disregard. Oue of the most profligate proposals of last Session for some six and twenty thousand pounds
for "the improvement of St. James' Park," met with too cold a reception to be pressed upon the house; but
the sufficiently scandalous sum of eleven thousand pounds which was voted is evidently serving for a
commencement; and the improval of the park, unless a sharp watch be kept upon it, is not unlikely to mean
the adornment of the Queen's palace with a garden abstracted from the park, shut out from the public, and
devoted to the royal nursery. But the public as well as the ministers are placed upon their guard, and in
sufficient time.

So let us hope, are the city merchants to the danger of a continued inadequate water supply in the heart
of London; seeing that a hundred thousand pounds were sacrificed at a fire in Mark Lane the other day, when
hardly as many sixpences need have been lost if water for the engines could have been obtained. So, let us add
with no inconsiderable pleasure, are a class of people that required even severer caution and warning than
ministers, merchants, and rate-payers. In Edinburgh, just after the Queen's visit, the responsible officers of
the Glasgow and Liverpool steamer Orion, wrecked in the summer off Portpatrick with a loss of more than
fifty lives, were pronounced gulty of criminal negligence by the High Court of Justiciary, and sentenced, the
captain to eighteen months' imprisonment, and the mate to seven years' transportation. The case against
both admitted of not the least doubt. The defence set up involved the old artifice of an attempt to discredit
the compasses, and to prove a sudden inset of the tide; but the jury had not the least hesitation in fixing
on the real culprits. If a doubt rest upon the verdict it is that the captain was not entitled to the
comparative mercy of his lighter sentence. Assuming the correctness of the nautical testimony, he had for
several weeks been steering a course notoriously unsafe, for the sake of a wretched and quite worthless
advantage in point of time; and, though the mate bettered his master's recklessness when left in sole charge
of the ship, the master continued as responsible for the peril incurred on that familiar coast, in that calm sea,
on that lovely summer night, as the man who stood at the wheel when the danger came. What
remains in the way of example, after unrelenting enforcement of the punishments awarded, it will become
the Board of Trade to look to, after considting certain recent acts of parliament. Had the boats been found
efficient, and the discipline of the ship proved equal to the occasion, the terrible scene of shipwreck might
have been deprived of nearly all its horror. It is perhaps hardly disconnected from this subject to add a
word on the fate of the wretched man who destroyed himself in a balloon and pony ascent from Bordeaux
the other day; and in the death of the poor child who tumbled on his head instead of his heels, in posture-making
with his father, à la Risley. There is of course no effectual protection against incidents of this kind
but in the refusal of the pleasure-seekers, for whom they are invented, to find pleasure in such unworthy
excitements. It is perhaps some set-off, however, for the discredit of the victim in the balloon case having been
an Englishman, that the holiday-makers for whom he put his life in peril belonged to another country.
Mr. Gale would hardly have crossed the channel with his pony, if Cremome had encouraged him to stay here;
or if Mr. Green's reception, in his like attempt at Vauxhall, had been a little more brilliant than it happily
proved to be.

The results of the harvest generally are up to this period better than had been looked for, and the potato
panic has ended in a not worse supply than that of last year. The country is prospering, notwithstanding
that particular classes, manufacturing as well as agricultural, feel the pinch of the transition state through
which it is passing to what we hope is the sure promise of a yet solider and more enduring prosperity.
Lord Brougham, in the interval of a little illegal amusement with which he has been disporting himself in
Westmoreland, dolefully warns the world of the unpromising condition of law in general, and of matters of
reform that have lately been taken too much out of his hands; but the world enjoys its summer holidays,
does not seem to lose heart, and is doubtless very far from despairing of that good coming time which is to
bring even popular education and law reform. It would appear at the same time very certain that Cambridge
Univereity wiII contribute little to either by the member she is about to elect to represent her interests in
Parliament. What those interests can be supposed to be, we must infer from the fact that Sir John Herschell
declines to represent them; and that the race is to be run between a man of John's and a man set up by the
smaller colleges, whose bigotry at least ought to bring them in neck and neck,whatever their college votes may
do. The Johnian is for going back to protection, and so is the man of the smaller colleges. The Johnian will have
nothing to do with the Jew, neither will the man of the smaller colleges. The Johnian will fight tooth and nail
against University Reform and the Educational Privy Council, and so will the small colleges man. Both are high
wranglers, both are decent lawyers; yet never were tweedledum and tweedledee committed to more mortal
difference than that which rages between Mr. Cowling and Mr. Wigram. Friends of the University say it
has all arisen from the contest starting up in vacation, when only the nobodies are in residence, and when the
Master of Trinity is on his travels; but a somebody might surely have been summoned, and waited for, if that
were all. Certain is it, we must admit, that London could not have supplied him, unless a police magistrate
would have served; for, since Baron Haynau went so suddenly away, these excellent individuals and the
objects of their judicial care, have had the metropolis almost exclusively to themselves. Somewhat fantastic,
too, have been their decisions now and then. While a beershop-keeper was fined £5. the other day for selling
beer on a Sunday morning, the captain of a steamer was fined only £3. for recklessness that had nearly caused
a frightful loss of life; and a "fashionably dressed" ruffian who had rioted in a theatre, and flung an enormous
cauliflower in the face of one of the actors, was simply asked to put in bail for future decency. Thus fine
by degrees, and beautifully less, justice is apt to grow. On the other hand we have to record our gratitude
to one of these gentlemen for having pithily condensed into two lines the philosophy of street-music. It was a
case of Scotch bagpipes, which have been lately added to other similar instruments of musical torture; and
the defence being that the players got their living by playing on the bagpipes, Mr. Hardwick remarked that
"they must not adopt such a mode of getting their own living as would hinder other people from getting
theirs." Having touched on legal matters it may be worth while to glance at a Dublin Exchequer Court
insurance case, in which the amount of money involved by the verdict turned out to be not greatly more
than double the amount that had to be paid to the special jurors in consequence of the trial having been spun
out to the enormous length of thirty-one days. A perfect sea-serpent of a trial!

We began with Haynau, and may end with the monster of the deep; adding a word or two on another
kind of monster. The sea serpent appeared on the Irish coast just as Haynau arrived, and as the Python
formerly visited a land more tranquil. The latter was deemed worthy of a god's intervention and