me has gone by,' he states, 'in which the details
of every art were ennobled in the eyes of its professors by being
spiritually improved into symbols and mementoes of all doctrines and
all duties.' We could hardly think so as we stood watching the
procession, with its curiously fantastic accumulation of ornament and
symbol; it seemed, however, rather the relic of a former age than the
natural growth of the present--a spectre of the past strangely
resuscitated.

The laugh, half in ridicule, half in good nature, with which the
crowd greeted every very gaudily dressed member, richer in symbol
and obsolete finery than his neighbour, showed that the day had
passed in which such things could produce their originally intended
effect. Will the time ever arrive in which stars and garters will
claim as little respect as broad-skirted doublets of green velvet,
surmounted with three-cornered hats tagged with silver lace? Much, we
suppose, must depend upon the characters of those who wear them, and
the kind of services on which they will come to be bestowed. An Upper
House of mere diplomatists--skilful only to overreach--imprudent
enough to substitute cunning for wisdom--ignorant enough to deem the
people not merely their inferiors in rank, but in discernment
also--weak enough to believe that laws may be enacted with no regard
to the general good--wrapped up in themselves, and acquainted with
the masses only through their eavesdroppers and dependants--would
bring titles and orders to a lower level in half an age, than the
onward progress of intellect has brought the quaintnesses of
mechanic symbol and mystery in two full centuries. We but smile at
the one, we would learn to execrate the other. Has the reader ever
seen Quarles' _Emblems_, or Flavel's _Husbandry and Navigation
Spiritualized_? Both belong to an extinct species of literature, of
which the mechanic mysteries described by Coleridge, and exhibited
in the procession of Saturday last, strongly remind us. Both alike
proceeded on a process of mind the reverse of the common. Comparison
generally leads from the moral to the physical, from the abstract
to the visible and the tangible; here, on the contrary, the tangible
and the visible--the emblem and the symbol--were made to lead to the
moral and the abstract. There are beautiful instances, too, of the
same school in the allegories of Bunyan,--the wonders in the house
of the Interpreter, for instance, and the scenes exhibited i