sift the lime.

But wherefore thus particular--why should we dwell on individuals?
Pole-cat, weasel, ferret, hedgehog, with all your vermin affinities, come
forth, and staring reproachfully in the faces of all prorogued Members,
bid them imitate your zeal and pains, and--the masons having struck--build
their Houses for themselves.

(We make this proposal in no thoughtless--no bantering spirit. He can see
very little into the most transparent mill-stone who believes that we pen
these essays--essays that will endure and glisten as long, ay as long as
the freshest mackerel--if he think that we sit down to this our weekly
labour in a careless lackadaisical humour. By no means. Like Sir LYTTON
BULWER, when he girds up his loins to write an apocryphal comedy, we
approach our work with graceful solemnity. Like Sir LYTTON, too, we always
dress for the particular work we have in hand. Sir LYTTON wrote
"Richelieu" in a harlequin's jacket (sticking pirate's pistols in his
belt, ere he valorously _took_ whole scenes from a French melo-drama):
_we_ penned our last week's essay in a suit of old canonicals, with a
tie-wig askew upon our beating temples, and are at this moment cased in a
court-suit of cut velvet, with our hair curled, our whiskers crisped, and
a masonic apron decorating our middle man. Having subsided into our
chair--it is in most respects like the porphyry piece of furniture of the
Pope--and our housekeeper having played the Dead March in Saul on our
chamber organ (BULWER wrote "The Sea Captain" to the preludizing of a
Jew's-harp), we enter on our this week's labour. We state thus much, that
our readers may know with what pains we prepare ourselves for them.
Besides, when BULWER thinks it right that the world should know that the
idea of "La Vailiere" first hit him in the rotonde of a French diligence,
modest as we are, can we suppose that the world will not be anxious to
learn in what coloured coat we think, and whether, when we scratch our
head to assist the thought that sticks by the way, we displace a velvet
cap or a Truefitt's scalp?)

Reader, the above parenthesis may be skipped or not. Read not a line of
it--the omission will not maim our argument. So to proceed.

If we cast our eyes over the debates of the last six months, we shall find
that hundreds of members of the House of Commons have exhibited the most
extraordinary powers of ill-directed labour. And then their capacity of
endurance! Arguments that wo