the personal description of Magdalen in Miss
Garth's letter. With a daring ingenuity which
even Captain Wragge might have envied, Mrs.
Lecount had found her instrument for exposing
the conspiracy, in the unsuspecting person of the
victim himself!

            SMALL-BEER CHRONICLES.

WHERE is the historian of our social life?
While the great events of the History of Europe
are duly recorded; while the diplomatic struggles,
the commercial transactions, the political
progress, of the civilised world, are discussed,
reviewed, and commemorated; does any one note
down the social changes which follow the
progress of those greater developments, which are in
some sort brought about by them, which may
perhaps help to elucidate them, and which, even
if they do not, are in themselves sufficiently
interesting to have an historian of their own?
Where is the Registrar-General who shall from
time to time furnish a report how the great
nation whose public doings are so adequately
recorded, behave in the seclusion of private life?
Where, in a word, is the Chronicler of the
Country's Small-Beer?

Here he is, at the reader's service.

Whither are we tending? In manners, in
morals, in literature, the drama, art, domestically?
In our health, our temper of mind, our
habits of life, the nature of our amusements? Is
all going on right, or are there any little decay
spots in our constitution which might be
eradicated with advantage before they spread? Is
any disease threatening us just now: not a great
plague of London, but some lowered tone of the
system generally?

The last fifteen or twenty years, which have
wrought great alterations in the world at large,
have brought about corresponding changes in
our social existence. The changes have not
been all on a grand scale. There have been
smaller alterations too. Change, however, there
has been in every direction. We are no longer
the same people. The sun has set on many
virtues of the olden time, and on many
vices. Ladies are no longer the same, gentlemen
are no longer the same. Costume has
altered. Manners have altered. Form of speech
has changed. The external aspect of our towns,
our mode of getting from one town to another
—all these things and many more have gone
through great changes; nay, the very form
which the age's greatness has taken, is itself
new, and manifested after a sort that would
have astonished our forefathers not a little. But
here is a subject for the Chronicler of
Small-Beer—OUR GREATNESS.

He would be a poor officer if he had nothing
to say in connexion with so important a
subject, so grave a national symptom, as the
Great Exhibition of 1862. The public tongue
is not always easy to get a glimpse of. Here
it is exposed to our scrutiny. It is hard to
get one's middle finger on the public pulse.
Here it is beating away, in such an exposed
predicament, that one can test it to half a
second.

The biography of a nation—nay, the history
of the world itself, for we may as well go to
work on a grand scale while we are about it—is
in some respects comparable to the life of an
individual. As the man has his infancy, his
manhood, his maturity, his decay, so has the nation
and the world. As the man passes through a
series of phases and developments, putting off
one and assuming the next, shedding one skin
and getting another—which is his right and
wholesome career—so it is with the nation and
with the world. The world passes on from stage
to stage, and from phase to phase. Woe to the
people which should fail so to advance! Woe,
and double woe to the individuals who would
hinder the advance. The car of progress shall
crush them, and they deserve it. (There is,
by-the-by, a High Church Court in the Great
Exhibition—but we have not got to that yet. We
shall have some purgation to propose in
connexion with that court by-and-by.)

To resume our comparison of the world with
the man, and adhering still to the analogy
between the two, one's first natural inquiry would
be: How old is the world now? This is a difficult
question to answer, but, on consideration,
we are disposed to reply that, though not as
Falstaff says, "clean past its youth," it is just
touching on the border of middle age. Estimating
the duration of the man's life at seventy
years, and continuing our original comparison,
we should judge the world to be about
five-and-thirty, or from that to forty. The world,
then, is no longer in its first youth. Its
illusions are over, it is grown up, it has
been through romance, and has become
practical. Its long minority is over, its painful and
severe education. Its early youth when it put
on armour and went to the relief of the
distressed damsel is gone. It has lost its taste for
jingling spurs, and waving plume, and coloured
jerkin. It dresses in sober broadcloth. It no
longer makes pilgrimages and shuts itself up in
monasteries, and takes vows of poverty. It
builds model lodging-houses, and, when its
sympathies are moved by a touching tale, sends a
Mendicity officer to ascertain that all is as
represented, before administering relief. The world
is sensible and cautious, it looks before it leaps.
The gilt is off the gingerbread, and that comestible
appears for what it is.

And surely all this corresponds very much
with the career of the average man. His life
changes, his tastes change, and with so much of
regularity that it is not difficult to predict at
what particular epoch the taste for cricket-bats
will be succeeded by a taste for clothes, for
jewellery, for dancing, for dinners, for
money-making, for domestic life, for hospitality, for
excelling in wine, for retiring to the country,
for building, for possessing land. Each of these
phases the man passes through, and as he arrives
at the new one, the last is abandoned.

Now, the analogy between this progress of the
man and that of the world must not be pressed