Church to the State; much less an obsequious dependence of the former, from day to day, upon the ever-changing personages of the administration. Would the Church LOSE power, or GAIN it, by resenting this humiliation? Unquestionably gain power; and not merely gain it for the episcopal order, but for every incumbent and curate, in his private sphere, throughout the land. The people would at once see their ministers in a new light; and if, at the same time, the glaring abuses of patronage were corrected, and the whole system brought under the operation of a gradual amendment, such as should concede something to the people, and absolutely exclude the merchandize of souls -the people would yield to their ministers a cordial reverence and submission, at present hardly granted to the most eminent personal worth."-p. 395.

"The actual constitution of society, the natural diversity of talents and accomplishments, as well as the differences of official rank, properly involved in a church polity, render unavoidable (nor should we think it abstractedly an evil) some considerable inequalities of dignity and emolument among clerical persons. But there must be a limit at both extremities of the scale of ecclesiastical rank: reason, and the spirit and rules of the Gospel, demand it. All ministers of Christ are, spiritually, on a footing; and they must never so stand relatively one to the other, as to render the cordial fellowship of brethren impracticable, or undesired,as well by the depressed as by the elevated members of the order. If alive to her honour and interests, the Church would take prompt means for rescuing any of her ministers from the cruel privations and humiliating embarrassments of absolute poverty. The Church is even more disgraced by the penury of many of her worthiest ministers, her poor curates, than she is by the excessive wealth of some of her dignitaries."—p. 398.

Passing over the General Inferences, which consist of some good advice to all sects, and some observations on Reform, all that remains to be noticed is the Appendix, the chief articles in which are, the Inquiry into the Source

of the Authority of the Clergy, and a collection of evidences of, and remarks on, the spirit and practices of Popery ; from both of which we have already given extracts.

We must now terminate our imperfect notice of this admirable work with one more extract, cordially and fervently joining in the eloquent aspiration with which it concludes:

"On a subject so nice as this no man will readily receive his opinion from another; and none ought to resent the opinion entertained by another. We are not, be it remembered, imputing designs, or sounding the alarm of treason and conspiracy; but are indicating only the natural tendency of principles; and we assume it as no extravagant surmise that, whatever hitherto the nations of Europe have admired, and some of them emulated in the British constitution, will instantly sustain the unbroken impetus of popular impatience should the English Church be subverted. If indeed pure republicanism be the highest political good, let us calmly watch the progress of the assault upon the Church. But if the BRITISH CONSTITUTION be good, and if we desire to uphold and to perpetuate that form of the social system which used to be thought by Britons admirable, and by the world enviable, then must we anxiously inquire whether the Church of England can and will admit that renovation of her powers, which may enable her to cope with the times, to survive the agitation of the moment, and to continue, as she has been, the guardian of our national welfare.

"First then for the sake of Christianity, and then for the sake of the country, we should desire and promote the restoration of the Church. May HE who in so many signal instances has put honour upon England, and has sustained her amid the wreck of nations, and has rescued her peace when it seemed gone, and has kept alive within her the cordial profession of his Gospel; may HE now, in as great emergency as has yet befallen her, send the spirit of wisdom and power, of moderation and charity, upon some who shall repair her desolations, and build her up for ever!"-p. 28,

I MUST have swallowed a dose of the elixir of life some day or other in mistake for a glass of champagne, or it is against all laws, moral and physical, that the fortress of my existence should have held out so long against the myriad of enemies that beleaguer it. Figure to yourself the afflictions of the man who has no other satisfaction but the committing of his woes to paper! It were easier to count a host of locusts than the foes of my peace. I am the sport and the prey of every troublesome, busy, impertiment, obtrusive, officious, presumptuous, absurd, ridiculous, disagreeable, malicious, fantastical, preposterous, mischievous, blockhead and knave in the king's dominions. It would overtask Linnæus or Jussieu to reduce the bores of my acquaintance to class and order. Sometimes have I thought of classifying them by their magnitudes, as astronomers do the fixed stars; but then it was almost impossible to say that one plague was greater than another, where all were the greatest plagues in nature. Sometimes (as I have said in a former chapter of my grievances) I have contemplated an arrangement by offices or departments, fancying myself a kind of monarchroyalty, we know, is often but a state of splendid wretchedness-having my bores of the bed-chamber, my bores in waiting, my bores ordinary and extraordinary, in short, a whole suite of coxcombs a complete retinue of dunces -as handsome an establishment of "les fâcheux" as ever graced, or disgraced, formed or deformed the court of any potentate under the sun. According to this system, my bore political (already introduced to the reader's acquaintance) is a kind of prime minister; my bore literary, a sort of poet laureate; my bore fashionable, the master of the ceremonies; my bore epistolary, a description of foreign

envoy; and my bore facetious, a revival of the good old office of king's jester. Sometimes I compare myself to Mr. O'Connell, and consider my bores in the light of an enormous tail; sometimes I liken myself to St. Anthony in the Dutch pictures, on his knees in his oratory, surrounded upon all sides with imps and demons, and all manner of grotesque and horrid shapes, mocking, grinning, pinching, pulling, and in all imaginable ways teasing and harassing the holy father; sometimes I fancy myself a bull at a ring, or

"A chained bear whom cruel dogs do bait."

A thousand guineas to the kind enchanter that would metamorphose me but for one brief minute into either of these ferocious animals!-I wouldbut let me, like Neptune, leave my vengeance to your imagination and proceed to delineate a few of my persecutors whose portraits were not in the last exhibition.

This gentleman is my bore inquisitive!--would he but take to some branch of science or philosophy--to botany, anatomy, mineralogy, or mathematics, he would certainly change the whole face of human knowledge; he would not leave a secret of nature uninvestigated, or the most private drawer of any of her cabinets unexplored. Unfortunately, however, for the advancement of learning, insignificant affairs are the sole objects of his researches: he is content with my scrutoire. His motto is "aliena negotia curo;" and I dare say I might add

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excussus propriis," for it is not possible he can be cumbered with any business of his own, or he could not find leisure to make himself so completely master of mine. He is in perfect possession of every action of my life. In his hands--and I am never out of them-I am like a criminal in one of the prisons of Philadelphia,

which are so constructed that the gaoler can observe every motion and catch every whisper of the captives in his charge. Nothing can elude the varlet's scrutiny; he rummages my writing-desk-he reads my letters were you to see him in my study tumbling my manuscripts, prying into all my accounts, receipts, and memorandums, now with his nose in my dressing-box examining my toothbrushes, now with his eye in my portfolio composed by studying my most private papers, you would swear that we were upon the terms of Pylades and Orestes; it would never once occur to you that instead of regarding him as an "alter ego," I do not entertain a more decided aversion for Machiavelli's namesake, the horned devil! I hate him, in fact, as strenuously, as with my unhappy exuberance of the benevolent organ, and still more deplorable depression of the combative, I can hate any thing. And can you blame me? Why, sir, the miscreant "puts me to the question"-you know the import of the phrase-every day of my life; he actually racks me to get at the knowledge of circumstances which it annoys me excessively to communicate, while they are not, and cannot be, of the slightest importance for him, or anybody breathing but myself, to be acquainted with. Where have you been? where are you going? these are always the first interrogatories; and then, stroke after stroke is the wedge driven into the bootyou recollect the sufferings of Macbriar until I almost expire under the torture. I am no frequenter of hells no haunter of taverns-my tailor does not inhabit St. John's-lane-I have no dealings at the sign of the three golden balls-neither kinsfolk have I, or acquaintance in Crampton-court, or in Mary's-abbey, or on the margin of the Poddle-I have no resort to the office of Paddy Kelly's Budget-in short, no man alive has less reason to be ashamed of his "whereabouts :" yet, d-n it!— one does not like-it is any thing but agreeable-nothing can be more vexatious to a man of any spirit than to be forced in this abominable way to render "a full, true, and particular account" of all his movements, visits, calls-in a word, of every action of his life-ay, and his very intentions into the

bargain to a fellow towards whom he has no other feeling but one which would lead him-were it not for an unlucky craniological mal-formation-to kick him round Stephen's-green, and regret that the city afforded no larger gymnasium for that most delightful of all the callisthenic exercises-the castigation of a bore!

You would leap with Curtius into the chasm, with Empedocles into the crater, or with Sappho into the sea, to shun the next upon my list. I place him next, because he is an exact antithesis of his predecessor: he holds the office of bore communicative in my household. An execrable peculiarity of this gentleman is, that he is gifted with ubiquity. I believe I mentioned this in a former chapter as a trait of the bore species in general: you cannot escape them by any rapidity of locomotion though you were to migrate like a woodcock-though you were to accompany the wandering Jew in all his roamings-you cannot leave them behind you--they are utterly unavoidable-they resemble Lord Peterborough, of whom it was said by Swift that he

"Shone in all regions like a star;"

they can no more be outstripped than the wind; or shaken off than one's shadow, one's conscience, or one's wife! That this faculty of omnipresence is universally an attribute of bores, I do not take it upon me to say; but this I have no hesitation in saying-it is an attribute of the specimen now on the carpet. I can establish it to a demonstration. He is never out of Dublin; yet if I leave town for but three days on an excursion of pleasure, or upon professional business, whether I travel northward, or southward, or eastward, or westward, the very first object I recognise-perhaps in the first inn on the road-is the familiar but detestable physiognomy of this caitiff. Infinitely rather, sir, would I see the face of Medusa, or the most horrible countenance that ever grinned out of the tapestry in one of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances. He knows I "take an interest in everything that concerns him." The deuce I do! he knows mare than I ever knew myself. Far as I am apt to carry the "humani nihil alienur?” principle-and I carry it often too fa

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a vast deal-you will credit me when I say, that I do not extend it to such a length as to "meddle in buck-washing," like Master Ford, or concern myself, like the retired citizen in Miss Ferrier's inimitable novel "Destiny," with the culinary arrangements of persons with whom I have no connexion or sympathy whatever, except as far as all men are descended from a common ancestor, and made of the same clay. There is quite vexation enough, and littleness enough, and nastiness enough, in the daily details of one's own domestic doings," without being made the depositary and confidante of all the petty, frivolous, nonsensical, or shabby proceedings of one's neighbours. Why should any man make me his wastebook, or use me as a kind of recordoffice for chronicling the price of his boots, the day of his nativity, the misbehaviour of his servants, the failure of his gooseberries, the eccentricities of his wife's grandmother, the robbery of his hen-roost, his negociations with glaziers, or the benefit he has derived from wearing flannel waistcoats? These are a few specimens of the kind of entries my Bore Communicative daily makes in my unhappily too retentive memory. But yesterday he entertained me an hour, while I was upon urgent business, with the pranks of one of his nephews, who smoked seventy-six cigars in one day, and laid out fifty pounds upon a summer stock of duck trowsers. When he had done with his nephew, (who, by the way, is not half so great a scoundrel as his uncle,) he told me how many jars of preserved peaches his aunt Tabitha-the second wife of his uncle Peter, and one of the Singletons, of Singleton, in the county Cavanmade last year out of her own garden: from this momentous piece of intelligence he proceeded to inform me how backward his little Tommy is in his Latin grammar. Tommy-you see how well informed I am in the minutest particulars-is ten years of age, and not yet in "Magister docet!" After this disclosure, he gave me a kind of panoramic view of the seven last years of his life-would he had spent them in New South Wales!-his life! what have I to do with his dirty life? a life that has been dedicated, with a perseverance which in any honest calling would have made him as rich as

Rothschild, to the sole object of worrying and tormenting his fellow-creatures. The vital principle seems to have been planted in him for no other purpose: he appears to have been made, like a nettle or a mosquito, only to sting. Nothing, however, exasperates me so much as the sentimental cant with which he always prefaces his communications. He has picked up out of the Annuals all the boardingschool-girl gibberish about "the luxury of sympathy," and "the intercourse of hearts," and "the converse of kindred souls," and "the bliss of unbosoming one's self to a friend," and all the twaddle that fills the correspondence of a grocer's daughter in Dublin with a linendraper's wife in Carrickfergus. "Unbosoming"-that is his favourite phrase: it is everlastingly on his lips; and it is the sure harbinger of some of those interesting pieces of information of which I have just given a sample. I cannot tell you how many odious images this word conjures up to my mind whenever I hear it. Were I to write a dictionary, I should define it"to impart something disgusting; to communicate some offensive information; a word never used except to give pain, and only by arrant coxcombs, persons of a malicious disposition, or blockheads who, as Dogberry says, if they were twice as tedious, could find it in their hearts to bestow it all upon their acquaintances." This is precisely the liberality of the miscreant in question : he "bestows it all !"—and all upon me!

Your professed story-teller is a bore; but your story-teller who never finishes a story is a bore ten times over. Tom Endless never opens his lips but to tell you some anecdote or other, apropos of something, or of nothing. You cannot name a person, or allude to an event, or mention a place, but he recollects some curious incident, or interesting particular, which you have just brought to his mind, and which, "while it is fresh in his memory," he really must relate. Tom, however, never related a whole anecdote in his life he resembles the late Marquis of Londonderry, of whose parliamentary speaking it has been said that he never concluded a sentence. Tom starts fair; but he seems to lose the scent immediately; or, other game coming in view, he cannot resist the temptation