of an obscure Militia Act. History can furnish us with many examples of the governors of nations, when the interests of their kingdom were jeopardized, betaking themselves to pleasures and drowning their cares with joy. Edward III. forgot himself in the caresses of Alice Peerce while the Scots were marauding his cities, just as our Charles sat down to a game of whist with the Duchess of Portsmouth when the Dutch were burning Chatham. But the Russell Ministry were guilty of the unique folly of meeting the greatest political conjunctures with the most Liliputian measures. When a ship is reduced to irremedial straits by a tempest, the sailors are said, having given up all work, to spend their last hours in heedless revelry. But the Russell Ministry sought to outride a ferocious tempest by measures which could not have had the slightest influence upon the motion of the state vessel during a calm. They busied themselves with the paltriest schemes, taking in a small reef-sail here, and adjusting a cordtackle there, when they were assailed by a terrific hurricane, and every wave threatened to engulf the sinking ship. Such a pettifogging administration in such turbulent times England never saw before. It is to be hoped, for the safety of the commonwealth, that such a pettifogging administration, least of all in such turbulent times, England may never see again.

Of course, a somnolent government is always accompanied with its own remedy in that certain extinction which its indolence never fails to ensure. But the country has no protection against deceptive legislation, and it frequently happens the minister is obliged to succumb to it, forced by the hard necessity which the present forms of Parliament entail upon him, and the obligation he is under of making a show of legislation when the reality is not in his power. The most salutary measure, no matter however strongly supported in the Parliament or in the country, generally encounters a small group of foes, and the number of opportunities which the present complicated forms of the House present of obstructing its progress, or of introducing fresh clauses to nullify and restrict its provisions, renders it perfectly easy for any compact and vigilant faction to reduce any measure they oppose to the shadow of its former self, if they do not pare it down until it becomes absolutely worthless. It is the boast of the House of Commons, since the Reform Act, that it represents every interest in the country; and it is just because it represents every interest that the obliteration of any given grievance, by the passing of a sterling measure of reform, has come to be regarded in the light of one of those miracles we cannot look for more than once in a century. For no nuisance can be dealt with with

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out treading on the interests of some class; and if the representatives of that class cannot defeat the measure obnoxious to their party, by procrastinations and delays, they lie in ambuscade, and choose their opportunity, when the bill is weakly supported in Committee, to pounce upon their prey, and deprive it of some of its principal provisions. These tactics are aided by the animosity of the Opposition, who are always endeavouring to defeat the measures of Government, that at the end of the session they may hold up to the indignation of the country that legislative barrenness which has been produced by their own instrumentality. Now, no mere simplification of the rules of the House would meet the abuse referred to. A measure must be considered in detail as well as debated as a whole. But we would have the clauses of a measure divided into principal and secondary; and make it imperative, when discussed in Committee, that the principal clauses should not be modified by new clauses, or rescinded without a majority of two-thirds of the House following the proposer into the lobby. After the House has in full conclave given its assent at the second reading to the principle of a measure, we would not have that vote upon slight grounds set aside.

We hold it as essential that, after the Constitution has undergone any material change, the forms of legislative procedure should undergo revision with a view to adapt them to the altered state of things; otherwise we commit the absurdity of retaining the old harness after we have altered the team, or of using the old gear when the machinery to which that gear applied has undergone a sweeping modification. If it was an anachronism of a fearful character in those who drew up the Bill of Settlement, to leave the forms of procedure exactly as they were under James II., it is a still more fearful anachronism, after our experience of the additional changes of the reform acts, to continue the same folly. Before 1832, the proceedings of the Legislature were not half so protracted, or so wearisome, or so fruitless as they are at present. Even debates upon the most engrossing topics were seldom ad journed. A field-night consisted merely of a gladiatorial combat between some five or six favoured individuals. But now, owing to the extinction of the pocket-borough system, and the representation of the large towns, nearly every member feels the expediency of keeping himself before his constituency by addressing the House on every important occasion. The change which has come over the House with regard to the rapid and universal publicity awarded to the statements of the idlest speaker, would of itself have sufficed to produce the flood of inane verbosity with which the country is periodically inundated, and to make thirty

speak where only one spoke before.* The consequence is, that every day the House is becoming more of a huge debating society and less of a legislative assembly. The minister begins to think he has performed a feat if, amid all this wilderness of loquacity, he can vote the estimates and get through the supplies before the middle of August. Legislation, if attempted at all upon a scale commensurate with the wants of society, has either to be abandoned at its middle stage, or is consummated in a manner which defeats its own purposes. The progress of society is impeded. That institution, which not only ought to provide for its wants, but to guide its energies into new paths and open out new fields for their exercise, in reality blocks the way.

If man were a stationary animal; were he one of that tribe of insects which spring into life every summer and find no heritage, and which cease to exist in the autumn and leave no memorials of their race, then the plan of governing him by simply making provision for his passing yearly wants would not be out of place. But unfortunately we have a future, and are connected by a thousand traditions with the past. Our forefathers have bequeathed to us the rich inheritance of a progressive civilization based upon free institutions. What we have received we are bound to transmit, if not improved, at least in no worse a state than that in which we found it, otherwise, like a debased heir, we shame the past by committing our posterity to a retrograde future. We are afraid that is destined to be our case. In former times, when the public were harassed by monopolists, or victimized by fraudulent vendors or regal exactions, they found in Parliament speedy and effective redress for their grievances. But now the spirit which animated these grievances has transmigrated to other quarters, and from its legal holdings defies all the cornucopia of statesmanship. That Parliament which was once so chary of the national purse, and so stout in its attack upon public marauders, is now fast doubling its system of taxation, and abdicating its remedial functions. The evils which are perpetually arising from the fluctuating tide of new social adjustments are left to blacken the otherwise promising foreground of the future with their corrosive mass, while of the Legislature which ought to provide a remedy nothing is left but the expensive forms,-terribly increased in cost as they have become more obstructive, to mock the nation with an appearance of business when all the reality of it has passed away.

* Sismondi, who paid as much attention to our Constitution as any foreigner since De Lolme, liberal though he was, when he saw the practical working of the Reform Act, expressed his belief that England, to right herself, would have to return to the old system. Etudes sur les Constitutions des Peuples Libres, vol. i. p. 155. He does not appear to have had the remotest conception where the real mischief lay.

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Now, it is because we are the strong advocates of representative institutions that we are desirous this state of things should not continue. With representative institutions are combined our only hope of a progressive future, of a release from those evils which make life a burden to most of us, of those scarecrows of the past which still act like a nightmare on humanity. Representative institutions, we believe, are destined to conduct man to that Pisgah of political territory never dreamt of but in the reveries of the philosophic statesman, when every labourer shall sit at rest under the fruit of his own fig-tree; when no man shall seek work and not find it; when gaunt armies and grinding taxation shall cease; when the meanest craftsman shall be impressed with a sense of the responsibilities, as well as in possession of the knowledge attaching to his sphere; when there shall be sympathy and brotherhood not only between alienated classes, but between hostile nations. It is because we believe such is the splendid destiny these institutions have in store for us, that we are desirous to free that assembly which has always been regarded as their model from those trammels which impair its past glory and destroy its present utility. With the House of Commons absolutely dead, the world might get on well enough. It would remember its ancient renown, and be stimulated to frame institutions of an analogous character. But a House of Commons absolutely fetid, evincing no activity but in levying taxes and stultifying its own proceedings, is a spectacle which the world could ill bear at any time, but never less so than at present, when Europe, from the gulf of Borysthenes to the shore of the Adriatic is arraying itself in arms in order to contest the supremacy of that form of government of which it is the chief. If the scarf of liberty is to be proudly borne in that contest, it behoves the model of those assemblies in whose cause it is worn, to brighten her already waning lustre, by rejecting the incumbrances which have reduced her to a state of decrepitude, and show herself the hope instead of the despair of the human race.

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ART. IV.-Faithful for Ever. By COVENTRY PATMORE. John W. Parker and Son.

MR. COVENTRY PATMORE has been a close student of the affections, especially of the affections between the sexes. He penetrates the mazes of feeling in such relations, and what he apprehends clearly, he can often express beautifully and forcibly. Great is the difference in this respect between the lover, and the poet who describes him. The true lover makes love more by dumb show than by words, more unconsciously than consciously. He does nothing so awkwardly as the thing which, above all things, he wishes to do best. In such things, deep passion and smooth speech do not go together. But it is otherwise with the poet, he is merely an artist in this department. His business is to delineate. The disturbing forces which belong to such experiences he has felt; but at present they are before him, not within him; and he can with calmness observe their evolutions, their fitful lights and shadows, fixing them upon his page, as the artist fixes the fleeting clouds and the turbulent sea upon his canvas. It is truly work for an artist to show, not only how the lover looks at his mistress, but how, through her, he learns to look upon himself, upon all people, and all things. His world is, for the time, his own world, with all the reasonable or unreasonable that may be in it.

The form into which Mr. Patmore has thrown his theme is not, we think, a happy one. The volume consists of a series of letters in rhyme. Nothing can be more removed from our idea of the ease and nature proper to a good letter, than the art and elaboration proper to good poetry. Mr. Patmore's correspondents write to each other in a style of such studied subtlety and finished beauty, as would be deemed strange, very strange, were any of our friends so to address us. Here and there, indeed, as if this departure from nature were beginning to be felt, we have, in verse, as plain prose as can be written, even in the case of persons who in the next page take us far into the Fairy land of poetry. But even this is not so much a relief as a mistake. Such alternations of differences, if not of opposites, come upon us like discord, and never unity. We can excuse the prose of one of the correspondents, who is supposed to be only capable of feeling poetry, and not of writing it. Some of her prose is indeed prosaic.

The mother of Frederick Graham writes to him to caution him against becoming enamoured of his high-born, accomplished, and beautiful cousin, Honoria Churchill. But the caution comes too