; and when he had passed out of her sight her heart sank, as it ever did in his absence, with fear of unknown ills chancing to either before they met again.

As she went in from the porch, Honoria felt full of remorse for the words she had used to her sister the evening before. "Mine is a bitter, bad temper, to prompt me to say such things only to spite Hester in return for her impertinence. All the while I am conscious that I love Thomas more than he loves me. The differ. ence is in our dispositions. It is not in his power to care more about any woman than he does about me. 'Tis not in him to love as I could. He is kind to his wife for the same reason that he is to his horses and dogs. But he has no higher need for her than for his daily food. Why else does he treat me as a child, with smiles and caresses, and withholding of all serious talk? I know that his heart is even now heavy with care, but he trusts me with none of his affairs. He has no taste for painting-'tis but a pretence; I know that well enough. He let me know that he talked parrot-like, repeating only Sir Robert Compton's words. Yet he would have me believe he has no more urgent call to London than the invitation of his friends to the opening of the Royal Academy!

What a simpleton he must think me! His talk of his bachelor days came from his heart; he said naught else that was genuine. I despise jealously, yet 'tis hard to put faith in a husband who hides his thoughts. Who was Mrs. Jane Douglas, and why did he laugh as he spoke of her? 'Tis very aggravating to know so little about one's own husband. Then, he cut me short at once when I said I wished to go to London.”

By the wide sea

CIVILISATION.

Weary with waiting-watching human woe,
As the dark tide of centuries ebb and flow
In giant waves that sink so far below;
Oh, sad, sweet eyes, so yearningly aglow !
Heavy with mem'ries of the abyssmal past,
Ten thousand years!

A world's iconoclast!

Freighted with trophies from each varied clime,
Daughter of all earth's wrongs and all her hopes sublime.
A myriad years! of thought, of love, of strife,
Dwarfing the war of elements! The life
Of death incorporates in thee,

Bowed head, on which so great a burden lies-
Heart, that has throbbed unstayed since Paradise;
Soul of all souls! The ends of earth have come
And made thy utterance mighty! Voiceless, dumb,
We stand amazed before the embodied thought
Of one like thee, by all earth's suffering wrought.

ISABEL A. SAXON.

PERSONALITIES OF THE HOUSE OF
COMMONS.

XXVIII.

MR. SMOLLETT.

THIS gentleman, we believe, proudly "claims kindred" with the celebrated novelist, his namesake; and equally, we believe, has his claims allowed." Those who have watched his bearing in the House of Commors will readily admit that there is something about him remarkably suggestive of the blood of the author of "Roderick Random," and "Peregrine Pickle," flowing in his veins. There are glints of the same broad humour, and amusing developments of the same blunt and half-querulous independence. It is strange that the hon. gentleman's ancestor, while continually subscribing contributions towards "the harmless gaiety of nations," should have been almost all his life a martyr to ill-health in some form or another. Sterne used to satirise him under the highly complimentary designation of "Smelfungus," and jeered at his peevish references to his sufferings. One would almost suppose that the present representative of the name inherited some slight elements of the same temperament. When Mr. Smollett gets on his legs in the House, he usually gives one the idea of a man who is suffering from a fit of dyspepsia, and who is bound to vent his irritability with impartial justice on friends and foes alike. He scolds all round with a quaint humorous crustiness which, in place of provoking the indignation and resentment of his audience, causes everybody to turn in the direction of the speaker, and to greet his plain-spoken and caustic fault-finding with peals of laughter. The truth is, the House does not believe one bit in the reality of the hon. gentleman's fury, though he himself, to judge by his affronted air and the crisp tone of indignation in which he deals out his dry and droll sarcasms, appears to have worked himself up into the belief that he is in a most terrible rage. The angrier he seems to get the merrier and more delighted gets the House; for well does it know that just in proportion as the hon. member lashes himself nto greater fury, the more plentiful will be those piquant gibes and flouts, expressed in racy Scotch idiom, which so tickle and exhilarate it. The member for Cambridge has, we believe, passed a great part of his life in India, and he frequently selects that empire as ihe text of his quaint denunciations. Apart from the peculiar style of his animadversions, his speeches display no contemptible know.

ledge of his theme, and his remarks are often unquestionably shrewd and suggestive,-the offspring evidently of actual personal experience. In this respect they present a charining contrast to the purblind and pedantic howlings of a Fawcett on the same subject. It is amusing to watch the crusty old Scotchman rise from the back Conservative benches on an Indian Budget night, to pound into the Under-Secretary and the Government. The House, empty as it generally is on the night of the Indian financial statement, has been rendered almost literally tenantless by the howlings of the learned Professor just alluded to, who for a full hour has been forcibly suggesting a discontented watch-dog baying the moon. But a whisper that the descendant of the great Tobias is on his legs brings many a straggler in from the lobbies. The member for Cambridge grasps in his hand a formidable bundle of notes, and at once gets astride of his favourite hobby-the irrigation of India. He peppers away at the Government for three-quarters of an hour in a succession of terse, snarling sentences, every second one of which is so saturated with his own characteristic humour that the House at once begins to relish the entertainment. The hon. gentleman keeps his eye steadily fixed on Lord George Hamilton (late Under-Secretary), who as steadily eyes him back, and probably laughs at regular intervals. He tells his lordship how, years ago, be (Mr. Smollett) pointed out that a timely course of irrigation would have prevented these famines, "which occur as regularly as a hen lays her eggs." "But," he adds, snapping his fingers, "there are always some persons (viz., the Government) who think they can see deeper into a milestone than other people." When the hon. gentleman sits down the House cheers him heartily, though it no more believes in his fierce looks and growling inuendoes than does a mischievous urchin in the scoldings of his grandfather, whom he knows is laughing in his sleeve all the time. It is probable that Mr. Smollett felt his temper sorely tried (and, perhaps, his purse too) by Mr. Gladstone's sudden dissolution of Parliament in 1873; at any rate, he was the only member who formally arraigned the right hon. gentleman for that extraordinary proceeding. Really, the ex-Premier seemed stung to the quick by the uncompromising home-thrusts of Tobias Smollett's descendant, for he sprung to his feet in the very whirlwind of passion. He replied by telling the hon. gentleman that he scarcely maintained the reputation of his famous ancestor, which was a very small piece of retaliation— especially as nobody agreed with it. Then, in awful tones of outraged innocence, he defied his assailant to prove some trivial allegation; to which Mr. Smollett replied by stating that he had no notion if rising in his place a second time. Whereupon Mr. Gladstone, who is rather fond of insinuating that he monopolises all the man

liness of the House, Lur'ed forth the featul taunt that the member for Cambridge had not he manliness to prove his own assertions. No repartee could be more essentially feeble or more child. ish. The member for Cambrige is a favourite with the House no less for his shaggy Sestea honesty and downrightness than for his queer saturnine humour. He not only proves his affinity to the famous novelist in these respects, but like him also, behind the mere laughter-ioving faculty there may lurk, for aught we know, some touches of true petic feeling; for poet, in the genuine sense of the word, the man undoubtedly was who wrote the tender ode, beginning, "Mourn, hapless Caledonia, mourn!" and who penned lines of such masculine poetic vigour as

"Thy spirit, Independence, let me share,
Lord of the lion-heart and eagle-eye!"

XXIX.

MR. TREVELYAN.

THE present House of Commons probably contains as many distinctive types of human character as is possible in an assembly which, though large, is still necessarily limitel in numbers. One type of character with whom we have all possibly had the mis. fortune to come in contact at one periol or other of our lives, is the prig. Wordsworth very truly declares that "the child is father of the man ;" and no doubt, could we trace the careers of the prigs with whom we associated in our school-boy days, we should continually be confirming the wisdom of that dictum. We should find that the prig of our form or our college, when he became a soldier or a parson, or a doctor or an M.P., did not, by any means, part with his essential attribute; that he was merely a "child of a larger growth;" that, having been a child-prig, he had merely developed into a man-prig. The two commonest specimens of this strange species are undoubtedly the intellectual and the moral. The intellectual prig is given to laying down the law upon all questions relating to letters, science, and politics; and his claim to do so is probably based upon the fact that he has taken prizes at school and honours at college. The moral prig usually steers his course by the light of a few narrow moral maxims which he has got by rote; and he occupies a great deal of his time in censuring those who do not follow in his wake. Sometimes the two classes are combined, as appears to be the case with Mr. Trevelyan. He is not, by any means, the only Parliamentary prig at present extant, but it cannot for a moment be denied that he is one of the most, if not the most representative specimen of the genius. Mr. Trevelyan went to college and entered public life with all the advantages