country levies before they entered the town.
The arrests should have been made before or
after the meeting. The arrests once made, the
meeting could no longer have been mischievous.
Rage at their own blunders, mingled with
fear, led the magistrates to give orders for a
charge that ended in the death of at least
six people, the wounding of some eighty
others, and innumerable secret casualties that
never came to light. The overt act was clearly
wanting, and that alone would have been a
pretence for the cruelty shown.

That same year the tyrannical Six Acts were
passed by that timid but oppressive statesman,
Lord Sidmouth. That very autumn, the
manufacturing classes grew more determined and
revengeful. In September there were three
days' riot at Paisley and Glasgow; in November
there were rumours of a general rising;
and early the next year the Cato-street conspiracy
was organised.

In bitter parody of the name of Wellington's
great victory, the scene of that cruel sabring of
the inoffensive Manchester workmen was
christened by the name of Peterloo.

THE URCHIN OF THE SEA.

THE storm died out, and the day was dying;
   I stood on a wet and weedy beach,
And watch'd the angry clouds still flying,
   And heard the wheeling sea-birds screech.
Something white, in a cloud of spray,
Was tossing on the watery way;
   I knew not what; I was stunn'd with the roar
Of the waters that rise and part and mingle,
Wrathfully tearing the whirring shingle
   With a heavy boom on the shore.

A thin-faced urchin stood beside me
   (I had not noticed him before);
With a hideous leer and a squint he eyed me,
   Pointing imp-like from the shore.
Sharp black eyes in a sheet-white face
Gleam'd as he pointed towards the place.
   And his hard shrill laughter pierced the roar
Of the waters that rise and part and mingle,
Wrathfully grinding the whirring shingle
   With a hollow boom on the shore.

        "Oh, have you seen,
         Would you like to see,
         Have you ever been,
         Would you like to be,
         Where the waves leap high
         As the bulging sky,
         And tumble and crowd,
         With a roaring loud,
And laugh and push, and quarrel and splash,
With a headlong run and a giddy dash
        To worry a wreck?"

The leering ill-shaped imp of the sea
   Pierced one eye so deep in mine,
And held his face so near to me,
   That he drew me over the foaming brine,
On a chill, chill wind, in a dim strange light
That gleam'd like neither day nor night—
   Over the brine, in a smoke of spray,
To the reef where the waves their rage were wreaking
Pelting and storming the dead ship—shrieking
   Like white wolves after their prey.

Round the hull I saw them leap,
   Quarrel and laugh, and bubble and shout
"I was the first the deck to sweep!"
   "I storm 'd the port! Ran in and out
         Of the wooden thing,
         With the canvas wing,
That could neither swim, nor ride, nor fly!"
"And I leapt over it!"
                 "So did I!"

One, clear'd with a bound a dripping beam,
   That held to the hull by a creaking chain,
And mimick'd the mother's drowning scream,
   While all the sea-imps laugh'd again.
   One to the other, the tale they told,
As they shriek'd and chatter'd, and groan'd, and hiss'd,
   Of the bodies that sank in the frothing cold,
Of the souls that rose shuddering up in the mist.

And when, with a crash of beam and rafter,
   She sunk in a suddenly yawning well,
Oh, then a louder and fiercer laughter
   Echoless on the waters fell!
And when again I stood alone,
   And the laughter changed to a distant moan.
Still, on the beach of weeds and shingle,
The urchin's accents seemed to mingle
   In a faint and far-off tone.

        "Oh, have you seen,
         Would you like to see,
         Have you ever been,
         Would you like to be,
         Where the waves leap high
         As the bulging sky;
         Hi! hi! hi! hi!
         And tumble and crowd,
         With a roaring loud;
And laugh and push, and quarrel and splash,
With a headlong run, and a giddy dash,
        To worry a wreck?"

And e'en when a golden light is lying
   On a soften'd, chasten'd, sorrowful sea;
And e'en when there's nought but a gentle sighing
   And a dreamy sweet monotony;
The faint tones o'er the waves still reach
Where'er I stand, on the shining beach,
   From the Urchin of the Sea. Still more
When the angry waters part and mingle,
Wrathfully rolling the whirring shingle
   With a hollow boom on the shore.

THE WORKING MAN.

MUCH has been said and written of late about the
working man, his habits, wants, vices, virtues; he
has been extolled as a hero, and decried as a
demon—credited with qualities which make the
Spartan virtues themselves look tame, and
debited with sins which would qualify him for
Pandemonium without delay; he has been made
use of by political writers as a bugbear to
terrify the timid against further concessions to
a creature who will destroy the institutions of
the country, and ride roughshod over religion,
morality, and decency, when once he gets the
chance and an extension of the suffrage, and
he has been set up as the future dominant
power of the realm, whose initiation into the
art of governing it is as well to begin now and
by easy stages, before his inheritance lapses