that the elective franchise is a matter of chartered right-an assumption not only not founded on, but at variance with all, law. Sir Charles Wetherell has asserted, that Lord John Russell's Bill has, in this respect, no parallel in history, but in the quo warranto proceedings of James II. James deprived corporations of their municipal rights for the purpose of oppressing the people; the Bill takes from the corporations their exclusive elective privileges for the purpose of relieving the people from oppression; the one perpetrated a particular crime with a view to establish a wholesale system of iniquity, the other proposes to suppress a particular abuse, with a view to effect a general good; the one acted against law, and in spite of it; the other acts by law and subservient to it; and yet we are told the cases are precisely analogous! It is not unworthy of notice, that out of the sixty condemned boroughs, only twenty-five are corpo. rate. Sir Charles has gone farther: he has we will not say soberly-charged the members of those corporations that have petitioned the House of Commons in favour of the bill, with perjury! because, having sworn to support their lawful privileges, they are ready to surrender them to an act of parliament. Such a confusion of ideas calls for pity rather than censure.

The disfranchisement of the voters of the sixty boroughs has been grievously lamented. Why should they suffer, doing no wrong? Sir Robert Peel was very pathetic on this: if he had put the same question with respect to the patrons of those voters, there would have been some show of reason in it. What voters are deprived of their rights? Nominally, the disfranchised boroughs contain 4,300 electors; but really, with the exception of Okehampton, Hedon, and Queenborough, which are open to money, the whole sixty contain just as many voters as they have owners, that is, fifty-nine individuals. Twenty of them have not been polled in the memory of man; those that have been polled, during the last thirty years, have been so in order to settle the disputed rights of their masters, by the trial of contested votes. We might as well talk of the right of the Duke of Newcastle's valet to brush his master's inexpressibles, as of the rights of the seventy nominal electors of Boroughbridge.

We need not reply to the arguments against the uniformity of suffrage, nor the destruction of mercantile and monied influence, for these have been fully met by the opponents of the measure, several of whom have contended that the new system will be as full of anomalies as the old; and that, instead of putting down bribery, it will augment it. We may admit that Lord John may blow hot and cold, but must demur to the doctrine that he can do both at the same time.

Many members have argued against the proposed change, because it is impossible to say it will be the last. In the course of the next ten or twelve thousand years, if the world last so long, we think it not only possible but probable, that the House of Commons will be altered a hundred times. To resist evil in limine, is a very good rule, but these lovers of fixity would have us resist change as change, without consideration of its consequences. It is not wonderful to find men behind their generation, who are thus intent on standing still, while all the rest of the world are moving.

In the early part of the discussion on the Bill, it was sturdily maintained that the people would not have it; that it would be as little acceptable out of doors as it was presumed to be in the House. The hundreds of petitions since presented, all praying for the Bill, and nothing but the Bill, have given the best answer to this.

There have been various objections of a more miscellaneous character made by more than one member, but they are of minor importance. Mr. Tyrrell, who represents the calves of Essex, and professes to utter the voice of his constituents, has impressed on the House, at great length, that reform should not be granted, because reform of Parliament is not a reduction of taxation. Mr. Tyrrell is evidently a man of discrimination, and can tell "a hawk from a hand-saw, when the wind is southerly." Should old Father Thames receive a Swing letter one of these dropping mornings, threatening to burn him in his bed, Captain Richbell will know at once where to lay his hand on the offender; the member for Essex is evidently quite capable of planning such an act of incendiarism. On the whole, we conclude the Bill must stand, for the plain reason that there is nothing to knock it down. The bullets hitherto discharged against it are too light to shake it, even had the assailants not aimed pretty fairly at both sides, and thus served, so far as such weak ministers could, to support what they foolishly thought to overturn.

Since the above hasty remarks were written, on the greatest and most important measure ever submitted to the consideration of Englishmen, the Bill has been read a second time by a majority of 1, the numbers being, including tellers, for the second reading 304, against 303. Sir Richard Vyvyan moved the amendment. Sir Richard would fain be thought another Jack the Giant Killer-he would be-

"the little Cornishman,

Who slew the monster Cormelan."

;

But his sword of sharpness is a harlequin's lathe, stolen from Sir Charles Wetherell ; his shoes of swiftness are a pair of worn-out gouty slippers filched from Lord Eldon his coat of darkness is borrowed from Mr. Spencer Perceval, more holy than godly. A dissolution will give the ministry 50 members, and take 50 from the people's enemies and theirs; the Bill is in fact carried by 101.

MIDNIGHT AND MOONSHINE.

A FRAGMENT.

O GOD! this is a holy hour!
Thy breath is o'er the land;
I feel it in each little flower

Around me where I stand;
In all the moonshine scattered fair,
Above, below me, every where;
In every dew-bead glistening sheen,
In every leaf and blade of green,
And in this silence grand and deep,
Wherein thy blessed creatures sleep.
The trees send forth their shadows long
In gambols o'er the earth,
Chasing each other's innocence

In quiet and holy mirth.

O'er the glad meadows fast they throng,
Shapes multiform and tall;

And lo! for them the chaste moonbeam,
With broadest light, doth fall.

Mad phantoms all they onward glide,
On swiftest wind they seem to ride,

O'er meadow, mount, and stream;

And now, with soft and silent pace,
They walk as in a dream,

While each bright earth-flower hides its face
Of blushes, in their dim embrace.

Men tell how in this midnight hour
That disembodied souls have power
To wander as it liketh them,
By wizard oak and fairy stream,
Through still and solemn places,
And by old walls and tombs, to dream,
With pale cold mournful faces.

I fear them not; for they must be
Spirits of kindest sympathy,

Who choose such haun's, and joy to feel

The beauties of this calm night steal

Like music o'er them, while they woo'd
The luxury of Solitude.

COLLOQUIAL DICTIONARY,

OR CYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIAL INTERCOURSE AND ORDINARY LIFE.

THE object and general character of this Compilation from the best English and Foreign sources, will be sufficiently explained by specifying that it is intended for the benefit of those who have a taste for such conversation as befits rational and responsible creatures; who, even in their hours of relaxation, feel that they have minds to be entertained, as well as bodies to be fed and rested; and who know that the one is perfectly compatible with every innocent indulgence of the other. It excludes, in short, those only who find no conversation pleasant or interesting, but such as refers to the gratifications they have in common with the brutes. But if we are to name any one description of persons whom we had especially in view, it would be those who, called to the duties of business and active industry at too early a period of life to have received a finished or classical education, had learned to appreciate both the pleasure and the solid advantages to be derived from a taste for reading, and the gradual addition of a respectables tock of general information to their professional and indispensable acquirements. For such persons-and it is the honour and blessing of the country and of the present age, that we must count them by thousands!-for such persons the information which may be found in books has a double value. For their acquaintance with active life, and the necessity of seeing things as they actually are, and not as a benevolent theorist might fancy and represent the world, enable and predispose them to compare what they read with what they have themselves seen and known. The contrast between bookish and practical men, is yearly superannuating. All knowledge, of all kinds and purposes, from the manipulations of the artizan, to the working the machine of an empire, is now communicated in print. A book is a conversation, the number of the hearers of which is determined, not by the size of the room, or the advantages of the site, or the comparative circle of the speaker's acquaintances, but by the value and attractiveness of the conversation itself.

The widest experience which the most favourably schooled individual can acquire, if he had availed himself of no other means of information, would leave him sadly in the rear, and rather tend to engender positiveness, self-sufficiency, and a narrow mind. Nevertheless, personal experience is of inestimable worth, as the test and filter of the information supplied by the press. We may even call it the digestive organ, through which the individual, out of the total mass, separates, takes up, and converts to his own proper life and functions whatever is for him nutricious and congenial. The chief obstacle in the way of the persons whom we are here contemplating, lies in the multitude and dispersion of the works supplying the information which is or may be required, and the removal of this obstacle is one of the main objects of our Cyclopædia.

With regard to the contents, although it is neither possible nor desirable expressly to divide the one kind from the other, they may be conveniently described under two heads:

Whatever a person placed in intelligent society would feel himself uncomfortable by not knowing,-so far at least, as would enable him to take an interest in the subject; whatever is requisite to make him feel at ease in the companies to which his choice may lead, and his rank and means entitle him, from a consciousness that entire ignorance on such points may be construed as the mark of low breeding, or a proof at least that the man had taken no pains to bring himself up to a level with his circumstances.

Brief details of remarkable institutions, persons, events, and places, some knowledge of which is necessary or aidant for the perfect comprehension of the domestic and foreign history of the month; biographical notices, at greater length, of distinguished foreigners; the great outlines and general results of the sciences and scientific arts; in short, all the points of information which the foregoing remarks have loosely but sufficiently characterized—so worded and so arranged as to be easily acquired, and readily referred to, may be classed as forming the first head, or kind; while in the second we comprise all subjects of frequent occurrence in society, or calculated to become topics of conversation in mixed parties-theatres, menageries, exhibitions, mendicæ, mimæ, balatrones, hoc genus omne.