le-and-mortar apprentices, who, until February next, are to sit
cross-legged and try to think, there are at least six hundred and thirty
unemployed members of the House of Commons, turned upon the world with
nothing, poor fellows! but grouse before them. Some, to be sure, may pick
their teeth, in the Gardens of the Tuileries--some may even now venture to
exercise their favourite elbow at Baden-Baden,--but with every possible
and probable exception, there will yet be hundreds of unemployed
law-makers, to whom time will be a heavy porter's burden.

We have a plan which, for its originality, should draw down upon us the
gratitude of the nation. It is no other than this: to make all Members of
Parliament, for once in their lives at least, useful. The masons, hired to
build the new temples of Parliament, have struck. The hard-handed
ingrates,--let them go! We propose that, during the prorogation at least,
Members of Parliament, should, like beavers, build their own Houses. In a
word, every member elected to a seat in Parliament should be compelled,
like Robinson Crusoe, to make his own furniture before he could sit down
upon it.

Have we not a hundred examples of the peculiar fitness of the task, in the
habits of what in our human arrogance we call the lower animals? There is
many a respectable spider who would justly feel himself calumniated by any
comparison between him and any one of twenty Parliamentary lawyers we
_could_ name; yet the spider spins its own web, and seeks its own nook of
refuge from the Reform Broom of Molly the housemaid. And then, the tiny
insect, the ant--that living, silent monitor to unregarding men--doth it
not make its own galleries, build with toilsome art its own abiding place?
Does not the mole scratch its own chamber--the carrion kite build its own
nest! Shall cuckoos and Members of Parliament alone be lodged at others'
pains?

Consider the wasp, oh, STANLEY! mark its nest of paper.--(it is said, on
wasp's paper you are wont to write your thoughts on Ireland)--and
resolutely seize a trowel!

Look to the bee, oh, COLONEL SIBTHORP! See how it elaborates its virgin
wax, how it shapes its luscious cone--and though we would not trust you to
place a brick upon a brick, nevertheless you may, under instruction, mix
the mortar!

Ponder on the rat and its doings, most wise BURDETT--see how craftily it
makes its hole--and though you are too age-stricken to carry a hod, you
may at least do this much--