sive of heart, and the Fourth
Estate looked with eyes enlightened, as if you had touched its lips with
a staff dipped in honey,--I have sat with reflections too ghastly to
be uttered. A poor human creature and learned friend, once possessed of
many fine gifts, possessed of intellect, veracity, and manful conviction
on a variety of objects, has he now lost all that;--converted all that
into a glistering phosphorescence which can show itself on the outside;
while within, all is dead, chaotic, dark; a painted sepulchre full of
dead-men's bones! Discernment, knowledge, intellect, in the human sense
of the words, this man has now none. His opinion you do not ask on any
matter: on the _matter_ he has no opinion, judgment, or insight; only
on what may be said about the matter, how it may be argued of, what tune
may be played upon it to enlighten the eyes of the Fourth Estate.

Such a soul, though to the eye he still keeps tumbling about in the
Parliamentary element, and makes "motions," and passes bills, for aught
I know,--are we to define him as a _living_ one, or as a dead? Partridge
the Almanac-Maker, whose "Publications" still regularly appear, is known
to be dead! The dog that was drowned last summer, and that floats up and
down the Thames with ebb and flood ever since,--is it not dead? Alas,
in the hot months, you meet here and there such a floating dog; and at
length, if you often use the river steamers, get to know him by sight.
"There he is again, still astir there in his quasi-stygian element!"
you dejectedly exclaim (perhaps reading your Morning Newspaper at the
moment); and reflect, with a painful oppression of nose and imagination,
on certain completed professors of parliamentary eloquence in modern
times. Dead long since, but _not_ resting; daily doing motions in that
Westminster region still,--daily from Vauxhall to Blackfriars, and
back again; and cannot get away at all! Daily (from Newspaper or river
steamer) you may see him at some point of his fated course, hovering in
the eddies, stranded in the ooze, or rapidly progressing with flood or
ebb; and daily the odor of him is getting more intolerable: daily the
condition of him appeals more tragically to gods and men.

Nature admits no lie; most men profess to be aware of this, but few in
any measure lay it to heart. Except in the departments of mere material
manipulation, it seems to be taken practically as if this grand truth
were merely a polite flourish of