In the ballad of "Guy and Amarant," Sir Guy alludes to his former victories when he says to the thirsty giant,

Goe drinke thy last,

Go pledge the dragon and the savage bore ;
Succeed the tragedyes that they have past,

But never think to drinke cold water more;
Drinke deepe to Death, and unto him carouse;
Bid him receive thee in his earthen house.

Nor was this any vain boast: for Guy dealt this pagan,
A blowe that brought him with a vengeance downe.

Then Guy sett foot upon the monster's brest,

And from his shoulders did his head divide,
Which with a yawninge mouth did gape unblest,
Noe dragon's jawes were ever seene soe wide
To open and to shut, till life was spent,

Then Guy tooke keyes and to the castle went.

The giant's miserable captives are then delivered, and among them ome" tender ladyes," who

had noe other dyett everye day,

Than flesh of humane creatures for their food.

It was hard that one who thus went about doing good, should have met with so ill a reward: all these brilliant actions could not save poor Sir Guy from being crossed in love, nor from the tragic end which the reader will find, if so disposed, recorded in his "Legend."

St. George's dragon was eminently pestiferous

Against the Sarazens so rude,

Fought he full long and many a day;
Where many gyants he subdu'd,

In honour of the Christian way:
And after many adventures past,
To Egypt land he came at last.

Now, as the story plain doth tell,

Within that country there did rest
A dreadful dragon fierce and fell,

Whereby they were full sore opprest :
Who by his poisonous breath each day,
Did many of the city slay.

The dragon's breath infects their blood,
That every day in heaps they dye;

Among them such a plague is bred,
The living scarce could bury the dead.

The rest of this legend is so well known, that it would be needlessly occupying space to dwell further upon the subject of it. We would only observe that the dragon's infectious breath did the principal mis

chief.

But the time was at hand when the coup de grace was to be given to these dragon tragedies by the comic verse, showing how

More of More Hall, with nothing at all,
He slew the dragon of Wantley.

This clever performance was, as has been well observed, to the old metrical romaunts and ballads of chivalry what Don Quixote was to prose narratives of the same kind; and whether the witty author made his dragon out of a bloated Yorkshire attorney who had stripped three orphans of their inheritance, and had become intolerable by his enthe up croachments and rapacity till a neighbouring gentleman took cause of the oppressed, went to law with him, and broke his hard heart, or some other passages in local history are therein alluded to, no dragon could be brought before the public thereafter without ridicule.

Thus much for the fabulous part of our subject, as far as it regards terrestrial dragons. We constantly find allusions to the malaria that surrounded these monsters and their localities. It is not unworthy of remark, that the crass air which the real extinct dragons breathed, would, as has been satisfactorily established, have been fatal to man if he had then been upon the earth which now holds their remains. That earth is one vast grave of cities, of nations, of creations.

PILLS FOR POLITICIANS AND LOTIONS FOR LEGISLATORS.

Quidquid habent telorum armamentaria pharmacopolæ.

L'homme n'est connue qu'à moitié, s'il n'est observé que dans l'état sain. L'état de maladie fait aussi bien partie de son existence morale, que de son existence physique.-BROUSSAIS de l'Irritation.

NOTWITHSTANDING the metaphysics of Germany, the vagaries of La Jeune France, the extravagances of the saints, the impertinences of tractarianism, and the jesuitical distinguos of double-dealing political Januses, we still believe in a growing love of the intelligible; and that, as far at least as the sounder part of mankind are concerned, professional mystifications are fast coming to a discount. Humbugs of all sorts may, indeed, abound in the land,-legal, theological, medical, financial, commercial, artistic, and literary; and there is not a wigmaker or a tailor, a dealer in false silver, or false teeth, who can utter his wares, save with a transcendental flourish, far beyond the queen's ordinary English. All this, however, is merely transitional, the desperate struggle of a dying agony; and a millennium of common sense is not the less at hand (say in some thousand years or so), when men's converse shall be "yea, yea, and nay, nay;" and when no one will take the trouble to cant, simply because no one will be weak enough to be "done brown."

The proofs of this state of things are scattered widely over the surface of society, if men would but regard them; but though coming

events do cast their shadows before, this particular shadow is not so distinct, as to be understood without some little attention, and therefore without some little assistance from the videttes of the age, whose business it is to be on the look out for what the haberdashers call "the next article."

To proceed, therefore, from the known to the unknown, we begin by reminding our readers, that amidst all the fanaticism and gobemoucherie of the nineteenth century, Englishmen still keep a steady eye to the main chance; and where money is concerned, contrive to see through the millstone as clearly as their neighbours. Notwithstanding the most decided and persevering attempts at mystification, the dark sayings of chartism (for instance) are clearing up into an intelligible question of a fair price for labour, and a fair price for loaves. Repeal, in its multitudinous agitation, cries, trumpet-tongued, for something to eat; national education, in spite of Oxford logic, stands forth to view, as plain as Punch's cartoon can make it, a struggle for power as the instrument of plund-profit we mean. The opium question has been translated into very intelligible Sycee silver; the art unions are known as marts for the printseller's heavy stock; the election franchise is perfectly understood as a handsome gratuity given by somebody, with the connivance of nobody;* and to go no further, that most metaphysical of nonentities, the British constitution, has manifested itself in the flesh, as a pretty comprehensible and comprehensive machine for raising taxes.

Not, indeed, that these things are so understood "by all manner of people," so proclaimed at the market-cross, or so taught in the universities; for then the millennium would be actually come, which there is some reason to doubt: all we intend is, that those most interested are aware of the fact, while others see the truth obscurely, and are frightened out of their no-wits by the apparition; and a few are strenuously labouring to cast a bude-light on the embroglio, and as usual, are getting monkey's allowance for their pains.

Among the more salient proofs of the change coming over the spirit of men's dreams, we refer our readers to the progressive development of the breeches-pocket question, and to the importance it has assumed on all matters, debatable and not debatable. All parties are fully aware, whig and tory, establishment and secession, that if they can but contrive to get that question clearly on their side, la chose est jugée, and unanimity secured. Accordingly this is Q. E. D., the dignus vindice nodus, exploited alike by rich and by poor. Heaven help the most patriotic minister who fails on this one point, whereas

His faith can't err, whose budget's in the right.

But the most effectual means of bringing the breeches argument to bear upon things in general, is by stripping them of their metaphysical envelopes; for of all things sublunary, the breeches-pocket is the thing most palpable material, substantial, consubstantial, and transubstantial: consubstantial, as giving substance to whatever comes in relation with it; and transubstantial, as changing all other natures, like Midas's most exquisite touch, into gold. We accordingly (though with all due mo

* Vide Durham election committee, passim.

desty) lay claim to the merit of having prepared a vast many great moral questions for the application of this golden rule, by displaying to our readers how much or how little may be made of the several opinions we have, from time to time, brought into discussion.

Without further preface or apology, then, we presume to venture on another step forward in the course, and by translating a few more metaphysical obscurities into matter-of-fact clearness, to obtain some closer insight into their pecuniary value. It may be within the memory of the older of the faithful followers of the New Monthly, that years ago we set before them a statement of a pharmaceutical method of treating the moral affections of humanity; and showed how, by the timely exhibition of a little apothecary's stuff, we could realize the Shakspearian hypothesis, of administering to the mind diseased. Since that time, the world has profited more largely than is commonly conceived by the hint, and has applied its remedies for political and social evil with a closer reference to their physical effects.

For the better understanding of this point, we must bring to mind that the doctrine was not of our invention; but was founded in a great degree upon the ancient theological dogma of the mortification of the flesh; or, as it was called in the codes of monastic discipline, the minutio monachi. Falstaff, as you remember, raises a plea in behalf of his own luxurious vices, that in consideration of his exuberance of flesh, he is entitled to pardon for an exuberance of frailty; and è contrario, it follows that the less flesh, the less frailty. The long-fashionable doctrine of the monks ultimately lost ground in their estimation, not from any thing intrinsically erroneous in it, but owing to a very obvious mistake they committed in applying the method to their own proper persons; for it must be confessed that the remedy is none of the pleasantest. They soon therefore became tired of monthly blood-lettings, periodical fastings, flagellations, vigils, hairshirtings, and the like gentle medicaments, now becoming once more popular in Oxford: whereas had they limited their experiments to the persons of their neighbours, (as is more wisely done by the modern lay practitioners), they would have continued to find in the exercise an infinite delectation, easement, and content.

Properly considered, every penal infliction, every legislative attempt to remove any existing evil in the constitution of society, is of the nature of a drug, calculated to act upon the physique of the lieges, and by effecting some change in the current and crisis of the humours of the body, to work a corresponding improvement in the thoughts and volitions of the mind. The matter of infliction and the matter of reward (as Bentham with his peculiar happiness of language called them), are obviously no other than so many materiæ medica, remediess destined to improve the moral health of the patients, and to raise or to depress the energies of the soul, through an application to the body, just as the phiais of the druggist shops, (red, blue, and green, with all their trumpery,) are destined to expurgate the editions of the fleshly tabernacle.

Mind, apart from body, as every body knows, is a most ungetatable thing as the stoics say, it is unassailable by externals, and pro tanto, quite "beyond the reach of art." Tyranny has no hold over it, walls do not imprison it, nor chains enslave it. It may say, indeed, with the stage hero,

For I myself alone am lord of I.

It is not, therefore, too much to suppose, that mind has been saddled with a body, for the express purpose of its improvement,-that by thus being brought beneath the empire of material influences, it may be properly doctored, and fitted to behave decently in civilized society. Accordingly, ethics and medicine run on all fours, and moralists, like physicians, have a multiplicity of drugs, no few poisons, and only here and there, by chance, a tolerable cure. The parallel is indeed close between the practice of each set of professors.

In the fevers of the body, physicians rigorously prescribe the observance of a state of rest; on like therapeutic principles, lawyers in the fevers of the mind, prescribe solitary confinement. Thus, also, nothing on earth so closely resembles the late St. John Long's escarotic lotions, (both in cause and consequence), as a sound military flogging at the drum-head. Low diet in the infirmary is identical with low diet in the Penitentiary ;-except inasmuch as it is carried further and more effectually in the latter, than in the former: for medical men, not being irresponsible officers, dare not go to the same length as jailers and their magisterial friends and patrons, who can afford to proceed logically, and completely to extirpate frailty and flesh together. To effect a thorough (we must not say a radical) reform, there is nothing like turning a man out of jail a perfect skeleton-a living anatomy.

It is on this ground alone that in desperate cases, capital punishment can be justified. With the capitally punished, we are tolerably sure that they can sin no more; and if dead men are of no positive use to society (which, by the by, has never sufficiently been proved,— on the contrary, the bones of our valiant soldiers, slain on foreign battle-fields for the good of their country, have been recently imported on a grand scale, to the manifest improvement of agriculture)-if dead men, we say, are of no use, it is equally clear they can do no more mischief. We never heard of the ghost of a departed highwayman visiting the glimpses of the moon, making night hideous on Hounslow Heath, and pistol in hand, taking posthumous purses from travellers, whom a corporeal pistol would not perhaps have so effectually frightened into a surrender; nor is it on record that the most artistic copyists of bank-notes, when they have paid the last penalty of their fatal ingenuity, have (even under the instigation of the devil himself) been found capable of uttering spiritual duplicate promises to pay, to the further injury of the queen's crown and dignity. No, the remedy has been purely and entirely efficacious; and the patients, beyond all question or cavil, must be allowed to have died cured.

It will be evident from the very little we have yet advanced, that not only physic, but surgery is called in for the better treatment of the mental maladies of mankind. The rack and other instruments of torture employed in the ancient administration of the question, partake largely of the character of the old, awkward and frightful surgical instruments; and both are now alike preserved in curious collections, as monuments of the barbarism of our ancestors. There is much analogy, too, between the tying the healthy portion of an artery, for the relief of a diseased aneurism, and the putting on of a prohibitory duty on cheap wheat, to remedy the distresses of those, whose happiness is wholly dependant upon the production of high rents. In the suppression of riots, platoon fir ng is