"He begins to think it serious," said Charles.
"Is Philip going?" exclaimed Guy, looking as if
he was taken by surprise.

Doctor Dulcamara and Monsieur Guizot may
rest assured that France will have no such
book as this, until she has the two classes
which such a book addresses. The first class,
drawn from a large and wealthy section of
the so-called religious world, which looks to
the obtrusively professed intention of a book
solely, and knows and cares nothing about
the execution. The second class, represented
by a body of romantic young ladies, whose
ideal Man (name and all) is exactly
represented by such a character as Sir Guy
Morville. We believe it was Mrs. Kenwigs who
invented the name, Morleena, for her eldest
daughter; from a kindred spirit of gentility,
we derive the masculine, Morville.

For anything we know, representatives of
these two classes may have come together in
Warminster, to be prescribed for by Doctor
Dulcamara and Monsieur Guizot. If so,
they have their reward. If otherwise,
a suspicion will, by this time, have dawned
upon them that they have been benighted
and bemuddled in the usual Dulcamarian
manner.

To go from Warminster to Bradford, which
is a long way, we are pained to notice an
appearance of Doctor Dulcamara in the
Bradford market-place, under the guise of
the EARL OF SHAFTESBURY. Very few men
of this age, if any, have done more good than
Lord Shaftesbury, or are deserving of higher
respect. We differ from him on many points
of opinion, but we hold his labours in the
highest respect. Precisely for this reason, we
are unusually grieved and mortified to find
Doctor Dulcamara in such good company.
However, here was the Doctor at Bradford,
vending an antidote against fiction in general,
and against tragedies in particular; and
THE TIMES reports the Doctor as addressing
the multitude to this amazingly quackish
effect:—

"He remembered a very hard-hearted man, a
most profligate and wicked man, but he once made
a very true remark, 'I never go to hear a tragedy,'
he said, 'but it wears out my heart.' That was just
what it did; and that was the case with all reading
of this description; he (Lord Shaftesbury) meant, if
indulged in to excess."

Now, Lord Shaftesbury, at the head of the
Lunacy Commission, knows very well that
Bedlam has often come of indulging in the
Bible to excess, and that the balance of good
and evil in anything is always to be struck,
by sane men, with a reference to the use of
that thing, and not to its abuse. The Sea,
if indulged in to excess, would swallow up
the land; the Sun, if indulged in to excess,
would consume all animal and vegetable life.
But, Doctor Dulcamara, putting off his antidote
among the crowd, puts it off anyhow
and every how, and will strike the scales out
of the hand of Justice herself, that his light
weight may pass. Lord Shaftesbury, as an
upright man, knows perfectly well, when
separated from Doctor Dulcamara, that this
story (of the feeblest and most unreliable, at
the best), has another honest and plain
interpretation on the face of it: to wit, that the
"most profligate and wicked man," whose
detestable authority is to consign to oblivion
the noblest flights of human genius, and the
Art that of all others strikes to the Soul like
Reality, could not endure a Tragedy, because
he was "a guilty creature sitting at a Play,"
and felt that it awoke the conscience
slumbering within him.

For the love of Heaven, let there be hope
that men like Lord Shaftesbury, at least, will
keep out of the company of the ubiquitous
Dulcamara! Let the Doctor go about,
addressing Athenaeums, of the Warminster,
Warminister, and other kinds; let the
Athenæums take his physic, if they like it, and feel
the better for it if they can; let the Doctor
sing duets with Monsieur Guizot, to any extent;
let him render accounts of his stewardship
without end; let him puff off altar-cloths,
altar-candlesticks, and the rubric of the
Fancy Ball; let his eagle eye start out of
his head, if it will, at the martyrdom of
King Charles the First; but let him be
held at a distance by earnest men with
definite objects before earnest minds, and
those objects tending – not to the retrogression
of their country into the dark ages, but
to its advancement in a plain road that was
opened eighteen hundred and fifty-eight
years ago.

THE GRINGE FAMILY.

I.

IF an antiquary were to amuse himself hunting
up all the queer families in the kingdom,
and then pick from each the queerest member,
and so make up a new family, queerest of the
queer, he would at the end have gotten
together pretty much such a bunch of odd
creatures as sat together on a certain October
night. A lamp of oldest machinery (ante
moderator, ante argand even,) and of dullest
oil, burnt lazily on a spindle-legged table
beside a tall old man. He had the fee, so
to speak, of that illumination all to himself
for whatever business he was about; so that
it very much presented the notion of a light
in a cave, and the other figures, who were
all held fast in the shadows, might have been
smugglers dividing their booty, or brigands
asleep, or any other denomination in the
world. Brigands or smugglers, there was
present there a barbarous crew enough, made
up of these human items:—

Tom, primogenitus and unlicked beyond
all credibility; Gill, cadet, and rather more
unlicked, if such were possible—which
exhausted the male line. There was then
Sue, primogenita in her sex; rough-skinned