concerns, is obviously gaining ground in the customs of England; and the empire of Mrs. Grundy is every day increasing in extent and au thority.

When we look back into the night of ages, and compare the first dawnings of civilization among the nations of antiquity, with the superior morality of our own days, it requires all our very best modesty to prevent us from becoming vainglorious. Think, if Lycurgus, for example, could leave his grave for a few hours and walk into one of our London police-offices, how stiffened he would be! with what complacency would he not exclaim in the words of Dante, "Nuovi tormenti e nuovi tormentati

Mi veggio intorno."

That it used, for instance, to be a received maxim of natural philosophy, when a person leaves his home for business or pleasure, he must, in order to return to it, come back again. What, then, would Lycurgus think, when he discovered that in our regard for public purity we have abrogated this law of nature, and made it penal in certain ladies, when they have walked up the street to buy a ha'p'orth of milk for their tea, to walk down it again; and the same, whether they have or have not any other means of returning to their own apartments. Alas! he would say, we blindly made our helots drunk to prove to our children the misery of intoxication. To lead them from the practice of evil, we contented ourselves with showing them examples of vice in all its wretchedness; we never hit on the expedient of hiding it from the public gaze, in order the better to teach it refinement. Is it not true that "What the eye sees not, the heart rues not," as the servant-maids say when they are more than usually careless as to the cleanliness of their cookery. No matter what is done behind the back of the public, provided there is a decent surface on society;

"Le scandale du monde est ce qui fait l'offense,

Et ce n'est pas pécher que pécher en silence;"

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and therefore to obtain this, don't mind how troublesome the law is made, how absurd in the minuteness of its regulation, how oppressive to the poor in the multiplicity of its fines. Punish the penny cigar, punish the halfpenny bun, " perish the constitution," but let surface morality live. What does it signify if an old woman or two starves on a Sunday, because she must not keep an apple-stall, or rot in prison if she does provided the legislative Malvolio is glorified in his dislike to cakes and ale, by her committal to prison, and all England is edified by the example.

How would Draco hide his diminished head, and accuse himself of mistaken lenity, could he see his brother functionary at Bow-street committing the locomotive damsel to the House of Correction, to mend her peripatetic propensities on the treadmill in company with some atrocious muffin-vender or incorrigible dustman, who has obstinately broken the queen's peace, by agitating, his nefarious bell through the streets or rather, if we must go to the bottom of things, because the parties were so lost to all sense of propriety, so utterly disrespectable, as not to possess some forty shillings to pay for their misdoings. Then, how would he chuckie when he saw the schoolboy committed, in company with the felon and the murderer, for driving his hoop on the pavement. Ah! ah! would he exclaim, even the Christians admit

that I was right in making all offences equal before the law, and allow that the mercy and forbearance which breath in their gospels, is a mistaken and impracticable philosophy.

The timing of this novel system of legislation could not have possibly been more opportune: for had the transcendental jurists been left much longer to themselves, they would, by abolishing all capital punishments, and by simplifying the penal code, have left the law without any terrors for the evil doer: whereas, in counteracting this bias, by a sufficient series of minute enactments, we now contrive to preserve the idea of justice perpetually alive in the popular imagination. Law may, it is true, be thus rendered odious to the people; but it will not on that account be the less formidable; and the dread of the law is the foundation of all social virtue. We cannot, likewise, but eulogize the refined policy of multiplying to the utmost the petty offences attackable by fine and imprisonment. time is a great element in human conduct, and idleness, as is well known, is the mother of the vices. If, then, we can only succeed in entangling the poor in the commission of a variety of expensive peccadilloes, which though legally penal, are not morally wrong, we shall not leave them leisure for committing those greater crimes which are offensive in the sight of Heaven, and destructive of the peace and prosperity of the community. In fact, if, as is reasonable to be anticipated, the poor will hereafter pass the greater part of their lives in prisons and penitentiaries, those lives must become (morally speaking) exemplary and faultless. The only thing to be apprehended is the expense; which may become so heavy, that the parish officers will find it cheaper themselves to pay the fines incurred by paupers, than to maintain the children, while the heads of families are equivalenting their five shillings' worth, in the dolce far niente of the county gaol. We should therefore recommend the early establishment of benefit societies for the mutual insurance of the werking classes against the chances of being hit by a penal; and these, if largely assisted by the voluntary contributions of the wealthy, will be found not to very far exceed a demand for the entire wages of the intended beneficiaries, in order to fully supply the necessary funds, during their imprisonment.

We trust that we shall not too violently outrage the exquisite feelings of the public in general, or of the minute legislators in particular, if in treating on a matter so exceedingly meritorious, we venture to hint a fault, and hesitate dislike, and to notice some few little oversights for correction, some supplementary enactments necessary to carrying out the system to its requisite perfection. Rome was not built in a day, and it takes nine years to make an attorney. It is a rare thing, indeed, in any department of life, to find an invention starting at once into completeness, like the armed Minerva from the head of Jove. As therefore the French discovered a ruffle, and the English added to it a shirt, or as the ancients invented coin, and the moderns improved it by a papercurrency, so we may be permitted, without an imputation of arrogance, to make our contribution to the full development of the subject, leaving untouched the halo of glory which shines round the heads of the original inventors.

It is not, for example, with the remotest intention of reflecting on the abaters of the dog-cart nuisance, that we notice the very inefficient state of their law as it at present stands. We admit the subtilty of the dis

tinction they have drawn between the tractile capabilities of the horse and the dog. Horses were made by nature, and by the writers of Bridgewater treatises, to go before carts, as the Oxford regiment of cavalry were made to wear blue; while none but a Kamschadale should think of committing the immorality of harnessing a dog. But by merely providing a simple penalty applicable to that outrage on humanity, the law, we fear, has committed a great oversight, if it has not ab solutely brought matters to a dead lock. In relieving the dogs, they should have provided a legal substitute. What are the poor to do? "Let them buy a horse or an ass," it may be said: but dogs were used by those who cannot afford that outlay, and it is a maxim of law that nemo tenetur ad impossibile. Will not humanity, as matters now stand, be shocked by some scandalous evasion of the law? Shall we not have cats yoked in the streets, and the calves of the pensive public endangered by their claws? or will not reprobates employ goats, as they now do at Brighton? or may they not buy up Mrs. Trollope's cast factory children, to put them into harness? All these possibilities should have been guarded against, and a fit alternative provided. Some great man (we don't at the moment remember his name), used to take off his hat to coach-horses, because were they to refuse their work, men would be put in their places; but something like this will too probably be the case in the matter of the dogs; and though man does not come within the purvue of societies for suppressing cruelty towards animals, we yet think that enactments are necessary, for regulating the weight of wheelbarrows, and placing knifegrinder's wheels, as well as cottonmills under a legal regimen.

There is another monstrous abuse in this kind, which by a strange fatality has been altogether overlooked, and that is the exhibition of the industrious fleas! We all know that fleas are provided with a peculiar conformation of limbs, which adapts them to the proceeding per saltum ; and nothing can be more shocking to well-regulated feelings, than the torturing processes by which these harmless little creatures must have been forced to assume that alternate reciprocation of feet which constitutes a trot. Then, again (as all our hodiernal humanity has more or Jess of an arrière pensée-a squinting at self), is there not some reason to apprehend that if the practice of harnessing fleas be unrestrained the breed may be so multiplied, that all Catafelto's "poudra" will not cleanse the land!

While upon this subject, we may be likewise permitted to remark upon the the abominable cruelty (as bad as a bull-bait) exhibited daily, by the proprietors of the oxy-hydrogen microscope: we allude to the spectacle of two water-lions tearing asunder some nameless infusorial animal, whose objections to the process cannot be supposed to be one iota less peremptory, because he is not visible to the naked eye. The rapid and convulsive wrigglings of the infusorial eels also must be taken as the signs of intense suffering; nor can there be the smallest doubt that the millions of creatures swimming in the one drop of water, thus magnified, must be put to insufferable torture, as that drop becomes evaporated during the progress of the exhibition.

Then again, to recur to matters of mere police, what has society gained by the silencing of horns, and the putting down of muffin-bells, while organs are permitted to circulate through the streets, without a

previous certificate from some constituted judge, that they are accurately in tune? We do not indeed allude to a small matter, when we call for the total suppression of "Jim Crow," and "Sich a getting up stairs;" for we are satisfied, that, with the assistance of Mr. Wakley, we should have no difficulty in proving that very many persons have been brought to an untimely end by those murderous violations of all melody: neither is it a trifle that two itinerant musicians should be permitted to indulge in a Dutch concert, by performing within hearing of each other.

But, while we are on this theme, we may as well make a clean breast of it at once, and denounce the chief oversight of the new bill, its neglect of the great nuisance of all polished and civilized societies, crying children-a nuisance that bawls loudly for redress. We pass over the nightly caterwaulings of the feline libertines, as a matter too notorious for more than a passing word; but the ululations of neglected infancy are an evil which all fathers of families (those types of every moral excellence) must deplore. Surely some very heavy and unusual penalty against nurses, wet and dry, is called for, to put down an annoyance, that meets you, like Cicero's literature, at every turn. It impedes you abroad; it leaves you uncomfortable at home; it disturbs you in your hours of business, and makes your meal-times miserable; it haunts you by day, and does not leave you asleep in the night-season. Then, it drives married men from home, and compels them to neglect their wives; while it frightens bachelors into all sorts of crimes, both of omission and of commission. On the other hand, if children cry, we may presume that they are in pain; and a severe fine will make the nursemaids attentive to take pins out of the flesh of their charges, and to abstain from over-feeding them, or at least to deaden their sense of suffering by a due exhibition of "Godfrey's Cordial." It will likewise cure the most careless of these very careless ladies, of leaving the brats with their heads dangling over their arm in the streets, exposed to the blows of butchers' trays, ladies' parasols, and other projecting personalities not pre-eminently soft and yielding.

But if the natural noises of children are subversive of the public peace, their factitious sources of auditory annoyance are not to be lightly disregarded. A penalty against penny-trumpets is very desirable, and toy-drums are evils to be suppressed. Something may be said, perhaps, in behalf of cuckoos, their noise not being an absolute cacophony, however "unpleasing oft to married ears;" but whistles and rattles should be strictly prohibited, and Jews' harps should be subjected to regulation.

Here, for the present, we must pause in our exposure, or we shall leave no room for the lucubrations of colleagues.

We shall not, however, let the subject drop; but make diligent inquiry among the old ladies of both sexes, in the hope of getting up fresh matter for a new bill for the suppression of minor nuisances, possible and impossible; which, we trust, will go far to put a stop to all the natural movements of the human body, and make it penal for any person to do any thing upon any pretext, or for any purpose, any law to the contrary, notwithstanding.

THE STORY OF A DUN.

BY LAMAN BLANCHARD, ESQ.

AMONG the members of a small private family-what advertisers call a family of respectability-duly assembled at a certain period after breakfast, the brisk warm firelight diffuses cheerfulness in spite of the obstinate dreariness of a November morning, one of those mornings that come in the character of night, and keep up a very successful imitation thereof until the arrival of the original. The comfort within, in fact, is all the brighter for the gloom without. The "guinea"-like lady surrounded by her shining "seven-shilling pieces," is lustre itself. Each has some pleasant and appropriate occupation. The lady herself is writing notes; hem-stitch absorbs the innocent daughter's mind; another pretty damsel is drawing, perhaps; a little boy loses himself in happy wonder over the history of " Lord Nelson," or the "Adventures of the White Cat;" some other member of the domestic paradise, more usefully employed than all, has an especial eye to the fire the mere stirring of which requires something of genius in that dark season ;— the horrid music-lesson, which has been unvaried during the past six weeks, and which every soul in the house, except the young learner, has been practised in for a month, is over for the day; the very cat that winks upon the rug is not more comfortable, more truly tranquil, more insensible to the approach of annoyance, than the least anticipatory of the group-when to the eyes of the Adam and Eve of the Eden, the apartment is suddenly filled with fog; the scene within and the scene without are of a colour; the guinea loses its brightness, and the sevenshilling pieces seem mere gilt fourpences. Whence comes the cloud over this happy valley? Whence the conviction in its master's heart, that every Englishman's house is not his castle-that his has been assaulted by a ruthless enemy! There was a knock at the door a minute ago; could a simple rap scare and disperse into foul fog, the golden beauty of that domestic dream! Is it the intrusion of a disagreeable visiter who means to stop to dinner that is dreaded in this quiet circle? No: it is the knock, the mere knock of a known Dun, that has instantaneously frighted the house from its propriety. One fall of the knocker only, and the mansion of the respectable family has felt a touch of earthquake. "The man from Mr. Spriggs has called by appointment."

Who is so uncandid as to deny, that the intrusion of such an applicant, at such an hour, and in such a season, is particularly vexatious.

A fine day in spring, is human nature's "best restorer"-except, perhaps, brandy in some cases. Its influence is universal. All degrees and conditions of life are participators in the bounty of the sunshine. Even the blind are conscious of something livelier than blank darkness. The patient creditor, peeping out upon the morning, feels already half-paid; the wandering beggar smiles as he interprets the glow on every face into the sign of a generosity that will give unasked; the very prisoner looks up, as at the presence of something beautiful in his dungeon; the monarch welcomes in it a treasure unpurchasable "My heart leaps up," the poet sings