dest females, and whisper indecencies into their ears, as they walked in family parties to church-to grimace the parsons-to patronize prostitutes, and to employ the Sabbath-day in penning panegyrics on vices which occupied them during the whole week. The devil is in it, thought they, if we do not become distinguished characters. "There goes a Liberal," will every voice exclaim; "how beautiful his yellow breeches!"-" Behold Apollar!" But, O Gemini, what is this? A madness has seized upon the people. Spitting, hissing, hooting, cursing, cuffing, kicking, are the order of the day. King, Condé, and Grandee, are hauled to the horse-pond-goose and gander stand aloof on the green in breathless astonishment, as splash after splash, squash after squash, goes Cockney upon Cockney into the liquid element. Peter Bell's ass, now the property of a Hampstead huckster, brays forth Balaam; a huge Newfoundland dog leaps into the pool with suspicious humanity, and brings out Tims by the nape of the neck, who is instanter spun back by a tall man in the crowd, recognized to be ODoherty. Pygmalion having crawled to the bank, is betrayed by the pimple of his nose, just peering through the mud, to the vengeance of that much-injured tailor, and gets forthwith measured for a suit of mourning. King Leigh is drooping like a water-lily, and weeping like a crocodile, with his hands in the pockets of his yellow-breeches. The inferior rout keep puddling to and fro, undistinguishable from frogs and powheads; and from shore to shore of that small Mediterranean is heard a gurgling croak, that says, or seems to say, "The kingdom of Cockaigne is sunk into the bosom of the mighty deep!"

But, Mr President, to lay aside figure and allegory, I ask you, a wellinformed, tolerably well-behaved member of a Christian community, if ever, throughout the experience of a life, now apparently, from the cut of your jib, verging on threescore, you read, or heard, or dreamt of such an utter and inutterable set of blockheads as these Liberals? Why, at first, they proclaimed of themselves, that they had made up their minds to behave like so many bulls in a china-shop. A stramash was expected. But instead of the Bulls of Bashan, who should make their appearance but a quantity of apes,

moping and mowing, each pushing on the other with his paw on posterior, and the whole array at their wits' end at the novelty of their situation. Instead of going to work forthwith among the porcelain, the apery betook itself to plunder. Hop goes one little bleareyed hero, with scurvy and excoriated hips, and the manifest mark of the chain encircling his neck in blue ruin, into a vase, in search of cheese or a bag of nuts, every now and then grinning over the rim, disappointed in his scrutiny, but delighted, nevertheless, with the originality of his own inventive genius. A bolder baboon, mounting a tripod, clutches a china shepherdess from a shelf, and mumbles her all over with the loathsome slime and slaver of his hideous brute-endearment. The hard-bosomed nymph resists, and the hairy sibyl letting her drop on the floor, hurkles round and round the shivered fragments of his love, in the blind rage of his animal desire, and the dim perplexity of a nature unassisted by reason to distinguish living flesh from the potter's clay. A merrier monkey-a fellow of most rare wit and infinite fancy, rises with a chance looking-glass, and, like Narcissus of old, is desperately enamoured of his own fair proportions. The lovesick youth hangs his head considerably to the one side like a puppy weighed down by the dew, and acts in a manner to attract the decided disapprobation of the secretary to the Society for the Suppression of Vice, accidentally taking a peep into the window. An ouran-outang addicts himself to study, and sits as solemn as Solomon at the Ledger, chewing a piece of Indian-rubber, and tasting a little of the ink, as a liquor hitherto unknown. Meanwhile the main body and both wings are filching-when Messrs English and Co. coming into their shop, employ the moments immediately succeeding their first surprise, in securing Pan, Narcissus, and Solomon. A general hullybaloo pursues the scampering imitation-men on their retreat, most of whom are taken prisoners. Some are sent to Pidcock-a score or two are distributed among the small travelling bear-proprietors-a few fall into the service of elderly virgins at Bath and Cheltenham,-and perhaps from a dozen to twenty go stuffed to the British Museum and Private Collections.

Why, my good sir, it is not the blackguardism of the Cockney-writers that is most offensive to the present, and also every absent company. -I mean, sir, to say, that blackguardism, quâ blackguardism, may not only be tolerated, but enjoyed,-witness the former extensive circulation of the Edinburgh Review, and the present popularity of the preaching of the Reverend Edward Irving. But on being introduced to a blackguard, you surely never expect to see him sitting in a small and rather tidy parlour, on a settee, with pastoral imagery darned all over the back, with yellow cuisses on his thighs, smelling at a nosegay, and perhaps reading at Petrarch. You were not prepared for a display of Miss-Molly-ism, in an advocate for the abolition of the Slave Trade, known by the name of Marriage; a demand for universal suffrage should not be effeminately lisped out with uncertain aspirates; you are unreasonable enough to expect that he who would abolish all public grievances shall not include grammar in the number; in short, you will on no account whatever permit one and the same individual to be at once blackguard and blockhead, a" ne'er-do-weel" and a ninny; bad qualities must not be joined with false quantities; a hardened heart and a soft head are unpardonable; and it is not to be endured to see a Cockney picking his steps to eternal perdition, just as if he were merely going to eat hot muffins at Mother Red-cap's. He who would brave the devil, should not fear to soil his yellow breeches; and we lose all patience with a dapper deist, who talks of Ell as if he had just come out of a bandbox, who, were he ever to go thither, would be as perfectly unintelligible to well-educated people as he had been on earth, and calculated to throw an air of absurdity over the regions of despair. Yes, Mr President, I vow and protest that I am ready, this bless ed moment, to pardon, forgive, overlook, all the wickedness of the Cockneys. I think nothing of it. But never, never can I pardon their monstrous and unnatural stupidity. If they could do any one thing well, confound me but I would ask North to give them a farewell kick or two, and leave them to their own paltry passions. But nothing but bungling! Take a Cockney and start him upon a sonnet.

The pursy fellow has not run three lines, till there he is at a full stop, blowing like a nag in the farcy. Try his rhymes, and he does not know a vowel from a consonant, although surely no two things can be more unlike; watch him narrowly, and you detect his hand in another man's pocket, uniformly stealing trash, and knowing no difference between a grape and a grozet; pale, puffing, swinkt, sweating, sick even to vomiting with hobbling over the flat, he is as badly off at the fag-end of his sonnet, as if he had just descended from an hour at the Tread-mill. Now, Mr President, I maintain that this be a true bill, and that no Cockney can be produced to do a sonnet, which seems to me rarely to exceed fourteen lines, and which, in his case, I am perfectly willing to reduce to eleven, in four hours and a half, with refreshments, allowing a reasonable latitude in rhymes, and not being too severe upon him on the score of grammar, syntax, and so forth, which would prove encumbrances to his speed. I bet Glengarry's kilt to Leigh Hunt's yellow breeches, (the long odds) that such a feat shall not be performed by any native of Cockaigne before the next meeting of Parliament.

Mr President, I am sorry to interrupt you; but, sir, you are fast asleep. Sir, I was observing, that, after all the efforts of the Radicals, of all descriptions, to work mischief, little or none has been done. The people of Great Britain are really most excellent people indeed, and know whom and what to despise. They do not, by any means, like to hear religion abused or sneered at; and all those jokes against parsons, which make the round of the Whig periodical press, laughed at, perhaps, as something very funny, over a horn of ale, leave no favourable impression on the minds of village topers, with regard to the character of the wits. At their own firesides, when their comely wives and their chubby children are by, and the door locked for the night, their thoughts and feelings take another turn; the better part of their nature has the ascendancy, and they look forward to the coming Sabbath with satisfaction. They are uncorrupted by the poison that is worked off with the malt; and if asked their real, sober, serious opinion of the press-gang, they would tell you,

that they were a set of heartless scamps altogether, and strove to cheat poverty out of its contentment. They would rather have a kind visit from their "Parson," than make part of a deputation to wait on some factious freethinker; and if they had a daughter to send out to service, they would rather see her drowned or dead in any honest fashion, than exposed to seduction and desertion in the house of a Patriot and Friend of the people. When they hear that Mr Such-a-one has been hanged, after all his fine harangues, they are noways surprised, but seem prepared for the event, and chuckle at the idea of his execution more heartily than they ever did at his keenest jokes. They know better than any demagogue can tell them what are the real hardships and evils of their condition, and they also know that the power by which they must be endured lies in their own souls. The utter baseness and helpless debility of character exhibited at all times by those who set themselves against religion and social order, escape not their notice; comfort, and quiet, and peace, do, on the whole, fall to the lot of the loyal citizen, while a ragged offspring, a cold hearth, and a famished board, are the concomitants of disaffection and turbulence. No fire makes the pot boil so well as one stirred by the hand of content; and a mechanic will think that fare a luxury which he eats after six hours' labour at the loom, while the reformer growls over his mess of pottage with an appetite poisoned by anger, and forgetful of the hand that feeds him. But, thank God, all is yet sound at the core of the English heart: and the great body of the people know who are their friends and who are their enemies. There is not one man in Britain who does not know that Bristol Hunt is a despicable scoundrel, or would hold a hot potato one moment from his mouth, on receiving sudden intelligence of his being found dead in a jakes.

Now, Mr President, I cannot see much sense in those fine disquisitions which have been served up so plentifully to us of late in magazines, reviews, &c. on the great superiority of the ancient over the modern drama. Put Shakspeare aside, and who are the great old dramatists of this country? Very imperfect workmen, I can assure you. Not one of them all has drawn a single natural character.

The plots of their plays are rarely, if ever, interesting, and no great moral is left stamped upon the heart. They give us bursts of passion, and that is all,-bright images now and then, and occasionally charming versification. But the texture of their works is miserable patch-work; their bombast, fustian, extravagance, exaggeration, and violation of nature, is beyond all bounds-and what is the consequence? Why, that not one of them all, in spite of new editions, dissertations, essays, and critiques, has taken any hold on the English mind. They never had any strong hold upon it, and never will have; for our poetry is now diviner, deeper far; and a play no better than one of Massinger's or Ford's would damn an author for ever to the middle order.

But, Mr President, few subjects are of more importance than the choice of a profession. Shall I make my son a Scotch minister? He is a preacher ; and hangs on from year to year, in hopes of a manse. He is thirty-five years of age, but still he has no manse. At last he is offered a kirk, in a remote, cold, moorish part of the world, with a mean name, as bare of all associations as the pavement of a sunk flat. Stipend small; manse indifferent; glebe scranky; only one gentleman's house in the parish, and that uninhabited. Our Sandy accepts; marries Miss Susie Simpson, somewhere about the middle of seven sisters. Susie, being come of a prolific family, breeds yearly, and even produces twins-gets fat, lazy, and both red and broad in the face, but dresses well, and likes a how-towdy. Now and then a cow dies, and the sheep take the sturdy. Meal is a drug, and the fiars sink like quicksilver in rainy weather. Sons and daughters must be clothed and educated and fed; perhaps about a dozen, and the question is, How is all that to be accomplished? Now, Mr President, considering the very narrow income of the Scottish clergy, do not you think that they should be brought back to celibacy? A bachelor might live and grow fat on a stipend that at present keeps a large family in starvation. I never could see any hardship in celibacy. Take bachelors and married men by the lump, and I verily believe that the former are much better for clergymen, in a country where there are no rich endowments. If young men think it hard to be pre

vented from marrying, let them go into the army, and enjoy the luxury of a wife and four children, attached to a marching regiment; or let the rampant young gentleman go to the bar, and support a family on the salary of a sheriff'ship, or on the princely income of an advocate-depute. A clergyman should have nothing to do but attend to his flock; no married man can do that so regularly and rigorously as a Cœlebs. I defy him-and that is the point at issue. A married clergyman, on a scanty income, may be a good family-man, notwithstanding his many discomforts; but I say that I defy him to write such good sermons as a bachelor, ceteris paribus; he will not even be able to deliver them so well; for who can commit to me mory in a manse crawling with children?

Pardon such light remarks, my dear President, on a serious subject. Sure I am, that they would be taken in good part at a Presbytery dinner, and would give no offence to the excellent and admirable clergy of Scotland. Excellent and admirable clergy indeed; and since my plan is not perhaps soon to be adopted, may their Manse meanwhile swarm with offspring, and the honest howdy be familiar with its white-painted gate. Our ministers are indeed the guardians of national character. Themselves frequently the sons of peasants, they know well the annals of the poor; and methinks that the doctrines of Christianity come with a peculiar grace from the lips of men, who, in their youth, slept in lowly huts, and who, in after life, are separated, even in condition, by no high barriers from the humble ones of the earth. They know more than their brethren around; they have seen something of the character and spirit of stirring life, without having their feelings deadened, or hardened, or frittered away by much participation in its ambitious concerns. The meek and simple religion which they teach, brings them back willingly, and with pleasure, to the joys and sorrows of the poor man's lot; and from the pulpit they see the narrow pew in which they sat when children; and now and then have a vision of the grey head, gone down into the grave, that used, in other days, to be turned reverentially towards the preacher of the word. Their ordinary pursuits in the week-day world, partake of the quiet and con

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tented spirit, that, with such limitation as human infirmities impose, prevails over the peasantry of our land. Blameless mirth, wit without gall, fancy that sheds a cheerful light over meetings assembled even for sacred purposes, humour that plays and dallies with the harmless oddities and contrasted temperaments of men all zealous in the good cause; the joke, the jest, and the jibe, free from all ribaldry, and the pungent anecdote that will bear repetition a thousand times, because speaking to the experience and illustrative of the heart. Where can all these be found more fresh, vigorous, and racy, than among the ministers of our establishment?

It has been asked, what they have done in science, in philosophy, in history, in poetry? Much in all. But it is not their business-it is not their duty to strive or to excel in such things. Let each clergyman take care of his parish; and if he does so, it is all that man can require of him, or need be recorded on his tomb-stone. Eminent, distinguished, illustrious, immortal names, according to the judgment of this world, are not wanting in the annals of the Scottish church; but hundreds of men, greater than they, have gone to their graves with perishable and forgotten names, although their voices were heard only by a small congregation, and the sphere of their usefulness was but a parish with two or three glens and pastoral hill-sides, that shone at night with cottage-hearths like a

few sprinkled stars. Let the sense, the moderation, the intelligence, and the piety of our peasantry, speak for their pastors, both the dead and the living, and let those who may be disposed to overrate both the magnitude and the influence of their own attainments in the various departments of human knowledge, consider what would have been the country which they now dignify and adorn, without the men who, for centuries, have ministered at the humble altars of our national faith, and have so long preserved, by doctrine, precept, and example, that moral and religious spirit, without which the prosperity of a country is hollow, and all her knowledge unable either to enlighten or elevate. Religion, not philosophy, has made us, as a people, what we are; and, with all our defects, faults, vices, and sins, we possess much that true science could not give, nor false take away; something too high for the