showing to you the troubles that a tradesman has in these days to fight with.

Hoping you will therefore not take the writ amiss,

I remain your obedient Servant,

SAMUEL STITCHINGTON.

LETTER XII.

THE GENTLEMAN'S ANSWER TO THE TAILOR.

MR. STITCHINGTON,-Is it indeed five years that I have graced your books? How fleet is life-it scarcely appeared to me as many months. Although I have never given you a bill for the amount, how have the years passed by! You will guess my meaning when I assure you it is a theory of mine, that the wings of Time are no other than two large bill-stamps, duly drawn, and accepted. With these he brings his three, six, or nine months into as many weeks. He is continually wasting the sand from his glass, drying the wet ink of promissory notes. But let me not moralise.

You want money, Mr. Stitchington? As I am exactly in the like predicament, you are in a capital condition to sympathise with me. You say you never recollect so bad a season as the present. Of course not; no tradesman ever did: the present season is always the worst of the lot, however bad the others may have been. It says much for the moral and physical strength of such shopkeepers to see them still flourishing from worse to worse: they really seem, like churchyard grass, to grow fat and rank upon decay. You touchingly observe that present profits do not pay for taking down the shutters. My good sir, then why proceed in a ruinous expense ? In the name of prudence, why not keep them continually up?

You say you never press a gentleman. Why, in familiar phrase, we never press a lemon; but then we squeeze it most inexorably. That men should go into bankruptcy, yet live and laugh afterwards, is a great proof of the advancing philosophy of our times. A Roman tailor, incapable of meeting his bill, would, heathen-like, have fallen upon his own needle, or hung himself in a bottom of whitey-brown. Now the English tradesman suffers Christian hope to play about his goose, and, fresh from Basinghall Street, dreams of golden eggs.

Whether your neighbour is right in attributing our present

social laxity to the Adelaide boot, is a matter I have no time to consider. The speculation is curious; nevertheless, rigidly to follow up the subject would take us even beyond metaphysics.

You are quite right, Mr. Stitchington, as to the revolutionary effects of the disuse of velvet and gold lace. It is not, I assure you, my fault that they are not again the vogue. If permitted I should be happy to have a dozen suits of you. Fine clothes were a sort of gentleman-made-easy: as you profoundly observe, they at once declared the man. Now, one has to work out the gentleman by one's mode and manners-at times, I assure you, a very difficult labour.

I entirely agree with you as to the cause that has lowered the consequence of Parliament-the vile, plebeian outside of England's senators. I hold it almost impossible that a nobleman can vote with a proper respect for his order unless in full courtsuit. There is a dangerous sympathy between common garments and the common people. The Reform Bill had never been carried if Lord Brougham had not worn tweed trousers. Universal Suffrage will be carried—if ever carried-by Peers in check shirts, and, as you pathetically remark, thirty-shilling I remain your obedient Servant, WALTER LE Doo.

coats.

P.S.-My humanity suggests this advice to you. Don't go to any law expenses; as your letter found me making up my schedule. An odd coincidence; I had just popped down your name as the postman knocked.

LETTER XIII.

FROM A YOUNG GENTLEMAN, DESIROUS OF ENTERING THE
ARMY, TO HIS GUARDIAN.

MY DEAR SIR,—In our last conversation, you more than hinted at the necessity of my making choice of a profession. I have again and again considered the important subject, and am at length resolved. Yes; I have made my election-I will become a soldier. I have looked about me, I trust dispassionately; I have weighed and counterweighed all other things with the sword, and found them as nothing to the glorifying steel. Do not believe, sir, that I am biassed in my judgment by the outward show and ceremonious parade of military life; no, sir,

I

although I can well believe that they have a false influence on the youthful mind, I nevertheless trust that I have too well benefited by your philosophy to confound the noble profession of arms with its holiday blazonry-its review-day splendour. The mere human clod may turn from the plough, beckoned by the fluttering ribands of the recruiting-serjeant-the clown's heart may, to his astonishment, beat to the beating sheepskin, and so beguile him into the ranks-but, sir, I trust that education has taught me a truer valuation of things, enabling me to consider the profession of a soldier in its abstract glory, in its naked loveliness. I look only at the wreath of Cæsar, and care not for the outward splendour of his legions.

Oh, sir, when I read the career of conquerors, I have a strange belief that I was born to be a soldier! I feel such a sympathising throb of heart at the achievements of an Alexander, that all other pursuits, save that of arms, seem to me poor, frivolous, and unworthy of the highest dignity of human nature. To me, soldiers appear the true lords of the earth; and other men, however rich, but as mere greasy serfs-creatures with their souls dwelling darkly in money-bags. The game of war is a pastime for gods, and man is sublimated by its exercise. And then death -death in the bed of glory-with a whole country weeping over our ashes! Is not that a prospect, sir, to quicken the blood of youth, and intoxicate the brain with the sweetest, the noblest draughts of ambition? And then, sir, the laurel, flourishing in everlasting green, and circling our memory for ever!

Nevertheless, should you wish me to delay the purchase of a commission for a few months, I trust you will permit me to visit Germany this autumn to witness the reviews. It is said that the troops expected to assemble will be the flower of the world. I know not, too, how many thousands. What a sublime spectacle! In their different uniforms-with their banners, their artillery, and their leaders-many of them with the history of the last wars cut in scars upon their bodies! I do not think the world can show a nobler sight. So superhuman in its power-so awful in its beauty!

And now, sir, having freely communicated to you my desire to enter the army, permit me to assure you that I shall devote my entire soul to the study of my duties as a soldier. They have, I know, their severity: but have they not also their rewarding sweetness? Yes, sir, for how delicious must it be-the heat and fury of the battle over-to solace the wounded, to protect the helpless! In those moments the noblest emotions of our common nature must be awakened; they must repay the warrior for toil, privation, suffering unutterable. Yes, sir-to know that in

such an hour we are lessening the anguish of a fellow-creature, must for a time elevate us beyond the common impulses of poor humanity.

Anxiously awaiting your reply-and with it, as I fondly believe, your consent

I remain, your affectionate ward,

ARTHUR BAYTWIG.

P.S.-Do not think, my dear sir, that the opinions of a certain young lady, who has always declared she would marry no one but a soldier, have had the least influence upon my determination. No, sir; not the least, I assure you.

LETTER XIV.

ANSWER OF THE GUARDIAN TO THE YOUNG GENTLEMAN.

MY DEAR ARTHUR,-I thought more highly of your discrimination. I believed that you knew me better than to make so foolish a proposition. My opinions on war and its instruments are, I know, not the opinions of the world; it would save the world—I am vain enough to think—much guilt, much misery, if they were so.

You, doubtless, believe your letter the result of an honest enthusiasm; and yet, to my fancy, it is nothing more than the folly of a boy, who, unconscious of his prompter, writes with a fiend dictating at his elbow. Yes, my boy, a fiend; he is too often busy among us-one of the vilest and most mischievous demons of all the brood of wickedness. To be sure, he visits men not in his own name-oh no! he comes to them in the finest clothes and under the prettiest alias. He is clothed in gay colours-has yards of gold trimming about him—a fine feather in his cap-silken flags fluttering over him—music at his heels and his lying, swindling name is-Glory. Strip the thing so called, and how often will you find the abhorred nakedness of a demon? Be assured of it, fife and drum make the devil's choicest music. He blows and beats-for, being a devil, he can do this at the same time-and makes the destructive passions of men twist and wriggle in the hearts of even peaceful folk, and with the magic of his tattoo drives them on to mischief, You know, people say I have strange, violent thoughts. Well!

I think every sheep whose skin is turned into drum-parchment, has been sacrificed not to the gods but devils.

You tell me that you are smitten with glory in the abstractwith its naked honour. Pooh! like a poor-souled footman, you are content to take the blows for the fineness of the livery.

You say, that when you read the history of conquerors, you yearn to become a soldier. Well, I dispute it not; there have been men made soldiers by tyranny and wrong, whose memories may, like the eternal stars, shine down upon us; these men may be envied. But I, too, have read the lives of conquerors; and, as I live, they no more tempted me to emulate them, than the reading of the Newgate Calendar would make me yearn to turn footpad or housebreaker.

At best, soldiers are the evils of the earth. The children of human wrong, and human weakness. Understand me, I would not have men ground arms, and, with quaker-like submission, cry "friend" to the invader. Nevertheless, do not let us prank up a dire necessity with all sorts of false ornament, and glorify wholesale homicide. You say war is the pastime of gods. Homer tells us as much. And pretty gods they were who played at the sport! In my time, I have known many men who, for very humbly imitating them in some of their amusements, have died on the gallows or withered on board the hulks. I trust the time will come when it will bring as great shame to men to mimic Mars, as it now deals upon the other sex to imitate Venus.

You talk glibly enough of the bed of glory. What is it? A battle-field, with thousands blaspheming in agony about you! Your last moments sweetened, it may be, with the thought that somewhere on the field lies a bleeding piece of your handiwork—a poor wretch in the death-grasp of torture! Truly, that is a bed of greater glory which is surrounded by loving hearts-by hands uplifted in deep, yet cheerful prayer. There are thoughts too— it is my belief—better, sweeter far than thoughts of recent slaying, to help the struggling soul from out its tenement.

You talk, too, of the nation's tears! In what museum does the nation keep her pocket-handkerchiefs? Depend upon it, nations that love to fight, are not the nations that love to weep. I grant it; many a fine, simple fellow, has died in the belief of being wept over by his country, who has nevertheless been shamefully defrauded of his dues. My dear boy, never sell your life for imaginary drops of water. And then you rave about laurel—an accursed plant of fire and blood. Count up all the crowns of Cæsar, and for the honest, healthful service of man, are they worth one summer cabbage?