elevates the man, and that production is to humanity

what creation is to nature."

"No, no; that won't do.

None of that. Keep to the labourer-you were good there."

"You are perhaps too narrow-minded for the exercise of the franchise! I wish the men who say this would come down with me to your Mechanics' Institute. I wish they would enter into discussion with some of those intelligent men I met there not more than an hour since. I should like to see their effeminate intellects brought face to face with those great male organisations."

"That's bad; male is Frenchified; say manly."

You mustn't interrupt," said I; "how the devil am I to keep up the steam if you're always 'banking' my fire? I would like, I say, to see these clubnurtured creatures of self-indulgence and indolence confronted for once with the stupendous vigour of our manufacturing population, and compel them to argue out the great question between them in their proper persons. How do we legislate for the working man? I ask; is it with reference to himself, to his wants, his habits, his hopes, or his instincts? or is it simply by a respect for the convenience, the security, and the wealth of him who employs him? If we change an order in the Court of Bankruptcy, we send out a commission to supply us with information

to search out every detail and particle that may serve to guide us in our judgment, and especially are we concerned to know that no servant of the State should be damaged in his fortune without being duly indemnified; but how do we deal with you? We decree the hours you shall labour, and the hours you shall rest; we settle the periods of your toil as though they were the enactments of a penal code; and when the day of repose arrives, we arrest your pleasures, we close to you the few sources of recreation moderate means could compass; we forbid the little excursions that health almost necessitates; and we tell you to sit down and brood over the evil destiny that has made you Englishmen and mechanics!

"Do they like Latin?"

"No; Latin is not quoted in a borough; it will do in the counties and the metropolitan seats, where men cheer it that they may seem to understand it.”

"It's a pity: there's nothing rounds off a speech like something with hominum in it."

Keep it for the House; it's always good there." "And do you really think I shall get there?" "Your return is certain.-Let us order dinner."

"Wait a moment," said I," what about a petition? They sometimes try to smash one's election that way."

"A petition," said he, with a sort of contemptuous irritation in his tone, "never succeeds, but against

a fellow with some small mean scruple, some one

who hesitates, some one who won't go in at once and say, Here I am, ready to swear: what shall it be? Bribe? never bribed. Treated? never treated. Promise? never promised. I stand here perfectly unassailable on the score of all corrupt influence, my first and last declaration to the electors being, 'Gentlemen, if you really desire an independent representative-if you are satisfied to send into Parliament a man unpledged and unfettered, and who is no more capable of endeavouring to exert an unfair influence. over you than he is of submitting to a similar bondage to himself, I shall be proud to serve you; but if the price of my seat were to be one shilling disbursed in corruption, I would refuse it."

"Will a committee believe all this?"

"Not a word of it, but they'll have to swallow it all the same. Nobody can contradict me but myself; let them try and make me, that's all."

"I'm ready for dinner now," said I, " and with a capital appetite.”

A DREAM.

I FELL asleep over the Archbishop of York's Charge, and I dreamed a dream! I suppose that the doctor in Mr Wilkie Collins's story of 'Armadale' could, on interrogating me, easily find a clue to each successive portion of my vision, and plainly demonstrate that there was nothing creative in my imaginingsthat they were, in fact, mere reproductions of ideas which had once before impinged upon my brain.

Now, whoever glances over the broad sheet of the 'Times'-no matter how cursorily or passinglywill in all likelihood have obtained a reason fair for a wide discursiveness in his after thoughts, and the Manx physician would have very little difficulty in tracing any consecutive train of ideas to something between the Australian clipper in the first page and the Church Extension Report in the last.

At all events, I dropped off asleep, my mind

imbued with the solemn picture of York Cathedral, its stillness broken by but one deep-toned voice, so far off in a shadowy aisle as to sound like a mere echoed thunder in a mountain - gorge; and mixed up with this, at minute peals, as it were, came the measured boom of loud artillery.

Mr Collins's doctor would immediately ask if I had not recently been reading the account of the ordnance experiments at Shoeburyness; and I have but to say it is perfectly possible I may, though I can't positively affirm it. My dream was a very confused affair; and all I can pick out of its scattered fragments was, that while standing under the lofty groinings of a stately Gothic cathedral, some one dressed in a cassock, but with a horse - artillery helmet on his head, was explaining to my ignorance the complicated mechanism of an enormous gun. It was, as he informed me, the most perfect piece of casting that had ever come out of a mould; and really, for smoothness, uniformity, solidity, and lustre, it was a marvel to look at. All its mounting, too, was costly and complete; and it was as perfect and as finished as wood and brass could make it.

"This," said he, "is the great cannon of the Established Church, forged at the time of the Reformation out of the scrap-iron of the Church of