alise what they can imagine, and whilst music comes to them

"Like ocean which upon the moonlight shores

Of lone Sigæum steals with murmuring noise,"

they must take down the common sense of common men: such is their cruel fate. And now one word about our companions. Most of them are young men; some are in their prime. None of them are old: old reporters are only met with where dead donkeys and departed postboys are common. At any rate they are not engaged on the morning papers. The late hours, the hard stretch of mind and body required in a reporter, do not exactly suit old men. If you think reporting easy, my good Sir, you are mistaken. It takes you two or three years to master short-hand sufficiently to take your place as a reporter in the gallery. When you have done that, you will find that you do not get your money for nothing, I can assure you. You must for half an hour take down all you can hear. You must then copy that out into long-hand and. plain English as best you can. You must then come back into the House, and take another turn; and so on till the House is up; and then, worn and weary, you must again trudge to the office, and there indite the copy, which, before the ink with which it is written is dry, is in the composingroom and in type. As this may detain you till four o'clock in the morning, you are then at liberty to retire to your bed, if it suit you; or to the flowers and early purl of Covent Garden, if it be summer-time, and you are of a sentimental turn. Now, occasionally it is all very well to sit up till three or four in the morning. London then is invested with a grandeur and stillness very impressive. The air is fresh and pure, bearing with it the odours of the country; the grand cathedral of St. Paul looms proudly before you; the streets seem broader, longer, than usual, and far off we catch glimpses of Hampstead or of the Surrey hills. But when you have to see this, not once, but every morning, the case is altered, the spell is broken, and the charm is gone; and such a life must tell, sooner or later,

upon the constitution. Reporters are not rosy jolly men: they do not look like Barry Cornwall's happy squires,

"With brains made clear

By the irresistible strength of beer."

Most of them live well, and are protected against the inclemencies of the weather. The reporters of the "Daily News" and "Times" come down in cabs; but they appear delicate hothouse plants; though, after all, they do not look worse than a popular M.P., such as Lord Dudley Stuart or Mr. Milner Gibson, at the end of a session. As a class, we have already hinted the reporters are intellectual men. Among them are many who have embraced literature as the noblest of all professions, and have as sacredly devoted themselves to it as, in old times, priests did to the service of their gods. You can tell these by their youthful flush and lofty foreheads. A time may come when the world may seduce them from the service, when all generous aspirations may fade away, when crushing selfishness shall make them common as other men. Then there are others to whom reporting is a mere mechanical calling, and nothing else; who do their week's work and take their week's wages, and are satisfied. But most of the Parliamentary reporters are clever men, and all aspire to that character. The mistake is one a little self-love will easily induce a man to make. Men of infinite wit and spirit have been in the gallery: therefore, the men in the gallery now are men of infinite wit and spirit. A gorgeous superiority over other men is thus tacitly assumed. You will hear of such a one, that he was a reporter on the "Times," and he was not clever enough for that, and so they made him an M.P. But, after all, no man of great genius will report long, if he can help it. Reporting is terrible drudgery. A man who can write his thoughts well will not willingly spend his time in copying out the thoughts of others. Dickens was a reporter for the "Morning Chronicle;" but he, though his talent in that way was great, though he could perform almost unparalleled feats as a reporter, soon left the gallery. At one time Angus Reach was in the gallery. There, night after night, may you still

see that rising novelist, Shirley Brooks. For a literary man, reporting is a capital crutch. He is well paid, and it often leads to something else. The "Times' " reporters are divided into three classes, none of whom get less than seven guineas a week. The other papers do not pay quite so well; but a literary man, if he be in earnest, can live on less than that till the day comes when the world owns him and he becomes great: and if his dream of fancied greatness be but a dream, if hope never realise the flattering tale she at one time told, still he has a means of respectable livelihood, and may rise from a reporter into an editor. Mr. James Grant, editor of the "Morning Advertiser," was at one time reporter for that paper. In some cases the ambition of the reporter does not end quite so successfully. Only recently a reporter for one of the morning papers contested an Irish borough. Unfortunately, instead of being returned, the ambitious youth was thrown into gaol for an insignificant tavern-bill of merely £250 for eleven days. What cruelty! What talent, what hope, what failure have there not been in the Reporters' Gallery? And those who know it, if they wanted, could find abundance of material there with which "To point a moral or adorn a tale."

-Slightly abridged from Tait's.

"ST. JAMES'S VOW."

THE "pious fraud" in which originated a very productive tax on a considerable part of Spain, and which was levied until the year 1812 or 1813, is related by the Spanish historians, whose records we condense, compress, copy, or pass over, as they may deserve.

An old King of Leon, Ramiro I., challenged by the Moorish King, Abderrahman, to pay him a tribute of a hundred Spanish damsels, brought out to battle the whole strength of his kingdom, and suffered a terrible defeat. Night closed the shock of arms. The remnants of his host rallied as well as they could; and, after throwing up a temporary fortification in the wilderness, gave heed to the wounded, and spent their days in lamentation. One night Don

shuts him up in prison by order of the Governor of Tunis, the highest authority in the Regency, next to the Bey himself. A messenger brought me the painful intelligence about two o'clock, just at the moment we were preparing for dinner. I immediately went to see him, and inquire into the cause of his imprisonment. Having informed myself by whom and wherefore he was committed to prison, I called on the Lieutenant-Governor, whom I found squatted on a stone bench, and surrounded by other officers, before the principal entrance of the house or building where the prisons are, and where the Governor administers justice. There are three prisons in the building. The one for females is upstairs, and of course inaccessible to males. The others are on the first floor. That for the Mohammedans is a large square room, with smaller ones opening into it, in a most filthy condition, and teeming with beings of all ages, in an awful state of misery and wretchedness. The Jewish prison consists of two small low-roofed rooms, about sixteen feet square each, and opening into each other. The inner one was covered with a common mat, the property, no doubt, of some of the prisoners; for the Government does not supply the prisons with any article whatever. The prisoners must look to their relatives and friends, if they have any, not only for the supply of bedding, &c., but also for food. Those who are too poor, are provided with a small loaf of the coarsest bread daily. The other room was full of indescribable filth. The smell or effluvia that both prisons emit is really insupportable. They admit light and air through a couple of grated windows in each prison; those of the Moorish prison opening into an arched passage that leads to them. Many unfortunate Moors had their feet fastened with heavy chains; others were dragging themselves with heavy irons with which their feet were loaded. These are not intended for security, (they are secure enough without them,) but to increase their misery and suffering. There were nine Jews, besides the distressed youth, in prison. The Governor's Lieutenant said he could do nothing in the matter, as the youth had not been imprisoned by his authority; but he proposed to introduce me to the Governor, and to him we

went. He was by himself, seated on a divan, in a large hall upstairs: a few officers were in the opposite or roofless hall. I claimed the youth as my domestic; for it is under that character that I received him into the house, chiefly for the sake of protection. But he dismissed me in a summary way, saying that his father imprisoned him, to whom I should go and settle the matter! This I thought a very strange delegation of authority; but I was afterwards informed that, by the established laws of this Regency, a father may, at will, and without assigning any particular reason, shut up any of his sons or daughters in prison, for as long a time as he may please; and even cause them to receive as many hundred bastinadoes as he may pay for to those whose duty it is to inflict them, no matter what the age or position of the son may be!

What, then, was I to do for the poor distressed youth? I felt so discouraged and cast down. For really what hope could there remain of rescuing souls from the thraldom of Judaism, superstition, and error, if they may be thus snatched away, imprisoned, or even bastinadoed, by their parents, relatives, or the Rabbies? These last should be dreaded most, as they generally act with the greatest severity and cruelty in such cases. What am I to do against such unlimited authority? What a terrible blow, I thought, this would be to my feeble influence! What a barrier to future intercourse with the people! Who would be the youth, or Jew, that would afterwards dare, with such an example before his eyes, visit me, read my books, or listen to my message? You may imagine, better than I can describe, all I felt at the moment. I called on an influential friend, who is, from his long residence in this Regency, well acquainted with the laws, to consult with him as to what I should do next; for I was determined not to appeal to any other authority than the Moorish. He advised me not to interfere any further in the matter, nor even visit the prison again. He thought that all my efforts would prove useless, that they would be frustrated, and probably only result in the adoption of more rigorous measures to coerce the unfortunate youth to yield to the wishes of his family; that,