Beelzebub-the Turkey carpet-the cottage which I have not yet

seen."

"Nor ever will, my dear fellow, for it exists only in my own imagination but then, to be sure there's this house, centrically situated-"

"In good repair—”

"Held for a long term, at a moderate rent

"Not a chimney in it smokes-no drafts, no rattling old windows, and no noisy children, Dick!"

66

dear! I sup

True, my full of felicity. Then again, we must not forget my former identity, which, you may readily guess, annoyed me as much, and stuck to me as closely, wherever I went, as the old man of the mountain did to the shoulders of Sinbad."

"A hump which you couldn't pitch like a porter does a package of suspicious goods and run away from it."

"No: in fact Garnet is the safest name I ever wore."

"And you've been rather volatile, Dick, eh?”

"Uncommonly, as I am free to confess."

Is it a

"Ha! ha! but now for the climax of all this badinage. serious proposition of one hundred guineas-there or thereaboutslittle more or less ?"

My dear Maria, I cannot bear this. You won't look at things in a proper light."

"A hundred and fifty then?”

"Providence, though late in life, has beneficently interfered on my behalf"

"Two hundred pounds?"

"And shall I be such an ingrate as to reject its proffered blessings ?"

"Make it guineas."

66

My affections, safety, ease, comfort, and a thousand other considerations admonish me not to cast my bread upon the waters" "Pshaw! don't be rapacious !"

"Pythagoras, in his remarks on the transmigration of souls, has divinely observed-"

66

Oh bother Pythagoras! Don't bring him in as a mock-bidder, or Socrates, Plato, and Euclid will presently follow. Take my final offer of two hundred and fifty-money down, Dick-and let the hammer fall."

"Don't call me Dick, dearest! my name is Jonathan, Jonathan Garnet; a bourgeois and objectionable appellation it is true, but possesses such solid advantages (for even to say nothing of you, there's the business you know, and the safety as well), that hang me, my love, if any consideration on earth shall tempt me to part with it. Henceforth I am an attorney who has been very ill; you have recognized, Lord Tenterden has ratified me as such, and it would be bad taste on my part

"

"Of course Dick, you're joking still-joking on the broadest possible scale."

"I made no reply; but fixing myself firmly in the elbow-chair which I occupied, after having poked the fire with all the emphasis

of decided ownership, I gave her a glance so seriously negative, that the dear susceptible little woman shrieked with emotion, rose, staggered towards my plate, snatched up my anchovy knife, and made a desperate lunge, which, had it been successful, would have laid her open to a capital imputation. Of course, therefore, I parried it; pushed her back-what less could I do?—and she dropped on the hearth-rug in violent hysterics. The chamber-maid and cook, alarmed by her toscin,-the shriek which I mentioned, now burst into the room. I bled her to profusion, while partially delirious. Being convinced, however, that there was no reason for alarm, I left her in the care of her women, and-the cab being at the door-just jumped into it and took a brief bold dashing drive about town.

Beelzebub proved to be a perfect darling: he possessed action as well as pace; kept both head and stern gallantly up; and unlike many fast-goers, he was neither cat-hammed nor goose-rumped. I gloried in him. Maria's groom was an ass. He had dwelt on the reins with so dead a hand as to irritate the noble nag: the consequence was, that he had pulled the cab, not from the collar but the bit. I could have cuffed the fellow where he sat, (for I had taken him with me,) but for the anachronism of a man, who hadn't been out of his room for years, thrashing his groom. Rhino, the name to which the rascal answered, was amazed at my tact and Beelzebub's obedience. The animal found himself treated by a master-hand, and might have been driven, with the velocity of an arrow, through the most encumbered streets, by the slender pilotage of a pack-thread. Several highly respectable looking persons, after having stared egregiously, took off their hats as I passed, to make amends for the offence of having, as I guessed, foolishly taken me, at the first glance, for some low vagabond whom they knew. Rhino was astonished at the multitude of persons who recognized me, after having been so long an invisible invalid; while my perfect generalship in all the minutiae of cab-driving, produced, in his appreciating bosom, a sensation of positive awe. The fact is, that without vanity be it spoken, although I succumb to Apsley, the Nimrod of the Sporting Magazine, in tooling a team," I sing second to no man, so bountiful is nature-as a buggy whip over the stones. All this is parenthetical, and by-the-bye; but I have so little to brag of that I may perhaps be allowed to mention my comparative superiority in the trifling article of driving "a onehorse shay."

"

On my return, Maria was in bed; but so successful had been my depletion, that she was now quite composed, and had even admitted our managing clerk to a consultation, literally over the counterpane, on some urgent topic. I dined alone and undisturbed; but just after my filberts and parmesan had come in-(I always marry them in my mouth)— I heard a faint feeble irresolute tapping at the door. I dictatorially shouted the usual shibboleth, and he who managed the official regions below stairs slowly sneaked in. His name was Gruel. He stood about five feet six, and might be forty; but there was no telling how his account stood with time to any certainty. He wore a wig-smooth, brown, and oily as the plumage of a duck. He fought in armour, for no adversary ever saw his eyes. They were protected

laterally as well as in front by large green glasses; he had not discovered that expression dwells as much about the region of the mouth as about that of the eyes; and consequently deemed himself safe while the latter were concealed, although the lips, naked and exposed as they were, to so erudite a glance as that with which circumstances endow a man of my experience, reveal, with the nicest accuracy, what is going on within. I have always found that the deepest villains are, in apparently minor, but really most important points, the greatest noodles: this it is, that-fortunately for the publichangs so many of them; and some odd day it will hang our sleek friend Gruel.

When he entered the room his humility was so aggravated, that an innocent spectator would humanely have wished that the fellow, for his own sake, could have sunk through the floor. I, however, not only saw, but by what dropped from Mrs. Garnet, knew that he was a dead rascal, who, notwithstanding his apparent imbecility, possessed steam-engine power. I therefore asked him to sit down and take wine with me. He glode forward, and seemingly oppressed by the consciousness of his own insignificance, dwindled into a chair on the edge of which an abrupt incident compels me to leave him until the first of March.

UNEQUAL DISTRIBUTION OF PROPERTY.

-the

As the present system of society has advanced, the natural relations of man to man have been broken up; they now recognize each other as only so many several parts of the political machinery. The grasping game of exclusive property has annihilated social feeling, and the cant of political economy is superseding even the cant of religion. The fanatics of both are conspicuous for one and the same errorneglect of the question of morals-an important part of true polity, whether civil or divine, and the essential base of human happiness. The zealot is busy to make man fit for a future state;-the political economist, in making the most of him for this. The one seizes on his soul; the other on his body: between the two he is left without voice or volition on his own behalf; he toils to produce that which he never enjoys, and dies in fear of that which he has never examined.

Neglect and indifference to mankind in the mass is the pervading vice of our social arrangements. Those monstrous anomolies-preferring the lesser number to the greater-valuing production beyond the producers-seeking partial wealth instead of general happiness, are such standard deformities of the body politic, that, like all the malformed, we have grown into self-complacency, and continually allow ourselves to be flattered on the subject of our political beauty. Humanity has become a drug-sacrificed, remorselessly sacrificed to the production of wealth; which is all in all, and the hinges of the human machine are only oiled to enable it to work; while its exertions, be they attended with what extent of suffering they may, are

regarded with as little interest and less sympathy, than the motion of the paddle-wheel of a steamer. Political economy is making us mere calculators, and would close the safety valve of even such little charity as may be remaining. The poor of this country now actually look to the prisons as places of refuge, thank the magistrate that commits them to " durance vile,” and stand to be branded, no longer sensible to the blush of shame. Is not this a fact to turn every bed of down into one of torture?-to convert the banquet room into a place of reproach, where common sympathy would forbid the few to feast while their fellow-creatures famish? But from one end of the nation to the other, the most gross inequality of property has numbed common feeling; the poor man forgets the privileges, and the rich man the principles, of humanity. Factitious habits, by rendering association partial and exclusive, annuls all sense of common kindred, and in the estimation of the luxurious, the Lazarite is a different order of being. But let the new-born of the palace and the peasant's hut change places:—will birth or breeding triumph in their future character? Thus it is, that systems are stepdames to Nature's children-the capabilities God has given his creatures for happiness is suffered to run waste like water, and toil is carried to torture to perpetuate monopoly and misery.

Horace Walpole says, "If angels have any fun in them how they must laugh at us!" It may as truly be said, if they have any pity in them how they must weep for us! The people of this unhappy planet seem engaged in a sort of game at blindman's buff, and custom is the band used to blindfold the eyes of their reason. The authority of precedent is the warrant for practice, and, amid all the outcry for reform, we seem to forget that, of which "The Gentleman in Black at the City Theatre nightly reminds us, that "all that is custom now was innovation once.' Reform can only properly pause when perfection is attained. The march of reform therefore is not likely to be very limited, unless among those who, like the Chinese, make the immature institutions of past ignorance and inexperience the rule of future measures. "Of all the fallacies with which man has attempted to gloss his expedients, there are none more evidently false than that which infers the duration of a social system from the length of time it has already existed." Thus speak sthe greatA merican novelist— thus thinks every rational creature whether speaking it or not.

The present time has one consolation—the light of knowledge is abroad. Some may say, "What good has it done? There is not more happiness now than in times past-perhaps less." This may be true. There is an intermediate state preceding any great change. Knowledge now enables the people to see abuses and absurdities; it will next enable them to mitigate, and at last, let us hope, to remove them. The happiness of the past was something like the stolid quiescence of Curran's client, who declared he never knew how ill he had been used till he heard his counsel state his case in court. The power of opinion is omnipotent, the increasing power and privilege in expressing opinion will give the moving force to that mighty engine which, under the guidance of knowledge, will enfranchise mankind.

AN OLD WOMAN.

THE PRESENT CRISIS IN THE UNITED STATES.

THE year 1833, we venture to predict, will be memorable in the annals of the world. Clouds are gathering upon the political horizon of our own continent. From one end to the other, Europe, though apparently in profound repose, is internally agitated by the attrition of the two great principles-that of the many and the few. Though her physical energies seem dormant, the mind of man is progressing. In the western world the Federal Republic of the United States of America that Republic, whose rapid rise to its present elevated rank in the scale of nations is unparalleled-is threatened with desolation —it is perishing by the very principles that first gave it existence. The reasons alleged by the State of South Carolina for the non-execution of the tariff, are precisely the same as those urged by Franklin and Washington in 1781, as the grounds of separation from the mother country.

The dissolution of this great Republic, and the probable failure of the mighty experiments in government of which it has been the theatre, will be a fine subject for political parties to illustrate their various prejudices. The upholders of despotism will sing pæans over its downfall-the lover of liberty will mourn over what appears to be the stern_condition of man, to run alternately the career of improvement and of degeneracy-while the philosopher will recognize the unerring operation of that great political axiom countenanced by the highest authority, and proved by experience-" That the natural property of small States is to be governed as a Republic, of middling ones to be subject to a monarch, and of large empires to be swayed by a despotic prince, and that, therefore, the spirit of a state will alter in proportion as it extends or contracts its limits." The framers of the American constitution were not blind to an opinion confirmed by the history of every government in the old world; the difficulties that attended their undertaking were manifest. When the idea of a Confederate Republic presented itself, a kind of constitution was formed, which, according to the great Montesquieu, has all the internal advantages of a republican, together with the external force of a monarchical government. The expanding quality of such a government was peculiarly fitted for the United States, the greatest part of whose territory at that time was uncultivated.

But while this form of government enabled them to surmount this difficulty, it led them into another-it left them without precedent or guide; and, consequently, without the benefit of that instruction to be derived from the history of other nations. Several associations, both in ancient and modern times, have been called by the name of Confederate States, which have not, in propriety of language, deserved that appellation. The Achæan league, the Lycean confederacy, and the Amphyctyonic council in ancient-and the Swiss Cantons, the United Netherlands, and the Germanic Body in modern times-but none of these assemblages constituted a new one, and do not, therefore, correspond with the full definition of a confederate republic. M.M.-No. 86.

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