people lower their tone, and hope that the common
danger may ultimately unite Whigs and Tories to
resist the common enemy. They have done the
mischief, and feel too late their incapacity to remedy it."

Continuing thus, a little further on:

"Glad would the government now be, if they could
dissolve the political unions; but of this there is little
chance; on the contrary, success seems only to have
raised their tone, and Lord Grey will find that he has
used a dangerous auxiliary, who will only serve under
him as long as he will lead them on to further
conquest. They have got their reform; what will be
their next war cry? The repeal of the Corn Bill,
which will reduce the income from land one-half.
Will that satisfy them? No! Then comes," &c.
&c. "annual parliaments, ballot."

Observing in a similar strain, when the last
faint Tory hopes that the bill might be
quashed, or at any rate amended, have been
finally dissipated:

"A new era may be dated from this day for
England, and who can tell the changes that may
ensue? The House of Peers as a deliberative body is
trampled under foot; it never again can be a check to
popular innovation, as the same threat of a fresh
creation may be used by a reckless minister to carry
any other point in opposition to their opinion and
feeling."

But, ah! the secret peeps out at last, the
secret of this intense political excitation in
the mind of the exquisitely tasteful and
consummately refined West End diner-out. It is
in the middle of the Reform agitation, when
Thomas Raikes, Esquire, enters in his diary
this startling but wholly unintended revelation,
—"I do not think," he says, "that in all my
experience I ever remember such a season in
London as this has been; so little gaiety, so
few dinners, balls, and fêtes." The murder
is out—à bas the Reform Bill, away with
the Whigs, down with Radicalism! No
wonder the sleek Sybarite abhorred a
movement carrying such desolation and
languor into the salons of Mayfair, and to
the kitchens of Belgravia. No wonder he
exclaimed, when commenting on Lord Grey
with such bitterness, and originality: "He
has sown the winds, and must reap the
tempests." Or that, repeating himself in
his sorrowful indignation, he should cry out
with the guttural voice of a well-fed
Cassandra, "From this day commences a new
era for England"—This Day being the date
of the dissolution of the last unreformed
parliament. He very considerately obliges
us upon the opposite page to the one containing
the last-mentioned most touching
ejaculation, with his own axiomatic definition of
the Great End of all Good Government,
namely,—To combine the maximum of liberty
with the minimum, of democracy. (Something
tantamount to, The Wide Ocean, with
as little water as possible!) It is a
philosophical and statesmanlike epitome of his
political creed, worthy of so extremely well-
preserved a frequenter of White's and the
Carlton.

It is positively affecting to note that the
first shock of the consequences produced by
this miserable Reform Bill, upon the nerves of
Thomas Raikes, Esquire, he himself indicates
with a spasm of loathing, when he observes
that, "the bone-grubber, W. Cobbett, is
returned for Oldham," and, a little lower down
the same page, that "the famous pugilist and
better at Newmarket, Gully, has been
returned for Pontefract." A month later, and
this revolting parliament has actually
assembled at Westminster. What is the
earliest anguish of it to our afflicted Diarist?
"The first object which presented itself,
was Mr. Cobbett seated on the Treasury
Bench with the ministers; from which he
refused to move, as he said he knew of no
distinction of seats in that house." The
wretchedness of all this being to Thomas
Raikes, Esquire, not so much its revolutionary
aspect, as its abominable vulgarity. In
testimony of which he makes the following
illustrative remarks afterwards upon (as will be
seen) high authority:

"Sir Robert Peel said to me that he was very much
struck with the appearance of this new parliament,
the tone and character of which seemed quite different
from any other he had ever seen; there was an
asperity, a rudeness, a vulgar assumption of
independence, combined with a fawning deference to the
people out of doors, expressed by many new
members, which was highly disgusting. My friend R——,
who has been a thick-and-thin reformer, and voted
with the government throughout, owned to me this
evening that he began to be frightened."

So atrociously vulgar, in point of fact, is
the whole transaction from first to last, that
he ultimately arrives at the deliberate
conclusion that, "none can deny that a great
revolution in the state is advancing."
Explaining the character and tendency of that
revolution thus: "The aristocracy are hourly
going down in the scale; royalty is become a
mere cipher." Finally, he expresses himself
explicitly in these appalling words:

"The revolution so long predicted seems to be
approaching. No real government can henceforward
exist in this country."

In reality, he appears to have thought
pretty much as Pozzo di Borgo thought in
eighteen hundred and thirty-four: to wit,
that, "the British constitution of king, lords,
and commons, which had for ages been the
admiration of the world, had been destroyed
by a stroke of the pen:" that, "the only
government which remained for England was
the reformed House of Commons, or, in other
words, a democracy." Nevertheless, Thomas
Raikes, Esquire, survived until the third of
July, eighteen hundred and forty-eight, when
he peacefully expired in the seventieth year
of his age at Brighton, leaving his fatherland
still out of the clutches of an untameable