professions. Would the "most distinguished counsel" ever have a brief
were he to scorn to employ the powers God has given him to obtain
impunity for the man whose heart's life has become polluted with crime
beyond the power of reform. Many a statesman has to thank a similar
laxity of conscience for his place and power.

CHAPTER XI.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED.

I am not in the best of humours. The wind and weather of the last few
months have been bad enough to vex the temper and destroy the patience of
a saint. I wish the papers would write a little more about reforms at
home, and not trouble themselves about the Emperor of the French. I wish
country gentlemen, when airing their vocabularies at agricultural
dinners, would not talk so much of our friends across the water being
desirous to avenge the disgrace of Waterloo, as if there were any
disgrace to France, after having been a match, single-handed, for all
Europe for a generation, in being compelled to succumb at last. I wish
we could be content with trading with China, without sending ambassadors
to Pekin, and endeavouring by fair means or foul to make that ancient
city, as regards red-tapeism and diplomatic quarrels, as great a nuisance
as Constantinople is now. I wish Mr. George Augustus Sala, with that
wonderful talent of his for imitating Dickens and Thackeray, would quite
forget there was such gentlemen in the world, and write independently of
them. And I wish the little essayists, who copy Mr. George Augustus
Sala, and are so very smart and facetious by his aid, would either swim
without corks, or not swim at all. Thank heaven, none of them are
permanent, and most of them speedily sink down into limbo. Where are the
gaudily-covered miscellanies, and other light productions of this class?
if not dead, why on every second-hand book-stall in London, in vain
seeking a sale at half-price, and dear at the money. But the spirit of
which they are the symptom, of which they are the outward and visible
sign, lives. Directly you take up one of these books, you know what is
coming. But after all, why quarrel with these butterflies, who, at any
rate, have a good conceit of themselves, if they have but a poor opinion
of others? Fontaine tells of a motherly crab, who exclaimed against the
obliquity of her daughter's gait, and asked whether she could not walk
straight. The young crab pleaded, very reasonably, the similarity of her
parent's manner of ste