to good manners. It is an unsound homage, if you will, but it is still homage, and it would be ill policy to ignore or to reject it.

It takes a long time for the higher graces that adorn a people to filter down to the lower strata of society, but we may see the process going on any day amongst us. Civilisation is now permeating masses in England whose compact insensibility would at one time have seemed to defy all transit. Why should not the Church aid this process, even by an assistance not enjoined by the rubric? Good taste is, I am aware, not the great standard to appeal to ; but why not take it as a mezzo termine? A people brutalised by low habits and corrupt ways are not very accessible to scriptural admonition. Why not elevate them out of this, and raise them to a level in which higher and nobler appeals will be listened to? Washing a man's hands may not give him an appetite for his dinner, but it will certainly better prepare him to enjoy his meal.

The medieval monks recovered all the prestige that the Church had lost, by devoting themselves to the arts which advance civilisation; and they threw off, besides, the reproach that rash men had been too prone to make, as to priests being essentially lazy and indolent, doing little for themselves, and even less for their neighbours.

The taunt ceased to apply when men saw that these same monks knew more of art, more of literature, were better agriculturists, better craftsmen than all the laity, and that, when the work of life went busily on, with its wars and disputes, its toils, its ambitions, and its jarrings, it was no small privilege to have a class who stood aloof from these passing interests, and whose function it was to link past and future so together, that whatever men had done in bygone days for the betterment of their fellows should not be lost or forgotten, but held as a precious treasure to be transmitted to all posterity.

Might not the lesson they then gave the world be worth remembering now?

ON ELECTIONEERING.

I HAVE often "ambitioned the acquaintance," to employ a French formulary for what I do not desire to affirm with great positiveness, of those people who, from conscientious motives, remit five or fifty pounds to the Chancellor of the Exchequer as a relief to the cravings of an irritable integrity. I do not mean to say that I have any strong desire to become their intimate or their associate. I feel myself too immeasurably their inferior for such a wish to be possible; but in my pursuit of strange humanities I would really be glad to see these people to mark their lineaments, hear their words, and ponder over their general characteristics.

In the same way, but in a diminished degree, I should like to meet the man who writes these letters that we daily read to the constituency of this county or that borough, duly setting forth what the candi

date's principles are, whether implied in the formula -we are very well as we are-we might be better -or, we can't be worse.

That it is one individual man writes these marvellous compositions, is a fact so clear and palpable it requires no demonstration. There is a charming simplicity in the style, with that small dash of complication which is the necessary ingredient of a certain evasiveness. Let the candidate be ever so wary and ever so wise, his prononciamento must still be, in a great measure, a leap in the dark. There are things will be inquired of him which he cannot possibly answer, and pledges exacted which, if he be only true to his word, will reduce him to an amount of insignificancy positively pitiable. To meet these great difficulties, his address must be written by one long conversant with human frailty as displayed in the electoral system of this great country. He must, in fact, apply to that great genius who knows how to promise without making performance necessary-who can so jostle one set of ideas against another, so balance something here by something there, so adjust this by redressing that-that the British constitution may be made to resemble one of those phrenological heads, in which every quality is arrested in its action by some antagonistic development, and all that is good

or bad in the individual finds its complement in something which makes it a matter of perfect indifference that it was there at all.

To be able to satisfy a modern constituency, a man very soon learns, is a downright impossibility. The cry of Give, give, can scarcely be answered by one who, to be able to give, must sit beside men who have responsibilities as well as salaries. The candidate therefore is driven either to accept pledges which make his position in the House totally valueless, or he must practise some game of tricky evasiveness that may enable him to talk one way and vote another.

Now, in the old days of bribery and corruption-I do not mean the pre-Sarumite days, but in that more recent period preceding our last enactments against the buying of votes-men usually went down to the country amply stocked with five-pound notes. Canvass and corruption became convertible terms, and the voter regarded the franchise as a privilege that could at will be demanded in gold. The candidate probably approached the electors with a feeling that a considerable number of them had no other interest in the contest than their own benefit. Some, of course, took a more elevated view, and preferred being bribed by the men with whose political leanings they concurred, and liked to have their pockets filled, and