derful nor unreasonable; not to say that his great personal interest in all administrations points to that most inscrutable thing, the Admiralty, of whose cruelty he can talk with eloquence, and of whose gross ignorance he discourses with a hearty enthusiasm.

When a great legal authority-a Chief-Justice, I believe once at a Bar dinner responded to the toast of "the Navy" on the plea that he had begun life as a midshipman, Lord Brougham, who had not heard of his colleague's antecedents, attributed his zeal to a mistake, and said he must have thought he was returning thanks for the "Bar," and that navy was spelt with a "K."

I want to part pleasantly from all those generous fellows with whom I have lived of late so happily. I drink to them all health and prosperity, be they iron or wood. They can have no successes, no advancements, no bigger swabs on their shoulders, nor broader lace on their caps, than I wish and hope for them.

P. S.-I have found that my sea-friends are dissatisfied with me for a judgment I once passed on naval whist. They arraign me for its fairness. I now apologise publicly, and own I was wrong.

I have lately played largely with blue-jackets, and am free to declare that I met several who

remembered what was the trump, and only two who revoked, and they belonged to the same ship. Delicacy forbids me to say her name, but it is gratifying to think she will soon be paid off, and out of commission.

THE COMING MEN.

I AM naturally disposed to be hopeful. I have inherited-it was nearly all that came to me in that guise—a sanguine temperament; and it is very rarely that I fail to detect in the inkiest and blackest of skies a patch of blue, even though it be only sufficient to make a coatee for a Prussian policeman.

Simply as a matter of social economy, it is not a bad line to take. The world is stocked with its prophets of evil; there is a positive glut of gloomy fellows. Take any society of twenty people-of course I mean Britons-and you will unquestionably find fifteen, if not more, on the side of our great inferiority to the French, the decline of our literature, the decay of our coal-fields, the decrease of our influence, and a score more of suchlike enlivening reflections.

There is a vast number of people who have not

the vestige of dramatic ability, but who can "get up" the part of Macaulay's New Zealander, sit on London Bridge, and speculate as they view the ruins of St Paul's. The groaners fill the market, and the real opening is for the fellow who sees or fancies he sees that England is not going either to be knouted by the Scythian or whipped by the Yankee-that our ships are not coated with puddled iron, but with a cuirass that will send off French shot like hail upon ice-that we drive a very lively trade in penknives and cotton-prints—and on the whole, if we do not insist on keeping too large fires, and will occasionally burn a little slack, our great-grandchildren may still have enough coal left to warm their tea-kettles.

Let me caution you, however, if you be disposed to adopt this as a career, not to run riot in the seemingly inexhaustible riches of your store. Have

-or appear to have a reason for your hopefulness. It need not be a good reason, nor even a plausible one. Heaven be thanked for it, the world is not very logical; so that when, with a confident look and tone, a man says "Therefore," he has sent conviction in front of him, like a courier to order fresh horses. "Voilà la raison que votre fille est muette," says Sganarelle, the great master of logic and rhetoric too. And are we not stocked with Sganarelles

in our public life? Look at the Church, the Bar, Medicine-not to speak of Parliament, where they

Every Englishman imagines he can argue, just as he believes he can drive a gig; and for this reason he is flattered by being addressed as an argumentative creature. He likes the 'Times' mainly because that journal always appears to appeal to his sound good sense, never belabours him with traditionary balderdash, or bedazzles him with showy subtleties, but bluntly says, "John, is this the sort of thing will suit you? You are neither Frenchman nor Russian do you imagine that you, nourished by beef, invigorated by beer, and elevated by the income-tax, will stand this, that, and t'other?"

'Tis a very humdrum sort of song this; but so is the national melody of "Bobbing John;" and yet that graceful air preserves its place in the popular heart, emblematising at once the attractions of domestic life and our execrable taste in music. Again, then, do I repeat, be hopeful. Very few things are as bad as they seem; and even a bottle of Gladstone at fourteen shillings the dozen is not always fatal.

You will probably tell me it is a strange time to preach hopefulness with cholera in the air, Fenianism and the cattle-rot in the kingdom, not to speak of