which the life has gone, and into which
putrefaction has come. On common lips we
perceive it to be a thing of no meaning, and
on lips of authority we perceive it to have
gradually passed into a thing of most
pernicious meaning.

For, what does it mean? What is it? What
has it come to? "My good man, John Bull,
hold up your hand and hear me!  You are
on no account to do anything for yourself.
You are by no means to stir a finger to help
yourself, or to help another man. Law has
undertaken to take care of you, and to take
care of the other man, whoever he may be.
You are the foremost man of all this world,
in regard of respecting the Law. Call in the
Law, John, on all occasions. If you can find
the Law round the corner, run after it and
bring it on the scene when you see anything
wrong; but, don't you touch the wrong on any
consideration. Don't you interfere, whatever
you see. It's not your business. Call in the
Law, John. You shall not take the Law into
your own hands. You are a good boy, John,
and your business is to be a bystander, and a
looker on, and to be thought for, and to be
acted for. That's the station of life unto
which you are called. Law is an edge-tool,
John, and a strong arm, and you have nothing
to do with it. Therefore, John, leave this
all-sufficient Law alone, to achieve everything
for you, and for everybody else. So shall
you be ever, ever, the pride and glory of
the earth; so will we make patriotic speeches
about you, and sing patriotic songs about
you, out of number!" So, by degrees, it is
our sincere conviction, John gets to be
humbugged into believing that he is a first-rate
citizen if he looks in at a shop-window while a
man is being murdered, and if he quietly leaves
the transaction entirely to Law, in the person
of the policeman who is not there. So, when
Law itself is down on the pavement in the
person of the policeman, with Brute Force
dancing jigs upon his body, John looks on
with a faith in Law's coming uppermost
somehow or other, and with a perfect
conviction that it is Law's business, and not his.

Extreme the second:

Technicalities and forms of law, in reason
are essential to the preservation of the
liberties and rights of all classes of men.
No man has a greater or lesser interest
in them than another, since any man may
be, at any time, in the position of needing
impartial justice. But, in its unreason,
Westminster Hall is a nuisance; and,
supposing Westminster Hall in its unreason
conspicuously to back up this grievous error
of John's, and conspicuously to supply him
with a new distrust of the terrible
consequences of his not leaving murderers with
blood upon their hands to be taken solely by
the Law, Westminster Hall would be a very
great nuisance and a well-nigh insupportable
nuisance. Supposing Westminster Hall to
make this mischievous idiot of itself at a
very critical time and under very famous
circumstances, before the Parliament Street
Murder was committed; why, then
Westminster Hall might, in a pictorial representation
of that terrible cruelty, be reasonably
represented as holding John's hands while he
looked in .at the window, and as menacing
John from interfering.

Will the reader who may not remember
the facts, look back to what Westminster
Hall said about the case of one Barthélémy,
who, having had the misfortune to murder
an old gentleman in Warren Street, Tottenham
Court Road, was escaping over a garden
fence, when, being collared by a meddlesome
individual laboring under the absurd idea
that he ought to stop a Murderer as Law
was not there to stop him, he became
virtuously indignant, and shot that meddlesome
person dead? In that case, which attracted
great attention, Westminster Hall solemnly
argued and contended before LORD CAMPBELL
that the meddlesome man shot dead, had no
right to stop the Murderer, and that the
Murderer had a right to shoot the meddlesome
man shot dead, for stopping him!
Before as upright and as sagacious a Judge
as ever graced the Bench, this almost
incredible absurdity could not prevail, and
Westminster Hall was reduced to the last
feeble resource of moaning at the clubs until
the ill-used Murderer was hanged.

Turn from these two extremes to the
window in Parliament Street; see the people
looking in, coming up, listening, exchanging
a word or two, and passing on; and say
whether, at the close of the year eighteen
hundred and fifty-six, we find for the first
time Smoke without Fire.

A JOURNEY DUE NORTH.

HEYDE'S.

THE widow Heyde is dead, and Zacharaï
reigns in her stead; but Heyde's is
still: even as Tom and Joe's coffee-houses
in London are still so called, though Tom
and Joe have been sleeping the sleep of the
just these hundred years, and Jack and
Jerry may be the tapsters now, in their
place. So Heyde, being dead, is Heyde still.
Le roi est mort!  vive le roi!

That beefsteak and trimmings with which
on board the little pyroscaphe that brought
me to this Vampire Venice—this Arabian
Nightmare—this the reality of Coleridge's
distempered, opium-begotten Xanadu; (for
here of a surety lives, or lived, the Kubla
Khan who decreed the  "stately pleasure
dome, and possessed the caverns measureless to
man, through which ran that River down to
the sunless sea:") that beefsteak and
trimmings, rouble-costing, with which, coming to
Xanadu—I mean St. Petersburg—I was
incautious enough to feed the wide-mouthed
Petersen,did not turn out wholly unproductive
to me. The quality of that beefsteak and
etceteras was not strained. It may, or it may not