IMPENDING- RUIN. OF THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION.
A GREEN heart and a grey head. form one of the rarest but most charming combinations with which the experience of life makes us acquainted, and it sometimes turns up just where it would. be letist looked fur. An. instance of this sort has recently occurred, and the fortunate genius who has evoked it is none other than 011E Prime Minister,—who must be at least as much surprised at his own success as other folk will undoubtedly be. Believe it, reader, or not, the fact remains, that a person, sex unknown, who is old. enough and clever enough to write politics for the Quarterly Re- view, imagines with a charming simplicity that Lord John Russell intends to propose an effective enlargement of the franchise, and hereupon startles the dull ear of the town with dismal forebodings. The Constitution, which the said Quarterly, buried with much wailing and many an 'doge funebre twenty years ago, was net, it appears, killed at all, but is now positively for the last time to undergo that distressing process at the hands of the rash physician, who threatens to exhibit-homoeopathic medicines in allo- pathic doses—to administer a large infusion of democracy to a patient already poisoned by an excess of democratine. Lord John should be warned, and not alarm ancient epicenes without cause- He knows, and most other people know, that when he roars " Re- form!" like a sucking dove, he means nothing by it ; but here and there an ancient. gentlewoman, like the croaker of the Quar- terly, may linger in lone country villages, whose repose may be seriously broken, and her nerves, not being of the Premier's Nel- sonic texture, be permanently shattered. if he must occasionally play lion to the gallery, let him whisper -.n aside to the private boxes;. let him consider with himself, and listen to the sound ad- vice of our old friend. Bottom.
"Bottom. To bring in, God shield us! a lion among ladies, is a most dreadful thing : for there is not a more fearful wild-fowl than your lion, living ; and we ought to look to it. Snout. Therefore, another prologue must tell be is not a lion. Bottom. Nay, you must name his name, and half his face must be seen through the lion's neck; and he himself must speak through, saying thus, or to the same defeet,—Ladies, or fair ladies, I would wish you, or I would request you, or I would entreat you, not to fear, not to tremble : my life for yours. If you. think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life : no, I am no such thing ; I am a man as other men are; and there, indeed, let him name his name, and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner."
This last charm must surely dispel the hideous delusion of our doleful friend. Is it not Snug thejoiner ? Snug destroy the Con- stitution ! Is it not the cloud-goddess that he woos and worships ? Has he not sacrificed to it utility, glory, public duty, all but the family party ? Snug destroy the Constitution ! does he not live by it ?' When did Beelzebub cast out devils, or a publican take the ple dge
But the fright of the gentlewomen is by no means the worst con- sequence of Lord John's roaring; a little extra peppermint would quiet their nerves. Fear and cruelty are old allies, and no sooner has our friend been thrown into a paroxysm of terror and rage by the histrionic passes of gentle John's fencing-foil—though the button was manifest with half an eye—than he straightwayy, runs a muck in. the public street, screeching like an insane wild-cat; and,, had his power been equal to his inclination, two highly- distinvished though rather eccentric natives and a crowd of am-
trious foreigners would have carried his mark to their graves. Happily, we have a modern invention,
" more med'cinal than that moly Which Hermes unto wise Ulysses gave,"
which instantaneously cures the scratches of such ferce. It is called, in our English pharmacopoeia, Public Opinion, and is the most sovereign remedy yet discovered for the venom of misrepre- sentation and calumny.
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