enlarge the circle of our ideas; and to encourage the pleasing hope, that New Zealand may produce, in some future age, the Hume of the southern hemisphere."* In Sydney Smith's review of the position and prospects of Australia, as Australia was at the commencement of the present century, the remark occurs, that he who lives among a civilised people may estimate the labour by which society is brought into such a state, by reading in Colonel Collins's annals of Botany Bay,† the account of a whole nation exerting itself to new floor the government-house, repair the hospital, or build a wooden receptacle for stores. "Yet the time may come when some Botany Bay Tacitus shall record the crimes of an emperor lineally descended from a London pickpocket, or paint the valour with which he led his New Hollanders into the heart of China.”‡ It is anything but true to allege of the Coming Man from our antipodes that he has long since been worked to death in parliament, the pulpit, and the periodical press. On the contrary, he is all alive himself and ecce iterum Crispinus seems to be his cue. Us it rather is that are in jeopardy of being worked to death by him. That Coming Man enjoys a stock of redundant vitality; though we cannot ascribe to him such an infinite variety as time cannot wither nor custom stale. The late Mr. Hawthorne, in his investigation of, and speculations upon, that "sublime piece of folly" the Thames Tunnel, was led to surmise, that when the New Zealander of distant ages shall have moralised sufficiently among the ruins of London Bridge, he will bethink himself that somewhere thereabout was the marvellous Tunnel, the very existence of which will seem to him as incredible as that of the hanging gardens of Babylon. "The traveller will make but a brief and careless inquisition for the traces of the old wonder, and will stake his credit before the public, in some Pacific Monthly of that day, that the story of it is but a myth, though enriched with a spiritual profundity which he will proceed to unfold."§ The author of those curious essays entitled "The Original," in one of his letters from the Continent, amusing himself in Rome with the bustle in front of the shop of one Samuel Lowe, wine-merchant, parenthetically exclaims: "Samuel Lowe in the eternal city'! and English ladiesmaids on the soil of Livia, Octavia, and company! What changes! But, as Gibbon somewhere prognosticates the future ascendancy of the negro race, perhaps the Timbuctooians may hereafter figure in England as we now figure in Rome. We may as easily imagine that, as Julius Cæsar could have imagined the present change."|| In an indignant denunciation of the insults offered to Sir Walter *Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. xxv. † Account of the English Colony of New South Wales, vol. ii. 1803. "At that period, when the Grand Lahma is sending to supplicate alliance; when the spice islands are purchasing peace with nutmegs; when enormous tributes of green tea and nankeen are wafted into Port Jackson, and landed on the quays of Sydney; who will ever remember that the sawing of a few planks, and the knocking together of a few nails, were such a serious trial of the energies and resources of the nation?"-Article, "Australia," reprinted from the Edinburgh Review of 1803, in Sydney Smith's collected Works, vol. i. 8 Our Old Home, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. ii. pp. 137 sq. Scott at Jedburgh and Hawick, during the elections of 1831, his son-inlaw and biographer gloomily predicts: "The civilised American or Australian will curse these places, of which he would never have heard but for Scott, as he passes through them in some distant century, when perhaps all that remains of our national glories may be the high literature adopted and extended in new lands planted from our blood."* Ah, said the sighing peer, in Gray's jeu d'esprit, had Bute been true, and his policy prevailing, sword would have purged and fire have purified London's hated walls: Owls would have hooted in St. Peter's choir, And foxes stunk and litter'd in St. Paul's.t A Yankee orator, spouting tall talk in the autumn of 1863, indulged in a beatific vision of the Federal army-its work done at home-crushing London Bridge with the fragments which fly from the bombarded dome of St. Paul's. Shelley amused himself in his epistle to the author of the Fudge Family, written as a preface to his own unsuccessful satire on Peter Bell, with predicting a day for some transatlantic commentator to be found weighing in the scales of a yet undiscovered and unimaginable criticism, the respective merits of the Fudges and the Bells, "when London shall be an habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; and when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream." This was written in 1819. Musing over the desolate ruins of St. Jago, one of Marryat's naval wanderers meditates on the possibility of London one day being the same -and Paris: "but who will the wretched man be, that shall sit on the summit of Shooter's Hill, and look down upon the desolation of the mighty city, as I, from this little eminence, behold the once flourishing town of St. Jago ?"§ Some day or other, muses Mr. Thackeray, "(but it will be after our time, thank goodness,) Hyde Park-gardens will be no better known than the celebrated horticultural outskirts of Babylon; and Belgrave-square will be as desolate as Baker-street, or Tadmor in the wilderness." Mr. Laman Blanchard had previsions of an Exploring Expedition sent forth in the year 2844-just one thousand years after the date of his writing-by the inhabitants of Anteros, one of the seaports in the planet Mars, to discover the site of ancient London.¶ President Isnard warned the French Assembly, in 1793, that if the Marat faction of destructives were allowed to have their way, before long "the traveller would ask, on which side of the Seine Paris had stood."** * Lockhart, Life of Scott, ch. lxxx. † Gray's Poems: Impromptu, 1766. Dedicatory Epistle prefixed to Peter Bell the Third. Frank Mildmay, ch. xxv. Vanity Fair, ch. li. Excursions to the Ruins of London in 2844. ** So Mr. Carlyle quotes him, from the Moniteur, Séance du 25 Mai, 1793. And this is better than Lamartine's version: "And you would soon have to search upon the banks of the Seine whether Paris had existed."-Histoire des Girondins L. xl. § 27. A city once for power renown'd, To introduce some fine reflection,* especially on the part of a Girondist president during the reign of terror. But President Max was not original in his stroke of the sublime. Nearly a century before-to go no further back-one of perfidious Albion's poets, triumphing in a carmen seculare at the cost of the Grand Monarque himself, had foreseen in prophetic rapture a time When the great monuments of his power Shall now be visible no more; When Sambre shall have changed her winding flood; And children ask where Namur stood.† So in another poem, taking a broader view of things, Mat Prior (impersonating King Solomon) delivers himself of the ex post facto meditation: Thus later age shall ask for Pison's flood, And travellers inquire, where Babel stood. Mr. Prior found it convenient to repeat not only the self-same idea, but in the self-same rhyme. THE VAGRANT'S CHILD. BY NICHOLAS MICHELL. THOU little child in rags- Thou little child in rags— Looking through the shop's great pane *Churchill, The Ghost, book iii. † Prior, Carmen Seculare, for the year MDCC. Solomon on the Vanity of the World, book i., "Knowledge." Thou little child in rags- To thy shoulders streaming; Thou little child in rags- Thou little child in rags- Dark enigma-wondrous Heaven! What to thee perchance were given? Gayest dress, toys, sweetest kisses, Maids to wait-a world of blisses. Thou little child in rags Yes, thou mightst have been the heir Or a general thou mightst be, Thou little child in rags- Thou little child in rags- ORIGIN OF FAMILIES, AND INACCURATE GENEALOGY. JOURNAL OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS, TEMP. CAR. II. OWING to the diffusion of historical knowledge, and the facilities now afforded for testing "authorities," one grand delusion after another is gradually disappearing, notwithstanding the efforts of certain families that owe the golden opinions which they have acquired in the heraldic world to the preservation of spurious tradition. So was it, not many years since, when the Emperor of the French, intending to do honour to the memory of the good citizen of CalaisSt. Pierre-caused the state archives to be carefully examined, with the view of making assurance doubly sure." The result is well known. It was soon ascertained that the patriot had been in collusion with the English invader, and the episode so affectingly described by historians, proved to have been a capital piece of acting, planned by the parties concerned, to suit their mutual interests. Our novelists of the eighteenth century have given no very flattering account of the energetic, but generally indigent, and too frequently unprincipled, adventurers of the obscurer classes, who, obtaining commissions in the army when it was in a very different condition from what Wellington made it, indulged in that profession most of the vices arising from limited education, and ambition, unsupported by merit. That these writers greatly exaggerated, is scarcely consistent with the popular reception of their works, and many of the heroes of this class have been handed down to our own times, by the pens of Fielding and Smollet, and the pencil of Hogarth, as accepted representatives of the lower grades of officers in those days. Successful government partisans, and stockbrokers, also contributed not a few members towards recruiting what has been called "the landed gentry," and time, with its softening tones, gives a certain dignity to these patriarchs, as we now run over their names, in the pedigrees of their descendants, little caring to scan too inquiringly the lineaments represented by, perhaps, two brief parochial records. After a while, when the family begins to creep into the Church, or raise its head in the Senate, the ingenious dreamer begins to remember having heard from his grandfather of some old pedigree, which mysteriously disappeared many years before. Sometimes the Trophonian echo hints at a supposed extinct baronetcy. Then follow surmises of some unnamed grandee being in "wrongous possession " of the family estate; of a strange traditional eviction from the paternal acres; or it may be that the ancestor was a political exile, who imprudently changed his patronymic, and left his impoverished heirs only the shadow of a mighty name, but, at the same time, a good coffee-plantation or a "drygoods" house in the colonies. Under such circumstances, a bona fide great-grandfather is invaluable; for, by a little management, he may be thrown into the seventeenth cen |