o"
with the animals from the Zoological Gardens. Every fortnight there is a
Derby Day, and the whole population pour into the Downs with frantic
excitement, leaving the city to the slaves. And then the moral condition
of this immense mass! Of the doings about the palace we should be sorry
to speak. But the lady patronesses of Almack's still more assiduously
patronize the prize-fights, and one of them has been seen within the
ropes, in battle array, by the side of Sayers himself. No tongue may
tell the orgies enacted, with the aid of French cooks, Italian singers,
and foreign artists of all sorts, in the gilded saloons of Park Lane and
Mayfair. Suffice to say, that in them the worst passions of human nature
have full swing, unmodified by any thought of human or divine restraints,
and only dashed a little now and then by the apprehension that the slaves
may rise, and make a clean sweep of the metropolis with fire and steel.
But _n'importe_--_Vive la bagatelle_! Mario has just been appointed
prime minister, and has made a chorus singer from the Opera Duke of
Middlesex and Governor-General of India. All wise men and all good men
despair of the state, but they are not permitted to say anything, much
less to act. Mr. Disraeli lost his head a few days ago; Lords Palmerston
and Derby lie in the Tower under sentence of death; Lord Brougham, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, and Mr. Gladstone, opened their veins and died
in a warm bath last week. Foreign relations will make a still greater
demand on the reader's imagination. We must conceive of England no
longer as

"A precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive of a house."

but rather as open to the inroad of every foe whom her aggressive and
colonizing genius has provoked. The red man of the West, the Caffre, the
Sikh, and the Sepoy, Chinese braves, and fierce orientals of all sorts,
are hovering on her frontiers in "numbers numberless," as the flakes of
snow in the northern winter. They are not the impotent enemy which we
know, but vigorous races, supplied from inexhaustible founts of
population, and animated by an insatiate appetite for the gold and
silver, purple and fine linen, rich meats and intoxicating drinks of our
effete civilization. And we can no longer oppose them with those
victorious legions which have fought and conquered in all regions of the
world. The men of Waterloo and Inkermann