Moët, and Sillery, hailing from the city of
Rheims, or the province of Champagne in
France.

What, will you be kind enough to inform me,
is to become of Ozias Bridlegoose, Esquire,
Attorney and Parliamentary Agent, of Horsenail
Buildings, Derby Street, Peccable Square?
That estimable gentleman has, for the last
twenty years, kept a Boroughs Engaged and
a Boroughs Engageable book with as much
method and regularity as a merchant keeps
his double register of bills receivable and
bills payable. He knows—he knew, at
least—to a tittle what boroughs were safe,
what counties questionable, what manufacturing
towns "no go," as clearly as a bankruptcy
assignee can distinguish between good
and bad debts. Furl the flags, doff the
cockades, silence the drums and trumpets,
and Mr. Bridlegoose's occupation is gone.
Electoral corruption is as the air he breathes.
If he have it not, he dies.

And would you deliberately and in cold
blood immolate one of the most respected
of the legal profession, brother indeed to
Mr. Serjeant Bridlegoose leader of the Sou-
western circuit, who will be a judge when
the right time comes; cousin to a
Commissioner of Bankruptcy, and nephew to
the famous old John Bridlegoose, of the no
less famous firm of Bludget and Bridlegoose,
the family, private, and confidential solicitors
to that enormously wealthy but embarrassed
peer, who, as he is said to owe thirty thousand
pounds to his tailor, must be indebted at
least half a million to his lawyers? Our
Bridlegoose, the very emperor of parliamentary
agents; the Fouché, the Jonathan Wild
of electoral police; shall he—in himself a
Great National Institution—be utterly
abolished? Has he not an army of satellites
at his elbow, as numerous as the sands,
as silent as death, as devoted as the affiliated
of the Vehmgericht, or the myrmidons of
Schinderhannes; as discreet as Pamela; as
insinuating as Sir Charles Grandison; as
hypocritical as Blifil; as ferocious as Blueskin;
as great masqueraders as Vidocq or the
late Charles Matthews; as accomplished
linguists as Pergrade or Contenson; as impudent
as Ferdinand Count Fathom; as
ubiquitous as Esmond's Father Holt; as
mendacious as George Psalmanazar : who
lie like truth for his clients, and varnish
truth over with lies for his adversaries?

These, Mr. Bridlegoose's merry men, scour
all boroughs. They stand at his bidding on
all hustings, platforms and scaffolds; in all
balconies, committee, club, and assembly
rooms. They parade all public-houses,
taverns, gin-palaces, and hotels. They have
no master but him. no behests but his, no
virtues save fidelity (on the Swiss principle of
continuity in payment), no passions (to speak
of) save drunkenness. As for Mr. Bridlegoose
he is (or was, alas!) to the full as
ubiquitous and accomplished as his acolytes.
After a late dinner in St. James's Square,
or Belgravia, where the wine has circulated
pretty freely, where do you find Bridlegoose?
In the drawing-room? Far from it. Ten
to one his next appearance will be in the
first-class carriage of a night express train,
soberly scanning the second edition of the
Globe; or, perchance, he will be tearing in
a cab through the dirty streets of Bermondsey
or Bethnal Green, or some out-of-the-way
suburb, boiling over with instructions and
packages for one of his merry men, there in
hiding; or he will be in his own paper-
crammed office in Horsenail Buildings, Derby
Street, Peccable Square, giving mysterious
orders to merry men not in hiding; but who
yet loom hazily behind the collars of cloaks
and great-coats, and from whom there seldom
issues a sound more distinct than that of an
asthmatic cough or the suppressed chink of
half-sovereigns.

Else would you find the impetuous Bridlegoose
darting into dingy chambers in the
Temple—nailing some parliamentary counsel
to his table with nails of reading-lamps, and
old port wine, and golden fees. Presto, at
almost the same time, you hear of him sliding
mysteriously into some far-off country hotel
late at night, ordering a private room and a
bottle of sherry, and sending a note by the
boots to the lawyer, or the parson, or the
barber, or the head linen-draper, that a
gentleman from Shropshire was waiting at the
George, and wished to see him, if he pleased,
directly.

What a man Bridlegoose is for cabs! Of
all men, who has so much reason to bless
Mr. Fitzroy's new Act? He has always a
cab, and is always in a cab, and yet the cab
seems always waiting at doors for him, and
the cabman seems for ever to be discoursing
familiarly to the policeman in the vicinage
concerning "the sight of papers that old cove
do carry with him, to be sure." And yet he
has a brougham of his own, which he uses
pretty frequently, and which, stuffed inside
and out with parliamentary and legal papers
and blue bags, you are pretty sure to see
waiting at the Carnack Club, guarded by a
weary groom, who yawningly complains to the
Club page of "being so much up o' nights
'cause of the governor's Parliament-house
business." It is impossible for any man to be
in more than one place at one and the same
time. That we know; reason says it; science
proves it. Lord Bacon would have told us so if
he had thought us such fools as not to have
known it without telling; yet it was currently
reported—and the evidence went far to
prove—that at the very time last winter that
Bridlegooae was managing the Ballygarret
(county) election in Ireland, he was conducting
the great Snolbury contest in Yorkshire;
that he was canvassing the electors of the
Itchingmuchty burghs in North Britain; that
he was defending the Tippington election
petition (which was successful,) before a