ps, rulest the yard behind the Cheapside counter,
hast thou never stood there and longed,--hast thou never confessed,
when standing there, that Fate has been unkind to thee in denying
thee the one thing that thou hast wanted? I have done so; and as my
slow steps have led me up that more than royal staircase, to those
passages and halls which require the hallowing breath of centuries to
give them the glory in British eyes which they shall one day possess,
I have told myself, in anger and in grief, that to die and not to
have won that right of way, though but for a session,--not to have
passed by the narrow entrance through those lamps,--is to die and
not to have done that which it most becomes an Englishman to have
achieved.

There are, doubtless, some who come out by that road, the loss of
whose society is not to be regretted. England does not choose her six
hundred and fifty-four best men. One comforts one's self, sometimes,
with remembering that. The George Vavasors, the Calder Joneses, and
the Botts are admitted. Dishonesty, ignorance, and vulgarity do
not close the gate of that heaven against aspirants; and it is a
consolation to the ambition of the poor to know that the ambition of
the rich can attain that glory by the strength of its riches alone.
But though England does not send thither none but her best men, the
best of her Commoners do find their way there. It is the highest
and most legitimate pride of an Englishman to have the letters
M.P. written after his name. No selection from the alphabet, no
doctorship, no fellowship, be it of ever so learned or royal a
society, no knightship,--not though it be of the Garter,--confers so
fair an honour. Mr Bott was right when he declared that this country
is governed from between the walls of that House, though the truth
was almost defiled by the lips which uttered it. He might have added
that from thence flow the waters of the world's progress,--the
fullest fountain of advancing civilization.

George Vavasor, as he went in by the lamps and the apple-stall, under
the guardianship of Mr Bott, felt all the pride of which I have been
speaking. He was a man quite capable of feeling such pride as it
should be felt,--capable, in certain dreamy moments, of looking at
the thing with pure and almost noble eyes; of understanding the
ambition of serving with truth so great a nation as that which fate
had made his own. Nature, I think, had so fashioned George Vavasor,
that he mi