man, not remarkably timorous, feeling a certain apprehension on seeing a great city for eight or ten hours in the possession of an immense multitude, whose order and organisation bespoke unity and concert of purpose, but I cannot so easily conceive the irritable legality that was outraged by the man in the cart. The Secretary for Ireland, however, knows better. To his prescient eyes the cloud no bigger than a man's hand is worse than the whole hurricane. It is what the First Napoleon called "the power of the unknown number."

Englishmen are so firmly possessed with the idea that everything in Ireland is absurd, anomalous, and upside-down, that they are ever ready to accept the most ridiculous explanations of whatever occurs there, and to hear a policy defended which, if applied to any other portion of the kingdom, they would scout with indignation. Change the venue, for instance, of these late events, and will any one tell me they would be dealt with in the same fashion?

Men are not permitted to talk of India as people talk of Ireland: the references to national peculiarities and the tendencies of race would not be tolerated if applied to the Bengalee. You would have to apologise to your reader in asking him to credit some practices of the Tonga islanders, which you might tell of Tipperary without prelude or precau

tion; and all this simply because there is a conventional Ireland and a conventional Irishman, to which Cockneydom believes all extravagances are possible. How valuable would it be, then, to know, through the authority of this little book, "What's an Irishman?" Not less instructive would it be to hear What's a Colony? Is a colony an integral part of the nation, inhabited by subjects of the same sovereign that rules the parent state, and bound up with the fortunes of the mother-country? or is a colony a hanger-on of the family, to be helped and assisted when times are prosperous and things go well, but to be turned adrift whenever retrenchment is necessary, and it may be thought prudent" to reduce the establishment"?

The mass of things which want explanation and accurate definition is positively astounding. It was but the other day we saw a trial to establish what was a Christy's Minstrel, which set me a-thinking how puzzling would the same sort of testimony ás was then proffered be if applied to the question, What's a Conservative? Was Lord Palmerston the rightful heir and owner of Peel's "Banjo"? or are the melodies now sung on the Treasury benches the same as those of the old Conservative "Christies"? As to blackness, there is not much to be said—they are pretty like their predecessors.

Again: What's a dramatic performance? Is Mr Vincent Scully, for instance, an actor "within the meaning of the Act"?

Well may Lord Dundreary say that no fellow can possibly know any of these things. It took the whole Privy Council t'other day to determine what a Colonial Bishop was not; but all the collective wisdom of the nation would be sore pushed if they had to declare, in set terms, what a Colonial Bishop was, and is.

For all these reasons, I do entreat some ingenious and active mind to supply the want I have here indicated. The real benefactor of his contemporaries would not be he who arrests Sunday travelling, corks up the beer - bottle, or suppresses the tea-garden, nor even that grander intelligence that suggests a new claim to the franchise; but that more practical spirit who, compassionating the confusion we live in, and seeing the inefficacy of our struggles to comprehend, would come frankly to our aid and teach us What's What" in the year '65.

SWANLIKE GEESE.

THERE is a strange inconsistency which I recognise in my nature, and which, I have no doubt, many others have experienced in their own, and of which I have never been able to arrive at a satisfactory explanation. How is it, I ask, that while one is never contented with his lot in life, always believing that Fate has ill-treated him, he is nevertheless profoundly convinced, that whatever is his is the very best possible thing of its kind that ever was born, hatched, nurtured, fashioned, or formed that, in fact, his geese are not merely swans, but infinitely prettier than his neighbours' swans-whiter, more stately, and more graceful?

Some will perhaps demur to either or both of my propositions. One may tell me that his wellbalanced mind has never known what it was to

feel discontent; and another may say that he has so far pushed his sense of dissatisfaction, that he regards all around him, all that he has and owns, as the worst that ever befell humanity. With such extremes I deal not; I take humanity ex medio acervo, and believe it will be found that the mass is of a temperament like my own.

Now, I am free to own I have no right to be boastful of the possession of a spirit of Christian resignation or philosophic contentedness. It is not in my nature to see that all things have gone as well as possible with me in life; on the contrary, I have, as I think, a whole rookery of "crows to pluck" with Destiny. I cannot persuade myself that I am not a far finer creature than the world will admit,-braver, bolder, wittier, pleasanter, more genial, more forgiving-more fifty other excellent things, in short-than have ever been scored down in the credit side of my account with humanity. If the conviction has not put me out of temper with my fellow-men, it is in a good measure because I ascribed much of this unfairness to envy, and much to ignorance; but still the conviction is there, and whatever other scepticism may torment or tease me, there is one form of it I have never felt. I have never disbelieved in myself. This will show, therefore, that I am not in that happy category of mortals