My entire morning had been spent in the police-court, and I returned home to my friend's house where I was staying, just at his dinner hour. I had always piqued myself on my extreme liberality in religious matters, and though myself a clergyman of the Church of England, had the happiness to number amongst my best friends one or two ministers of other denominations. Though the avowal may seem strange, I was now actually residing under the roof of a dissenter-one whom I esteemed very highly for his works' sake in the church, and whom I learned to love still more in his own domestic circle. He had offered me a home whenever business might bring me into the neighbourhood of London, and I had cordially accepted his invitation. It happened, however, that on this day he was from home, fulfilling an engagement of long standing in the neighbourhood, whither he had taken his wife and the elder members of his family, and I was accordingly alone on my return, special directions having been given to see that in his absence nothing that could minister to my comfort should be wanting.

The dinner hour over, I was pacing his library rather thoughtfully, when an open letter on the table attracted my attention. It was a circular announcing a meeting to be held that evening in the neighbourhood, for the purpose of opposing all governmental grants to Maynooth. My worthy host would not be at home till late in the evening, and I thought I might possibly profit by hearing what was to be said upon the subject in which I had felt not a little interest. Though I had never joined the 'No Popery' cry, I had always contended zealously for the great principles of Protestantism, and I supposed that I might, perhaps, receive new light on some of these principles and those of Romanism, by attending. But I was cautious of going among dissenters. I could, however, as I thought, follow my friend safely, and inferring that the meeting had most probably his sanction, I ventured to go.

I must confess that I did not much like the look of the place on reaching it; and the large placards ornamenting its ample staircase, and headed, "Civil and Religious Liberty!" made me doubt whether it might not be rather a political meeting than any thing else. The "civil" certainly took precedence of the "religious" in the announcement; might it not do so in

the reality? But having come so far, I was determined to go in.

The chair was taken amidst a vast deal of noise, stamping, and clapping of hands; and the chairman proceeded to open the business of the evening. In doing so he made a number of startling announcements, telling us that we were subjected to grievances which otherwise we should never have dreamt of, and showed so lively an imagination in the invention of extortions, and oppressions, and intolerable burthens, that had I not known to the contrary, I should have supposed him to be talking of the hard services of the captive Jews in Egypt, or the sanguinary exactions of some Eastern despot.

All this seemed to me to have about as much to do with Popery as with Truth; and as I was wondering where he would drive next, the room was shaken from its propriety by the uproarious cheering which greeted the entrance of one of those well-known orators who are accustomed on such occasions to hold forth the lamp of-Casuistry; that glows only to bewilder, and dazzles to blind.

I felt sadly out of place in a tumultuous political assembly like the present, and the words of the apostle recurred with tenfold force at that moment-"The servant of the Lord must not strive; but must be gentle unto all men, in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves, if God peradventure will bring them to the knowledge of the Truth." The Truth was a great theme, and certainly worth knowing; but it struck me that those men who strove most, were generally more busy in pulling truth to pieces, than in so adjusting its several members, that fitly framed and compacted together, they might constitute one majestic whole.

Yet perhaps I might be wrong; for the speaker who now stepped forward was one who called himself a servant of the Lord, as the title of "Reverend" prefixed to his name intimated. But there was very little in his speech to bear out his profession. With considerable smartness he went round and round his subject, nibbling here and there, but never closing in and grappling with it; and there was altogether so much of littleness in his views, and so much special pleading in his arguments, that I left the place almost as soon as he had done speaking.

When he sat down, an honest-looking fellow in the centre of the room attempted to offer a word or two in reply. But I found that the civil liberty of the meeting was not intended for him. When he spoke temperately, he was met on all hands by the very temperate cry of "Turn him out!" When, changing his ground, he asked leave to put a question, the only answer was Down! Down!" And when he implored them for the sake of our common christianity to contend only for matters worth contending for, the noisy advocates of religious toleration kindly recommended him to the police.

I was so disgusted at such conduct from the so-called advocates of liberty, that my thoughts as I walked homewards took a melancholy cast. It was indeed a very lamentable thing to witness such envyings, and strife, and bitterness, awakened about comparative trifles. True, they were called great principles, but undeniably they were party principles, if it be not allowable to call them prejudices. And to set a tongue of fire loose upon the world for party purposes, without thinking for a moment how great a matter might be kindled by it, seemed to me a very unwise, unsafe, and unrighteous experiment. Though the association was rather ludicrous, I could not help thinking of the silly and dangerous process said to have been once adopted by the Chinese in order to furnish a dish of roast-pig. Tradition tells us that the first animal of the kind roasted in that country, was cooked by the accidental firing of the premises on which the poor sufferer was located; and that for months and months after, the natives knew no other way of dressing pork than by setting house, out-house, and appurtenances in a blaze.

And it really seemed to me at that time as if these murmurers and complainers were attempting just as expensive and dangerous an expedient with regard to a few little differences of opinion, which the Gospel would have taught them to overleap, had its majestic, world-wide principles been graven influentially on the heart.

Several years have passed over since this meeting took place; but I seemed to trace in it the elements of those revolutionary principles which have been since so fearfully developed. If the mind be at any time prophetic, my own thoughts partook of that character as I walked homewards. Figures and phantasmagoria

and Brocken-like spectres danced before my mental eye, and the three great fictions-Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, as sketched by worldly philosophers, formed the most prominent features in these "dissolving views." The evening-a quiet autumn evening -was closing in, and the stars came gradually through the darkening sky above me. Though one star differed from another in glory, I knew that the palest even of that noble host had never asked its Great Former, "Why has thou made me thus ?" My thoughts had been disjointed by the sad spectacle of that uproarious meeting, and were alternately grave and gay, solemn and ludicrous. It was no wonder, therefore, that the sublime expanse before me became associated with ideas at that moment stirring in my brain. I fancied, amongst other things, that the crescent moon just then silvering the grove of elms before me, was preaching a Republic to the listening stars. There was a poetry and juvenility about her looks that commended her to the favorable notice of he rcompanions, though some of the leading stars seemed, I thought, to wink rather significantly at her doctrines. But the thickly clustered Pleiades, and other little groups, packed still more closely, soon appeared determined to separate; and portions of the Milky way actually resolved themselves to my mind's eye, when they heard the great doctrine of Equality propounded gravely to the leading constellations, "Why," said they, "must there be but one Great Bear, usurping with his starry tail so large a tract that should belong to us? Why should that Crown be suffered to elbow out the least, even, and the dullest of our nebulæ? Why should Arcturus, Orion, or Mazzaroth, with all their ancient and hereditary glories, shine more brightly than this or that unnamed or uncatalogued little twinkler ?"

“Why, indeed ?" said the Moon, putting a fair face upon the matter, as she rode majestically over the glittering fringes of a cloud, "why should we not all be great bears-Equality-glorious Equality-would soon make us so."

I smiled at the conceit, it was so worthy of the Moon, the great apostle of simpletons. But I grew serious when I thought how ruinously it would damage the fair face of creation. A sky filled with stars pranked out with mathematical precision, all alike and all equi-distant, would have been a spectacle so anomalous -so utterly uninteresting-so unlike any thing in the great

volume of older Scripture as now written by the hand of God himself, that I must have hesitated in echoing the sublime language even of that inspired writer, who has told us that the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shews forth his handy work.

As I drew nearer the trees which I had seen before me, I noticed that one corner of the field in which they stood was fenced off and thickly planted with shrubs, the leaves of which glistened in the moonlight, and chequered the ground with their dense shadows. In that quiet little nook, narrow as it was, there seemed to be such ample variety that I halted and looked on in silence for some minutes. The laurel and the bay stood darkly forward amid the spare-clad forms by which they were surrounded. The moon's light, though unfavorable for the development of colour, brought out the varied contour of the trees so beautifully, that a day view of the same spot could scarcely have been more lovely. I sighed involuntarily as the idea of Equality, even in so small a corner of God's book of nature, crossed my mind. The same figure, the same dimensions, the same relative distances, the same colors, the same details in each and all of those trees, would have indeed marred the glory of that little picture, and changed an Eden into a wilderness. And why, in the mental and moral world-the fairest and the noblest of God's great volumes, must there be none of those distinctions which are so essential to the beauty of His natural creation?

As I turned my steps homeward again, I felt as we often feel, when a current of thought is suddenly arrested, or violently diverted-a kind of reaction that for the moment staggers us, and sets the mind in a whirl. I suppose it was to this feeling that I owed the hallucination which followed. The stars above and around me seemed to reel and stagger in their courses, and then hurry like “a swarm of golden bees," down, down, down headlong at a pace that made me tremble. Influenced as are all weak intellects by the Moon, they had raised, I thought, a cry for Liberty,'-and had got it! Held no longer in their orbitsbound no more to rise and set, severed from all ties that kept them in their several spheres, they were now ranging the wide universe at will, without a purpose, and without a prospect, but