must obey the Law. Every obstruction, to the
minutest point of social life, is Toryism, and
its removal is Reform. In sheer shame and
craving for a reputation for consistency, the
persons who call themselves Tories adhere to
certain broad articles of Tory faith in politics,
but they vindicate their humanity and common
sense by working sedulously for social reforms.
The only genuine Tories are the Very Old, who
should be tenderly dealt with and left to their
harmless reminiscences. The rest I take to be
mainly Humbugs or Sentimentalists."

We do not quarrel, my sentimental friend and
I, albeit we are both hot of temper and hasty of
speech. My adversary cannot argue unless he
smokes, and as he never can preserve an
incandescent tip to his cigar, a half accomplished
angry phrase, such as "Sir, you are imper—,"
or "Your language is becom—," is frequently
cut short by a placid request for a light.
Moreover, he is given to caressing his moustache and
to humming opera tunes; and it is difficult
under those circumstances for a man to get very
much enraged.

It was recently after one of these discussions
that, at home, I took a fair sheet of
paper and endeavoured to work out my theory
that we cannot stand still—no, not for one
instant, no, not any more than can the blood
within the veins or the seed within the earth
—by jotting down some new Things whose
advent I can remember as having taken place
"since this old cap was new." It is not such a
very long time ago that the cap was new and
glossy, and had a glazed peak and a golden band
to it. It is not such a very old cap now, though
it has seen some service; but it is not the cap
it was, and never will be more. I tried to
recollect the things to which we have grown so
accustomed in our daily lives, and which have
become so much necessaries of our daily lives,
that usance has begotten familiarity, and if that
has not bred contempt, has engendered, at least,
indifference. And with some reference of
retrospect to a paper I wrote eight years since
in this periodical's predecessor, called "Things
Departed," I taxed my memory to enumerate
the things among us, which have been born
and grown strong and lusty and become affiliated
to our households and are of them now, since
this old cap was new. The wonder is, that using
them so much, at present, we could ever have
done without them. Haven't analogous thoughts
ever struck you going over that wonderful
Pompeian House in the Crystal Palace? haven't you
puzzled yourself almost involuntarily as to how
the ancients managed without a Manchester for
the spinning of their toga-stuffs, without
printing-presses to disseminate the poetical works of
Messrs. Ovid, Horace, and Virgil? without
steam-engines to pump and heat and carry away
the water of the great Thermae? The best
corrective of this uneasy sensation of wonderment
is, first, to remember that an Almighty
Providence was just as busy two thousand years ago
in fitting backs to burdens, tempering winds to
shorn lambs, opening doors when others were
shut, and making days sufficient for the evil
thereof, as now; and, at a reverent distance of
appreciation, to recal the pleasant enumeration
of appliances of life which Sydney Smith
remembered since his old cap was new. Gas,
steam, braces, coach-springs, lucifer matches,
are all things of which the good canon of St.
Paul's had seen the birth and progress; and yet
Mr. Pitt lived without them. Sir Isaac wrote
the Principia without them. Johnson finished
the Dictionary, and Sir Joshua painted his
deathless portraits without them. Sir Joshua!
why he hadn't any meguilp, any patent
capsuled colour tubes, any prepared canvas from
Winsor and Newton's; yet he managed,
somehow, to produce Master Braddock and the
Strawberry Girl.

Since this old cap was new, I have seen
railways. Huskisson had been killed and George
Stephenson had walked over Chat Moss, and
with his son had built the great-great-grand-mother
of locomotives, the "Rocket;" but there
were no London railway termini when this old
cap was new. Mr. Perkins's steam coach, a
cumbrous yellow concern with the chimney
belching black smoke at the rear, a man tugging
at the steering apparatus in front, the outsides
clinging on for dear life, and the insides looking
from the windows with scared faces this famous
machine grated about the New-road, somewhere
between Paddington-green and the Yorkshire
Stingo, to the wonderment of mankind and the
despair of the commissioners of turnpike trusts.
I was reminded, oddly enough, of the steam
coach, only yesterday, when I met a huge
lumbering Bonassus of a locomotive, dragging some
tons of trucks behind it, and staggering in a
vacant manner about Agar-street, Strand. It
was called, I believe, a Traction Engine, and
will, no doubt, be useful in its generation; but
it was a sight not to be forgotten to mark the
scorn with which a smart Hansom cabman, who
was compelled to draw up behind it, surveyed
the entire concern from chimney to tender, and
the impotent rage with which the monkey in the
court suit, who stands on the tripod and fences
with his Italian proprietor, and who was then
going through his entertainment at the corner of
King William-street, gibbered and shook his lean
paw at the dusky mass. Perhaps the monkey
and the cabman, all unconscious of the impeachment,
were Conservatives, and perceived that
this exceedingly ugly and awkward Traction
Engine meant progress in the rough, after all.
For are we not to have side-walk railroads,
midway railroads, underground railroads, and flying
railroad bridges, like the bamboo causeways over
Hindoo ghauts, some of these days? There were
none of them when this old cap was new.
London-bridge, Paddington, King's-cross, Waterloo,
Shoreditch stations, existed not. How the world
slid into railway life is a marvel of marvels.
The world's people woke up one morning and
found themselves in a train. A railway language,
with a complete grammar, dictionary, and Gradus
ad Parnassum, seems to start up ready made.
Whence came—though Dean Trench would tell