THE EARTHQUAKE.
FAMILIARITY and inexperience are the two great sources of public security : the inhabitants of volcanic regions and of London are equally undisturbed by the threat of a coming earthquake—the former because they are familiar with it, the latter because they think the substrata of their town too firm to be shaken. A very slight tremor of the earth, however, would unsettle the apathy with which people here talk of the earthquake to be on the 16th. It would not be the first time that London has been visited by such a phrenomenon. HORACE WALPOLE (no further gone) gives in his Letters an account of two smart shocks at about a month's interval, which enabled a mad prophet to set all the citizens a-shaking in their shoes with his prediction of a third and worse to follow, and sent many of the nobility, as HORACE expressed it, "to take their earthquake in the country." The earthquakes of which Comrie in Perthshire is the centre have of late years become more frequent and violent. There was one not long ago at Falmouth. That we should have an earthquake here is by no means such an impossible or improbable thing as people seem to imagine. Let us console ourselves, however, with the reflection, that though churches may topple down the Church is too unsubstantial, too ethereal in its nature, to be endangered, and that whatever may become of the Bank, the National Debt is oafe. Nay, even though the Houses of Parliament (old and new) should be destroyed, there will still be Houses of Lords and Commons- " Alter erit turn Typhys, et alters qum vetat Argo
Dilectas heroes."
" The beings of the mind" are " essentially immortal": con- ventional modes of thinking and acting long survive the feeble creatures who invent them: even earthquakes cannot kill ideas.
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