contain to relative importance.-A fly crawling over one of the vast frescoes of Paul Veronese, might just as well attempt to play the critic upon its design, as A. or B. or C. to play the philosopher upon the event of yesterday. Time is the distance of moral life,-the perspective of the mind. It is only now, seated in my easy corner at Crockey's, or by my fireside in St. James's Place, that groupings come out before my mind's eye, and trifles combine themselves into events which, when passing before me, were mere dots and lines, scratchings and daubings.

Provehimur portu, terræque urbesque recedunt.

My brethren of the Household were then only men who came in or went out of waiting, at certain epochs. I forgot that they were historical personages.-It did not occur to me that all the finished finicality of that golden clockwork constituted an epoch ;-a polished corner of the mighty temple of European civilization.

The first time it did occur to me was on noting the horror of the King at the prospect of finding a half-baked brick, or mass of unhewn stone placed next to it in the fabric.-Immediately after the Catholic Question, came Lord Blandford's notice of a motion for the consideration of Parliamentary Reform; — and though half the world seemed inclined to play Festus with the noble Marquis, accusing him of infirmity of mind or purpose, the other half trembled with the conviction that, within forty days, Nineveh would be destroyed.—We were at the beginning of the end!

"Après nous, le déluge!" is said to have been a favourite ejaculation of Louis XV., when admonished of the political reaction likely to occur in the times of his grandsons;-but let us not think so hardly of even one of the worst of the Lord's anointed, as to believe in the tradition.-Egotism, (or to write it puristically) EGOISM, in individuals a pitiful weakness, becomes a crime by regalization. The hardness

of a royal heart must accumulate the impenetrability of thirty millions of nether millstones; and an Aldgate pump for the dispensation of Hydroscyanic acid, or an Epping Forest of Upas trees for public recreation, would scarcely afford a bitterer source of national calamity.

My august Master contemplated, I am convinced, with profound sympathy, the downfall of the Beautiful Gate of the Temple. Court physicians are not always soothsayers or sayers of sooth; and while bleeding and blistering, or whispering hints of this symptom or of that, seldom perceive the worm at the root which causeth the branches of the royal oak to wax yellow and wither.-I shall go to my own grave with the conviction that the King I had the honour to serve, was chilled to death by the shadow cast before by the coming event of the Reform Bill; and that Sir Thomas Lawrence, the most loyal of royal limners, preceded him to the tomb on the principle invented by

George Colman, who proved himself to be younger than the Prince because too polite a man to come into the world before His Royal Highness.

But I must not anticipate.-I was talking, if I remember, of the little importance I then assigned to my brethren of the Red Book,whom, with the short-sightedness of human vanity and blindness of office, I regarded as permanent in their places as the giants in Guildhall; steady at their posts, albeit wooden giants, as the stone walls against which they are posted. I liked most of them,-some to laugh at some to laugh with:-I suppose no deeper motive need be adduced for the predilections of a coxcomb.

For one of them, for both these reasons, I entertained especial regard.—He was a pleasant sunshiny creature, equally ready to laugh or be laughed at,—some dozen years my junior, whom I remembered aforetime a page, and

now recognized as a legitimate inheritor of the honours of Cecil Danbyism.

Frank Walsingham,-for though the Red Book and his tailor recorded him in their pages as the Honourable Francis Walsingham, I trust I may be excused from such nauseous particularity, was one of those unhappy individuals born ruined, as one may say,-a nobleman's younger son! Like myself, he had been Etonized,-though not like myself, Christchurched and rusticated; -and was consequently as useless and expensive in his habits as his elder brother, the heir in tail to forty thousand per annum.

In his case, unluckily, half a dozen young Walsinghams intervened between the eldest son Lord Rotherhithe and my friend Frank:so that an Honourable Charles was in the Foreign office, an Honourable Edward in the Church, and the others hiving up knowledge in the Temple, and elsewhere, learning to spell their own name, previous to introduction into