s may approve; let church and state, law and
physic, commerce and agriculture, the arts of war, and the arts of
peace, all listen and obey, and all will be made perfect. Has not Tom
Towers an all-seeing eye? From the diggings of Australia to those of
California, right round the habitable globe, does he not know, watch,
and chronicle the doings of everyone? From a bishopric in New Zealand
to an unfortunate director of a North-west passage, is he not the only
fit judge of capability? From the sewers of London to the Central
Railway of India,--from the palaces of St Petersburg to the cabins of
Connaught, nothing can escape him. Britons have but to read, to obey,
and be blessed. None but the fools doubt the wisdom of _The Jupiter_;
none but the mad dispute its facts.

No established religion has ever been without its unbelievers, even
in the country where it is the most firmly fixed; no creed has been
without scoffers; no church has so prospered as to free itself
entirely from dissent. There are those who doubt _The Jupiter_!
They live and breathe the upper air, walking here unscathed, though
scorned,--men, born of British mothers and nursed on English milk, who
scruple not to say that Mount Olympus has its price, that Tom Towers
can be bought for gold!

Such is Mount Olympus, the mouthpiece of all the wisdom of this great
country. It may probably be said that no place in this 19th century
is more worthy of notice. No treasury mandate armed with the
signatures of all the government has half the power of one of those
broad sheets, which fly forth from hence so abundantly, armed with no
signature at all.

Some great man, some mighty peer,--we'll say a noble duke,--retires to
rest feared and honoured by all his countrymen,--fearless himself; if
not a good man, at any rate a mighty man,--too mighty to care much
what men may say about his want of virtue. He rises in the morning
degraded, mean, and miserable; an object of men's scorn, anxious only
to retire as quickly as may be to some German obscurity, some unseen
Italian privacy, or indeed, anywhere out of sight. What has made this
awful change? what has so afflicted him? An article has appeared in
_The Jupiter_; some fifty lines of a narrow column have destroyed all
his grace's equanimity, and banished him for ever from the world.
No man knows who wrote the bitter words; the clubs talk confusedly of
the matter, whispering to each other this and that name; while