passing objurgation. Then follow the prospectuses of three insurance companies, you being nearly ruined already with the amount which you are compelled to pay annually, in virtue of your marriage contract, to the Scottish Widows' Fund. Next appears a long slip, purporting to be the intimation of a police assessment. You swear savagely, having ascertained the fact, by dint of a spirited correspondence in the newspapers, that the available force of that esteemed body in the metropolis of Scotland is not much over a dozen, and having accurate personal corroboration of the statistics by walking the other day into an unmolested bicker, from which you emerged with a broken hat, and a head phrenologised by a blacking bottle. Before you have recovered from this, you receive another missive with a charge for cleaning the streets—an operation which you know, to your cost, has been performed throughout the last thaw exclusively by the petticoats of the females; and upon the back of this appear mulctures touching gas and water. A huge oblong missive, the envelope whereof bears on a corner the letters O. H. M. S., and which is sealed with a most imposing and royal escutcheon, deludes you for a moment into the belief that Lord John Russell has at last exhibited a gleam of common-sense, and has recommended you to her Majesty either for a commissionership or for a reasonable place on the pension list, in consequence of your balaamite contributions to the unsaleable Edinburgh Review. You open it, and behold, it contains nothing but a warning that you have not paid the last quarter of your compounded and thrice confounded income-tax! A gentleman next requests the honour of a moment's interview. In the hope that he may prove a Writer to the Signet, you weakly yield; and incontinently an individual with a strong Israelitish countenance, a fetid breath, and an odour of stale tobacco floating around his person, solicits the honour of your custom for a packet of sealing-wax, a gross of steel pens, or a new edition of the Pentateuch. You eject him in a tornado of wrath; but the cup of your misery is not full. Aaron is succeeded by Mendizabel—an expatriated Spanish grandee, who bears a strong recommendation from an individual whose handwriting seems to be attached to every begging petition in the country. This fellow won't choose to understand you, however frantic you may appear; so that, for the sake of peace, you violate your conscience and get rid of him at the expenditure of a shilling. Grizzy is called up, and severely reprimanded for her want of discrimination in admitting the illustrious stranger; and the consequence is that, on the very next summons, she peremptorily denies you to a Glasgow agent who has come through by special train for a consultation on a case of emergency. Last of all, just as you are settling steadily to your work, and turning over the third sheet of foolscap, in walks your friend the Haveril, on no earthly errand whatever, except to inquire how you are getting on. Of all social pests, this kind of animal is undoubtedly the worst. In intellect he is singularly weak: in disposition curious and prying. He hops about your study like a magpie, eying every letter, as though he longed to make himself master of its contents; and, notwithstanding that you believe the creature to be strictly honest, you would on no account leave him for a couple of minutes in undisturbed possession of the sanctum. He peeps into every book, indulges you with a quantity of small literary swipes, and finally fastening upon a volume of prints, entreats you to go on with your occupation, as he, the Haveril, is perfectly competent to the task of entertaining himself. Culpable homicide, say our law-books, ranges from a crime of great enormity to the smallest possible fraction of imputed guilt; and if, under such aggravating circumstances, you were to toss your acquaintance out of the window, it is not likely that your subsequent sentence would be severe. But you have at the bottom of your heart a sort of attachment to the nincompoop, whom you know to be utterly harmless, and who, moreover, to do him justice, invariably stands up for you, whenever you are assailed in your absence. Therefore you abstain from violence, and the penance which you heroically undergo is but one degree short of martyrdom. Under the visitation of these Egyptian plagues, the morning wears insensibly away; and the imp of darkness, when he calls for copy about dinner-time, is summarily exorcised, and dispatched, empty-handed, to the solitudes of his awful den! Is there, then, any feasible case of resemblance between the fortress and the modern mansion?

We have been led into this train of thought by a perusal of the speeches lately delivered at Manchester on the subject of our national defences. The question is one of undoubted interest to us all, and it is well that it should be brought forward and thoroughly discussed in time. If there is danger, either immediate or impending, let us know it, and then, to a certain extent, we shall be forwarned if not forearmed. The Duke of Wellington—a tolerable military authority, as times go—has already given us his opinion on the point, and that opinion has been immediately met and contradicted by the sapient Mr Richard Cobden. We have yet to learn the exact amount of Mr Cobden's attainments in the arts of strategy and fortification; but as he is undoubtedly a "myriad-minded" gentleman, of fair average conceit, and more than average effrontery, and as we have hitherto abstained from making special mention of him in our columns, it may, perhaps, be worth while to see how he has acquitted himself in the lists against the veteran conqueror of Napoleon. Our old friend Tomkins—he of the Ten Tumblers—used to be, if we recollect aright, rather eloquent upon this weighty topic. Tomkins, in early life, had sustained an amatory disappointment, in competition with a thwacking drum-major; and therefore always looked upon the army with somewhat of a jaundiced eye. The sound of the fife, clarion, and trumpet was ever after distasteful to his ear; and he never trotted his mare past a marching regiment of these scarlet locusts, without a spasm of righteous indignation. "They eat our bread, sir!" he would say, "and drink of our cup, and do absolutely nothing in return. The sooner we get rid of them the better. An Englishman, sir, needs no hired supernumeraries to protect his home. When was our soil ever invaded? Let the French come, and we will give them graves!" And having delivered himself of this sublime sentiment, Tomkins would incontinently ring for another tumbler. It always struck us, however, as a singular proof of the eccentricities or rather inconsistencies of genius, that our distinguished friend, when in his cups, and towards the close of the evening, invariably began to glorify himself upon his length of lineage and descent. In support of these heraldic claims, he was wont to cite the case of his great progenitor, "the founder of the family," who just about a century ago had the condescension to hold the stirrup of Lord George Murray, as he alighted from his horse when the clans marched into Derby. Tomkins, on the strength of this anecdote, had rather a kindly feeling towards the Jacobites, and would never allow that the enterprise had at any time the character of an invasion. "We were ready, sir," he would exclaim, "to have marched up, in the Reform year, from Birmingham to London; and who can doubt that, had we done so, we should have driven the household troops before us as the chaff flies out from the fanners?"

We have often deeply regretted that Tomkins did not survive to witness the consummation of the triumphs of free-trade—a cause which he contributed materially by his efforts and his writings to advance. The leading feature of his character was the total absence of every kind of prejudice or bigotry. He held it to be a fundamental principle, as old as Magna Charta, that England