blackened shield of Britannia. Conspiracies
dark and sinister were supposed to be lurking
among the Whigs, somewhere in a little
back-room at Boodle's. Simultaneously with
which, by a sort of chronic fatality, everyone at
White's looked (strange to tell) unmistakeably
in the blues. Conspicuous among these—
Thomas Raikes, Esquire: that ill-starred
gentleman, judging from the records of his Note-
book, groaning continually under a species of
waking nightmare of the most agonising
presentiments. Several of his associates,
moreover, seem to have administered, at this
time, to his morbid fears, rather maliciously;
some, probably participating in them to the
uttermost themselves. "Charlton," he writes,
"who dined with me to-day, said, aptly
enough, without some reform we should
have a rebellion in the country; but, with
the present extravagant plan, we shall have a
revolution." A member of the Cabinet having,
shortly before, observed most rationally,
"The Tories must concede, as we cannot
retract; the people would not let us," our
sagacious Diarist remarks immediately, with
a manifest shrug of the shoulders, as much
as to say, I told you so! "This speaks
volumes as to the dilemma in which they have
got not only themselves but the country."
Everything betokens, under his austere and
searching scrutiny, the folly of Earl Grey's
Administration.

A sympathising correspondent, Count
Matuscewitz, had written to Thomas Raikes,
Esquire, a little while previously, in
regard to the monstrous ministerial project of
a wholesale emancipation of the negroes,
reprehending it as a scheme "pregnant with
danger and bloodshed;" but adding, with a
Mawworm casting-up of the eyes, however,
"I sincerely wish I may be deceived in these
forebodings!"—when lo! at once the
dejected recipient of the letter has caught from
it the fever of the new alarm instantaneously.
A fortnight afterwards, he is swallowing all
imaginable and unimaginable kinds of sharp
things, in the shape of the Latest News
from Jamaica—another Ramo Samee bolting
knife-blades and dagger-points. "A serious
insurrection of the slaves," he scribbles down
in his journal, "which had been repressed by
the troops; but it is said that fifty estates have
been destroyed." Fancy fifty estates destroyed.
Nothing occurs but what chimes in with his
dull monotony of depression. Even a hopeful
spirit in the stronghold of Toryism fails to
inspire him with the most evanescent sense of
exhilaration. "The Tories at White's are in
spirits," he records upon one occasion, "and
begin to talk of throwing out the bill;" but
to this, quoth he, lugubriously, "Spes vana!"
Another while, he writes, "The Speaker told
me this morning that Ellice had assured him
the night before, that the Government never
was so strong as at present;" and here it is
that he claps on to the old wound which this
untoward remark has opened afresh, one of
his favourite little Gallic anodynes. "This,"
saith he, in his pet way, or, at any rate, in a
pet, "is un peu fort." He was incredulous
—the poor old-world and woe-begone Tory
—utterly incredulous of the capacity of the
Whig Reformers to do the mischief they
intended; yet, at the same instant, he
absolutely despaired of the discovery for the
doomed nation itself, of any means of extrication
from its difficulties. At one moment he
writes, somewhat as one might suppose a
reveller of Old Rome, fresh from a banquet
of the patricians, might have mused when
pausing in the Forum, and looking down
into the abyss ultimately destined to be the
grave of Curtius. In this temperament we
find him observing:

"There is much alarm in some branches of the
cabinet about the future; they begin to feel that they
have raised a power which they can never put down,—
a power that will only go with them as long as they
follow its impulse. The political unions have spoken
too loudly now ever to be silenced again, and they
will eventually overturn, not only this government,
but any other which may succeed."

Adding, almost immediately afterwards, as
though he had made his mind up for the
worst, and had fairly screwed his courage to
the sticking-place:

"The die is cast; to go back is impossible: the
tide of innovation has set in, and who shall say where
it will carry us? From this day dates a new era for
England. Placards are streaming about the streets
with 'Glory and Honour to the People!'"

"And what?" asks Thomas Raikes, Esquire,
son of the London merchant:

"What is the People? What has the people
always been? The most capricious, the most cruel,
the most ungrateful," &c. &c.

His own clay, of course, being moulded like
the rarest porcelain of humanity, out of quite
other materials—out of the holy dust from
some remote and sacred region—out of the
red earth of Mesopotamia! Evidently the
poor ecstatic tufthunter had been living so
long among the cream-of-the-cream—the
Nobs of Nobland—that he had actually
come at last to look upon himself as one
of the same divine fraternity. Metamorphosed
to that extent at least, as the caterpillar
gets coloured with the hue of the leaf
it feeds on. The People? Paugh! "Here's
the smell of the blood still!—all the
perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this!"

Mr. Raikes's terrors meantime, in the midst
of his mock-patrician disgust, increase,
apparently as the hour advances: the terrible
Reform Bill, in proportion to its drawing
nearer and yet nearer, enlarging its horrors
to his affrighted imagination, like some odious
head in a phantasmagoria:

"All parties now," he writes, "seem to agree that
we are in a dreadful state, and even the government