gentlemen," move for leave to bring them in. But it is not the appalling sum total that I regard. It is the mizzling insignificant items, the heart-breaking fractions, the endless subdivisions of misery, that provoke me. It is as if one were condemned to be blown up with a mass of gunpowder, and at the same time to feel the separate explosion of every grain.

Few of those pestilential vehicles called long coaches infest our roads at present; but when I was a young traveller, they were frequent, especially on the northern stages. Their external semblance was that of a hearse, and their inward accommodations might vie with those of a slave ship. An incontinent vestal might have rehearsed her living inhumation in one of them. They carried ten inside! Authors, children, and dandies, were only counted as fractions; and Daniel Lambert himself would only have been considered as an unit. Their pace was intolerably slow; their stages long; their drivers thirsty; and ale-houses innumerable. It is difficult to conceive what a variety of distress they sometimes contained. I remember a journey in one of them,— I think it was between Lancaster and Manchester, perhaps the dullest road in England,-which beat the miseries of human life hollow. It was during the high fever of trade, and just after the summer holidays. I was then a minim, and counted as nobody. Three youths, returning "unwillingly to school," with all their consolatory store of half-eaten apples and gingerbread, and with looks that indicated a woeful neglect of regimen during the vacation,

composed one passenger. The landlady of the Swan inn, in bulk a Falstaff, and clothed like the Gravedigger, ditto; (bearing a brandy-bottle, which, with most importunate civility, she proffered to the company, in spite of repeated and sincere refusals;) a consumptive gentleman, who supplied his lack of natural dimension by a huge box-coat; a sick lady, with her son, (who, by the way, was very disagreeably affected by the motion of the carriage,) her sister, and a lap-dog a strong ministerialist of eighteen stone; and an equally violent, and almost equally bulky, partizan of opposition; (neither of these worthies was perfectly sober, and their vociferation was such as to drown every other sound, except the complaints of the sick lady, and the occasional yelping of the lapdog;) a very smart, yet innocent-looking young woman, who was sadly pestered with the coarse gallantry of a middle-aged manufacturer of cotton; there was also a very prim and self-complacent young gentleman, who seemed to value himself much on his acute sense of the disagreeable, and not less on a peculiar delicate mode of swearing, mincing and clipping his oaths till they were almost softened into nonsense▬▬

Such were the intestines: the roof and box were proportionably loaded. There was some little danger of breaking down, and no little fear of it. Every jolt produced a scream from the sick lady, a yelp from the lap-dog, an oath from the young gentleman, and a nauseous jest, or a vulgar proffer of service to the females, from the cotton-manufacturer. Against this chaos of discords we had to balance the momentary

interruption of the political jangle, and a shriek in exchange for the customary groans of the landlady.

Scenes of this kind are particularly distressing to children; confinement and the want of fresh air are themselves sufficiently painful to them, and they seldom possess the faculty of deriving amusement from inconveniences. But all the troubles of our progress were nothing to the intolerable stopping. All conversation, even that of the politicians, ceased instantly. Sigh answered sigh, and groans were heard in all the notes of the gamut. The very horses seemed to sympathise with the feelings of the passengers, by various inarticulate sounds expressing, not, indeed, impatience to be gone, but uneasiness at staying. It was a hopeless condition. Every face was a glass, in which one might perceive the lengthening of one's own. For the last stage, a dozing silence prevailed, which made me almost wish for noise again. Anything to drown the rumble of the wheels, and the perpetual and unavailing crack of the whip, which was applied unmercifully, and, as it were, mechanically, without the smallest acceleration.

I am not sure whether these machines have not been put down by the legislature. Would that the same august body would exercise their authority upon long speeches as well as on long coaches, and be as careful of the national time as of the bones of His Majesty's locomotive subjects. Oh! that the value of brevity were understood within the walls of St. Stephen's! I never cast an eye on the close

printed columns of a paper, without being transported by imagination into the Speaker's chair. (I had rather be transported to Botany Bay.) How anxiously must that model of enforced patience keep watch for some irregularity! and with what joy must he seize the opportunity of crying Order! How sweet to his ears must be the sound of his own voice, thus coupled with the sense of authority!

A long debate is, to me, like a long story, of which I know the conclusion before it is begun. To read or listen to it is as tedious as to play a game which you are sure of losing, or to fight for your life when you know that, in case of defeat or victory, it is alike forfeited. The catastrophe of every discussion may be so clearly foreseen, and the very arguments, and almost the very metaphors of each member, so easily anticipated, that it is a cruel oppression to force a man to thread the intricate mazes of eloquence, in order to arrive at a point to which a hop, step, and jump, may carry him. I proposed to speak briefly of brevity, and, lo! I have produced a long discourse upon length. I intended to show that lovely things are brief, and I have digressed into an exposition of the unloveliness of lengthiness. Lest I should utterly belie my title, I will even conclude here.

TOM THUMB THE GREAT.

ATRABILIOUS REFLECTIONS UPON

MELANCHOLY.

"PERFECT melancholy," says honest Ben, "is the complexion of the ass." I have heard it asserted that the observation is no longer applicable. This is certainly a broad grinning age. A grave face is no longer the frontispiece to the apocryphal book of wisdom. Gravity is laughed out of countenance.-But melancholy is not the fashion of an age, nor the whim of an individual-it is the universal humour of mankind— so far, indeed, I differ from Ben Jonson (whose memory may Heaven preserve from editorial spite, and editorial adulation!) inasmuch as I think that melancholy is a passion properly and exclusively human. The ass and the owl are solemn, the cat is demure, the savage is serious, but only the cultivated man is melancholy. Perhaps the fallen spirits may partake of this disposition. So Ben would imply by the title of his comedy, called, "The Devil is an Ass," and if, as hath been more plausibly affirmed, the devil be a great humourist, then he must needs be melancholy-for whatever tends to laughter (unless it be mere fun) proceeds from that complexion.

Melancholy can scarce exist in an undegraded spirit-it cannot exist in a mere animal. It is the