ral in the family, you sent it down
stairs, that judges and juries might partake of the entertainment. The
unfortunate antiquary and augur who is the butt of all this sport may
suffer in the roistering horse-play and practical jokes of the servants'
hall. But whatever may become of him, the discussion itself, and the
timing it, put me in mind of what I have read, (where I do not
recollect,) that the subtle nation of the Greeks were busily employed,
in the Church of Santa Sophia, in a dispute of mixed natural philosophy,
metaphysics, and theology, whether the light on Mount Tabor was created
or uncreated, and were ready to massacre the holders of the
unfashionable opinion, at the very moment when the ferocious enemy of
all philosophy and religion, Mahomet the Second, entered through a
breach into the capital of the Christian world. I may possibly suffer
much more than Mr. Reeves (I shall certainly give much more general
offence) for breaking in upon this constitutional amusement concerning
the created or uncreated nature of the two Houses of Parliament, and by
calling their attention to a problem which may entertain them less, but
which concerns them a great deal more,--that is, whether, with this
Gallic Jacobin fraternity, which they are desired by some writers to
court, all the parts of the government, about whose combustible or
incombustible qualities they are contending, may "not be cast into the
fire" together. He is a strange visionary (but he is nothing worse) who
fancies that any one part of our Constitution, whatever right of
primogeniture it may claim, or whatever astrologers may divine from its
horoscope, can possibly survive the others. As they have lived, so they
will die, together. I must do justice to the impartiality of the
Jacobins. I have not observed amongst _them_ the least predilection for
any of those parts. If there has been any difference in their malice, I
think they have shown a worse disposition to the House of Commons than
to the crown. As to the House of Lords, they do not speculate at all
about it, and for reasons that are too obvious to detail.

The question will be concerning the effect of this French fraternity on
the whole mass. Have we anything to apprehend from Jacobin
communication, or have we not? If we have not, is it by our experience
before the war that we are to presume that after the war no dangerous
communion can exist between those who are well affected to the new
Constitution