falling on it, I can discern a head as yet
unknown to me, on gold, or silver, or on
copper, but which is soon to be, they say, on
all:—an aquiline nose, a pendant jaw, a
thick moustache and imperial, and LOUIS
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, 1852.  So runs the
world. There was a Member of Parliament,
I have heard, who once seriously contemplated
bringing in a bill for the abolition of
Hansard, exposing, as that publication did,
such inconvenient discrepancies between the
opinions of honourable members from session
to session.  I wonder whether we shall ever
have a ruler, who, remembering that
comparisons are odious, will call in or deface
all the monies of his predecessors.  As it
is, a handful of small French change is a
course of lectures, in miniature, on the history
of France.

THE ENEMY.

BUCKINGHAM Palace is beset, and every
house in London is surrounded, by the force
of the invader.  Throughout the whole country
every house is in a state of siege; nay, every
coach and every omnibus has to force its
passage through a hostile force that struggles to
get entrance at the doors or windows.  We are
not only invaded, but we are subdued; the
enemy retains possession of the country, we
resist, indeed, manfully, but we resist in vain:
the enemy sways over us and holds our very
lives dependent on his breath.  This is a
reflection mournful to the sons of liberty.

What can we do against an enemy
impalpable as the most tricksy of the fairies:
that whistles at us through our keyholes;
flaps our bedroom windows, in jest, at us when
we desire to go to sleep; gets under doors
or through chinks, and slips (horrible to
relate!) down our very throats into our lungs
while we are sleeping?  We do, indeed, fight
for our liberty, but how unequal must the
combat be when flesh and blood make war
against the powers of the air.

I wish to animate my countrymen against
the common enemy.  The winter campaign,
always the severest, is approaching, and it is
time that we should begin now to concert our
plan of operation.  There is, however, always
so much harm done to the good cause in a
contest by any tendency to under-rate the
power of the enemy, that I think it worth
while in the first place distinctly to point out
with whom we have to deal.  Even in the
approaching equinox the powers of the air,
with martial blast, will storm our towns and
penetrate into the sacred recesses of our
inmost homes.  But, in their stillest moods,
now while they are idling under the warm
August sun, they never cease to shoot at us
their arrows barbed with the poison of rheum,
crick, lumbago, and the other ills which cause
the flesh to ache, through chinks and open
windows, keyholes, even chimnies that have not
been guarded by the ægis of a chimney-board.
Completely to defeat the monster Air may be
impossible in this world; but we may oppose
to his severe custody "untamed reluctance,"
and be

   "Yet ever plotting how the conqueror least
     May reap his conquest, and may least rejoice
     In doing what we most in suffering feel."

This is my counsel, and I trust I speak not
only to those of my countrymen who defy the
enemy in woollen mail, with silken shields,
when

                                        "War appears
    Waged in the troubled sky, and armies rush
    To battle in the clouds,"

while they receive the same foe, open-mouthed
when he comes down more quietly upon us.

Whenever the air moves, it means mischief,
and the air is always moving.  When we
suspect some lurking ill design, we commonly
say, "What's in the wind now?" and the
proverb points to our conviction of the very
certain fact, that there has been no good
brought by the wind on any former occasion,
and that now, therefore, none is expected.
There is a proverb, saying, "It is an ill wind
that blows nobody good," which has been
sometimes read with a forced intonation out
of its true sense.  Its true sense, of course, is
the plain and direct one, that the wind is an
ill thing which blows good to nobody.
Proverbs betray the feeling of the people, and
that the feeling of the people is against all the
movements of the air our proverbs happily
testify.  Is there anything of foul report
affecting us, we hope that it will soon "blow
over;" that is to say, the wind which has a
sympathy for evil things will, we hope, take it
up when it comes by, and put it in its bosom.
When we express how an evil deed becomes
intolerable to surrounding people, we figure
the wind as having come to it, and say
sometimes that it is "blown upon."  When
a lady is disagreeable to the slight extent
possible in members of the fair sex, the fact
is expressed by saying that "she gives herself
airs."  A kind of praise that we despise is
called "a puff."  A quarrel in a household is
by its younger members called "a breeze."
Passion is said to come "in gusts;" and many
more expressions that have made for
themselves nests upon the English tongue, will be
found by any reader who will carefully take
stock of the phrases with which his own
mouth is fitted up.  The only good idea in the
suggestion of which wind takes part is
perhaps "windfall," unexpected good fortune,
as unexpected and most happy any events
must be that associate the idea of something
fallen with our braggart enemy.

How great and powerful an enemy the air
is to the sons of earth was very well known
to the ancients with whom wisdom dwelt
Anaximenes, an ancient philosopher whom
St. Augustine, an ancient father, terms an
Atheist for his pains, regarded the air as
a sort of god, the cause of everything.  Air,