the Chinese would have more silver at
command to purchase our cutlery, cottons,
machinery, and other goods. And as to your
India: let the Company make canals, railways,
and telegraphs; let them develope
the immense resources of that rich country;
let them, above all, encourage the
growth of cotton—and they would soon find
that the opium revenue might be dispensed
with.

On the other hand, the objector is objected
to thus: You over-rate the ill effects of opium;
opium-smoking is deemed by medical men
not so pernicious as opium-eating, since many
of the worst qualities are softened by the
processes the drug undergoes; and to that
extent the Chinese are in better case than
the Turks. Smoked in moderation, opium
neither produces dreams nor disturbs the
mind; it is served round, in smoke-whiffs, at
Chinese entertainments, as wine is in
England. Bear in mind that opium is provided,
as one of the naval stores, in Chinese
emigrant ships; that the highly coloured
accounts of the evils of opium have been
written by men who have neither tasted nor
smoked it themselves; that a drunkard,
whatever else may be said, is more violent,
maudlin, and disgusting than an opium-smoker.
As to the ruinous effects of excess,
these are observable in all indulgences, and
should not be laid specially to the account of
opium; and if you were to check or prohibit
this drug, a craving would arise for some
other stimulus, like as in England, where an
intemperate advocacy of temperance often leads
to a secret indulgence in something fully as bad
as ardent spirits. The mandarins themselves
smoke opium, and they take bribes, and they
allow pipe-selling shops and opium-smoking
shops in the open streets in enormous numbers.
How, therefore, could you stop the trade?
Smugglers would be too strong for you under
such circumstances. You censure the East
India Company as a great corporation
unworthily deriving revenue from the sale of a
poisonous drug to an infatuated people; but
remember these three facts—that the
Company have no control over the demand for
opium; that if the Company withdrew from
the trade, or rather from the culture in
India, China would probably be flooded with
opium more in quantity and worse in quality
than at present; and that as the opium
revenue is now five millions sterling annually,
you cannot fairly demand of the Company
such a sacrifice without a previous re-adjustment
of the strange relations existing between
the Company on the one hand, and the Crown
or the nation on the other.

The reader will find the opium question one
not to be answered with off-hand readiness;
and on that account we have presented
above, the chief arguments used on either
side, that he may, at any rate, appreciate
the largeness and complexity of the matter.
It is safe to predict that opium will have
something to do with any future settlement
of the relations between the barbarian English
and the Celestial Empire.

BÉRANGER.

A PLEASANT picture has recently died out
like a dissolving view in one of the stately
streets of Paris—at number seven in the
Rue de Vendôme. A quaint and beautiful
group, long familiar to us all, has there,
but just now, been abruptly scattered. The
central figure in it was buried with great
pomp on the seventeenth of July under the
sacred dust of Père la Chaise. And yet that
group, or we are much mistaken, will very
long survive in the world's remembrance.
It was one in many ways quainter even
and more beautiful than any with which
the eccentricities of genius have hitherto
rendered us so strangely and yet so
intimately acquainted in the animated and pictorial
records of literature. Quainter even and
more beautiful than that glimpse we catch in
one direction of Cowper in his velvet day-cap
and brocaded gown sauntering among
his tame hares, over the green lawn at
Olney! Or, yonder again, that other of
white-haired Sir Walter in his leathern gaiters
and his "carvelled" chair, seated among
the shaggy deer-hounds in the laird's writing
room at Abbotsford! Or Voltaire, with a
face wizened and wrinkled like a last
autumn's apple, tripping with a mincing
step and a lacquered cane, with a stereotyped
sneer on his lips and an everlasting
scorn in his eyes, among the box hedgerows
and quincunxes of Ferney! Or
Châteaubriand, brooding with dreamful eyes
under his disordered locks, in the midst of
the wizard-conclave of cats littered habitually
about his chairs and tables, among his books
and manuscripts! But this group—the group
of Passy and the Rue de Vendôme? Ah,
what a charming group it was, what a
picture it made, how it still contrives to
shine out vividly before the mind's eye in
the dim perspective of one's remembrance!

Loitering among his flower-beds, or seated
by his garden-porch, see dear old Pierre Jean
de Béranger! A comfortable old gentleman
to look upon,—clad after the homeliest
fashion in an ample and broad-skirted coat,
rather worn, it must be told, and even
threadbare. Has he not sung of it in one
of his most famous ditties? An easy waistcoat
and loose-fitting trousers, altogether
reminding one of that preposterously good
line in Rejected Addresses:

      "Loose in his gaiters, looser in his gait."

His feet thrust into slippers trodden down
at heel; his head bald and smooth, and
glossy as appears somehow to befit best your
true bacchanalian singer; a very

      "Beaded bubble winking at the brim!"

bald, and smooth, and glossy, as the sculp-