machinery. Crompton's mules and Hargreave's
spinning jennies will be preserved as curiosities
in museums some day. And we go maundering
on about things being in their infancy in this
old old world, till our hair falls off and our teeth
fall out, and we, too, are in our infancy, and
Goody Crossbones comes and tucks us up, and
gives us a spoonful of that Daffy's Elixir which
lasts us till Trumpet-time.

Gutta-percha is another of the things that
have been manifest in street shops, since this
old cap was new. We got on very well without
it, as the generation that preceded us got on
without india-rubber; but, it is the old story
over again, and gutta-percha is now a necessary
of life. I hope there is a huge underground
store of slabs of the material somewhere kept in
reserve like the bullion in the Bank cellars, for
if the supply were to fail we should soon have
to sing the song "It's O! what will become of
us! O what shall we do?" Gutta-percha soles
for boots and shoes, gutta-percha picture-frames
and images, gutta-percha baths, pipkins, vases,
(t)oys,cups-and-balls, goblets, life-preservers. And
(t)wenty years since, nobody had heard of gutta-
percha, or knew where the Gutta-percha Islands
(if any) were. Gutta-percha is in immense
request for walking-sticks and riding-whips, and,
ah! it is strange how very soon mankind become
habituated to things that can be turned to a
wicked and cruel use. Within eighteen months
after the introduction of this useful substance
into civilised life, a woman was tried in India
for the murder of a child by beating it to death
with a gutta-percha whip. She had found out
the tough, pliant qualities of gutta-percha in a
trice—the Jezebel. But it has been turned to
nobler purposes, and married to substances as
marvellous. See yon dandy who, among the
charms at his watch-guard, carries what appears to
be a little cylinder of chocolate, with tiny pips
or spangles of copper at the summit and base.
That is a tiny toy fragment of the Atlantic cable,
wire incased and isolated by gutta-percha. Once,
twice, the great attempt has failed, but it will
be renewed again, and must eventually succeed.
The Atlantic cannot suffer the puny British
Channel, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean,
to laugh her to scorn. The cable must be laid,
and gutta-percha and wire safely submerged
beneath the roaring waves will tremble at the
thoughts of men, and carry from world
to world the tidings of the greatest marvel that has been
accomplished since the oldest human cap was
new.

It would be easy to multiply examples,
but who would have the patience to listen
to them? Some doctors tell us that we
change our corporeality once in every seven
years, and that we have not the same bones,
muscles, sinews, that we had then. 'Tis as cer-
tain that our lives themselves are changed, and
in the manner of them different every year, as
that the days follow and do not resemble one
another. "Where is the life that once I led?''
sings madcap Petruchio in the play. Where
indeed, are the lives we have led? We can live
them no more, no, not one iota, one moment,
one fractional spark of their time again. I set
little store by Fashion and its changes, by the
sleeves that were long yesterday having given
way to the sleeves that were short thirty years
ago. Once the "Lancers" as a dance was
fashionable, then it sank into desuetude, then it
was revived again, and became doubly fashionable.
This chopping and changing and wheeling
about, and coming back again to the starting-
point, is worthy of Fashion: fashion in dress,
diet, reading, and the bowing and scraping
customs of society. But this paper would
have been written in vain had I not
endeavoured to maintain that we see every year
and every day, new Things, that are built up on
the ruins of the effete and useless past, that
suffer opposition for a time, but progress, and
wax strong in the land, and ultimately obtain
and prevail. Our state is no millennium,
Heaven in its justice knows; but every year sees
a bad old Thing disappear, and something new
and smiling in its place. Not that the new
things are perfect. Damp and unseasoned
as in their youth they must be, the weeds and
fungus and mildew will cover them with
lightning rapidity if the greatest vigilance be
not displayed. Witness railways, photography,
gutta-percha, all attacked by foul parasitical
plants almost so soon as they were known. But
it is the greatest argument against Finality that
few things stand so much in need of Reforming
as Reform itself. When there is nothing left
to Reform and we have Perfection, not in
sentimental theory, but in truthful practice,
Conservatives and Radicals may shake hands, for the
Millennium will have arrived, and the caps that
were old shall be made new again.

                   THREE PHASES.

                            PHASE I.

FAR o'er the azure depths, in which the earth
Reposes now as at its primal birth,
Imagination takes a daring flight,
And penetrates to realms remote and bright.
Thought chases thought, and in the crowded race,
A bridge of beauty quivers over space;
An arc created in youth's golden dreams,
As fragile as the floating web which seems
A skein unravelled from an Iris-bow,
To glisten on the summer air below.
But tho' so fragile, o'er it fancies fly,
And mock the limits of earth's boundary;
Within the furnace of the brain they burn'
And darting upward into space, return
Bright with attrition of some lustrous sphere,
Or laden with the treasures gathered there.
Or some have caught, from wing of astral breeze,
The mystic whispers of the Pleiades,
And then, deep-shadowed in youth's glances, dwell
Those dreamy looks the painter loves so well.
But other fancies from his teeming brain,
Fly o'er the void, and ne'er come back again:
They find within that far ethereal sea,
Beauty with theirs, in strange affinity;
A force mysterious lures them to the shore,
And they are lost to youth for evermore