array, by the side of Sayers himself. No tongue may tell the orgies
enacted, with the aid of French cooks, Italian singers, and foreign
artists of all sorts, in the gilded saloons of Park Lane and Mayfair.
Suffice to say, that in them the worst passions of human nature have
full swing, unmodified by any thought of human or divine restraints,
and only dashed a little now and then by the apprehension that the
slaves may rise, and make a clean sweep of the metropolis with fire
and steel. But n'importe--Vive la bagatelle! Mario has just been
appointed prime minister, and has made a chorus singer from the Opera
Duke of Middlesex and Governor-General of India. All wise men and
all good men despair of the state, but they are not permitted to say
anything, much less to act. Mr. Disraeli lost his head a few days
ago; Lords Palmerston and Derby lie in the Tower under sentence of
death; Lord Brougham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Mr.
Gladstone, opened their veins and died in a warm bath last week.
Foreign relations will make a still greater demand on the reader's
imagination. We must conceive of England no longer as


"A precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive of a house."


but rather as open to the inroad of every foe whom her aggressive and
colonizing genius has provoked. The red man of the West, the Caffre,
the Sikh, and the Sepoy, Chinese braves, and fierce orientals of all
sorts, are hovering on her frontiers in "numbers numberless," as the
flakes of snow in the northern winter. They are not the impotent
enemy which we know, but vigorous races, supplied from inexhaustible