I suppose that your chapter on the law of
this land is the result of a profound study of
the statutes at large and the "Reports of
Cases argued," &c.; for students of your
nation do not take long for that sort of thing,
and you have been amongst us at least three
months. In the course of your "reading
up " you must doubtless have perused the
posthumous reports of J. Miller, Q. C.
(Queen's Comedian). There you doubtless
found the cause of Hammer v. Tongs, which
was an action of tort tried before Gogg, C. J.
Flamfacer (Serjeant)—according to the
immortal reporter of good things—stated his
case on behalf of the plaintiff so powerfully,
that before he could get to the peroration,
said plaintiff's hair stood on end, tears
rolled down his cheeks in horror and pity
at his own wrongs, and he exclaimed, while
wringing his pocket-handkerchief, " Good
gracious! That villain Tongs! What a terrific
box on my ear it must have been! To think
that a man may be almost murdered without
knowing it!"

I am Hammer, and you, Mr. Rollin,
are Tongs. Your book made my ears to
tingle quite as sharply as if you had actually
boxed them. I must, however, in justice to
the little hair that Time has left me,
positively state that, even while I was perusing
your most powerful passages, it showed no
propensity for the perpendicular. I felt very
nervous for all that; for still—although
I could hardly believe that a French
gentleman residing for a few months in the
neighbourhood of Leicester Square, London,
could possibly obtain a thorough knowledge,
either from study or personal observation,
of the political, legislative, agricultural,
agrarian, prelatical, judicial, colonial,
commercial, manufacturing, social, and educational
systems and condition of this empire—yet,
from the unqualified manner in which you
deliver yourself upon all these branches, I
cannot choose but think that your pages
must, like certain fictions, be at least founded
on some fact; that to have concocted your
volume—of smoke—there must be some fire
somewhere. Or is it only the smell of it?

For, Sir, even an alarm of fire is
unpleasant; and, to an elderly gentleman with
a very small stake in the country (prudently
inserted in the three per cent. consols), reading
of the dreadful things which you say are
to happen to one's own native land is exceedingly
uncomfortable, especially at night; when
"in silence and in gloom " one broods over one's
miseries, personal and national; when, in fact,
your or any one else's bête noire is apt to get
polished off with a few extra touches of blacking.
Bless me! when I put my candle out the
other night, and thought of your portrait of
Britannia, I quite shook; and when I lay
down I could almost fancy her shadow on the
wall. Even now I see her looking uncommonly
sickly, in spite of the invigorating properties
of the waves she so constantly "rules;" the
trident and shield—her " supporters" for ages
—can hardly keep her up. Grief, and
forebodings of the famine which you promise, has
made her dwindle down from Great to Little
Britain. The British Lion at her feet is in the
last stage of consumption; in such a shocking
state of collapse, that he will soon be in a
condition to jump out of his skin; but you do not
point out the Ass who is to jump into it.

Fortunately for my peace I found, on reading
as she is, but Britannia seen by you, " as
in a glass darkly "—as she is to be—when
some more of her blood has been sucked
by a phlebotomising Oligarchy and State-
pensionary; by an ogreish Cotton lordocracy;
by a sanguinary East India Company, whose
"atrocious greediness caused ten millions of
Indians to perish in a month;" by the servile
Parsonocracy, who " read their sermons, in
order that the priest may be able to place his
discourse before the magistrate, if he should
be suspected of having preached anything
contrary to law;" by the Landlords, whose
oppressions cause labourers to kill one another
"to get a premium upon death;" and by a
variety of other national leeches, which
your imagination presents to our view with
the distinctness of the monsters in a drop
of Thames water seen through a solar
microscope.

But, Sir, as Mr. Hammer said, " to think
that a man may be almost murdered without
knowing it! " and so, I say, (one trial of your
book will prove the fact) may a whole parish
—such as Tooting—or an entire country—
such as England. If it had not been for your
book I should not have had the remotest
notion that " English society is about to fall
with a fearful crash." Society at large, so
far as I can observe it (at Tooting, and
elsewhere), seems to be quite innocent of its
impending fate; and if one may judge from
appearances (but then you say, we may not),
—we are rather better off than usual just
now: indeed, when you paint Britannia as
she is at the present writing, she makes a
rather fat and jolly portrait than otherwise.
In your "Exposition" (for 1850) you say: "The
problem is not to discover whether England
is great, but whether her greatness can
endure." In admitting, in the handsomest
manner possible, that England is great, you
go on to say, that " Great Britain, which is
only two hundred leagues long, and whose
soil is far from equal to that of Aragon or
Lombardy, draws every year from its agriculture,
by a skilful cultivation and the breeding
of animals, a revenue which amounts to more
than three billions six hundred millions francs,
and this revenue of the mother-country is
almost doubled by the value of similar
produce in its colonies and dependencies. Her
industry, her commerce, and her manufactures,
create a property superior to the
primal land-productions, and all owing to
her inexhaustible mines, her natural wealth,