I can remove my wifesh. I did not include her in the barganish when I was married," pointing to the old lady.

"The brute!" sobbed the latter, going off into a very respectable swoon at once.

"We can soon settle that little business," cried Jack, unlocking his desk; "if you will make these women pack up their clothes and those of my three dear step-sons, I'll write to my solicitor, and have him here in a twinkling. Good-bye, Mrs. John; goodbye, mamma!" and Jack betook himself to the drawing-room, where he waited until his man of business arrived.

The latter was as discreet as Jack wished him to be, and the affair was quickly arranged, very much to the satisfaction of the two husbands, and very much to the chagrin of all the rest of the family, who did not like an exchange from Jack's luxurious quarters, to the elegant purlieus of Saffron-hill. Once or twice afterwards, when Jack's cogitations took a turn that way, he used to wonder what relationship there existed between Mrs. Fanloo and himself; but as he was no very great genealogist, he never could settle the knotty point: one thing, however, is certain,-that he remained a bachelor till his dying-day, and always took pretty good care never to extend his peregrinations to the neighbourhood of Mr. Fanloo's residence.

"A very good story, indeed," quoth Mr. Joseph Linton, rubbing his eyes very hard, and refraining with difficulty from yawning; "and if Boodle and Tooley hadn't unfortunately fallen fast asleep at the beginning, I have no doubt they would have deduced a capital moral from it."

"Ah, my dear fellow, the moral's everything," coincided Jerry, with the greatest solemnity; "stick to the moral in everything you do, and you'll be sure to find your way through the thickest wood in the world."

And so saying, this tippling philosopher took up his candle, and walked slantendicularly off to bed, leaving Mr. Joseph Linton jingling his money in his trousers' pocket, with a meditative air. What a pity it is that the morality of theory and the morality of action are so far opposed!

The Progress of the Nation, in its various Social and Economical Relations. By G. R. Porter, Esq. Second Edition, revised. Murray, Albermarle-street.

Ir is with great pleasure, we perceive that the most valuable work of Mr. Porter, a work without which no library can be considered as complete, has just reached a second edition. Valuable alike for the correct economical principles it illustrates and unfolds, and for the copious statistical information it contains, we can safely aver that the English language has not another work of the kind, which can for a moment enter into comparison with it. Under the various heads of Population,-Agricultural and Manufacturing Production,-Interchange, including internal communication and trade, external communication and commerce, etc.,Public Revenue,-Consumption,-Accumulation,-Moral Progress,— the extent and condition of our Colonies,-we have all the information, collected from the most authentic sources, necessary for the fu'l elucidation of the subject. So much for the work before Mr. Porter confines himself to the nineteenth century. To us, however, it has suggested a wider survey of the progress and the destinies of the nation, which we now propose to take :

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Pomponius Mela, (we quote him second hand on the authority of Gibbon,) in narrating the war commenced by Claudius against the remote province of Britain, expresses a hope that, by the success of the Roman arms, the island and its savage inhabitants 'would soon be better known.' It was not long ere this wish, amusing as it may strike us now, was realised. The student of history can now trace the developments of men and things, which form the subject matter of the world's annals, and will see that a change has indeed come o'er the spirit of the scene,-that she who was named eternal,' has passed away as a dream,-that a religion, then known but by name; that men of alien manners, and blood, and tongue, have succeeded to the power and fame then possessed by Rome,—and that the obscure island, whose pearls attracted the avarice of the Roman soldiery, as they viewed its white cliffs from the shores of Gaul, is now linked with all of progression to which man's mind can aspire, and has a sway amongst the nations of the earth, of which Rome, in her palmiest days, never dreamed.

The eloquent pen of Gibbon has left us a vivid idea of the Roman Empire, in the age of the Antonines, an empire that

swayed the fortunes and lives of a hundred and twenty millions of human beings, reckoning from the wall of Antoninus to Mount Atlas, two thousand miles broad, and from the Western Ocean to the Euphrates, three thousand miles long, comprising altogether sixteen hundred thousand square miles,-situate in the finest part of the temperate zone, rich in the possession of all the arts that humanize and bless mankind, whose merchants set in motion the looms of Babylon, and bought up the furs of Scythia, the amber found on the shores of the Baltic, and the silks and glittering jewels of the East,—an empire, whose sons, of unrivalled skill and iron arm, had made Rome the seat of commerce, the home of civilization, of polity, and of religion, the queen of cities, the mistress of the world. Paul, the apostle, conscious that a spirit was walking the earth, of which the Roman citizens had no idea,* might see that the night was far spent, and that the day was at hand; but the latter might well be forgiven, if, with the shortsightedness, natural to man, he felt that the night of barbarism had already past, and that the day had already come, he might be forgiven, if he fondly dreamed that Rome was eternal, as the seven hills on which she stood, or as the yellow Tiber that washed her marble halls, he might well be forgiven, if he little thought that the time would come when her legions should turn their backs on a foe, or when the rude barbarian should climb her capital, and beard her senators.

Centuries of conquest were necessary, ere Rome could fight her way up to supremacy and power. There was a long time of struggle and of toil, before the mud cottages of Romulus were exchanged for the marble palaces of the crafty nephew of Julius Cæsar. What the Romans took centuries to do, was done by the inhabitants of the barbarous island of Pomponius Mela, in forty years. In one quarter of the globe, and at a distance of eight thousand miles, one hundred and twenty millions of men, whose manners and institutions remain what they were when Diodorus Siculus first compiled his account, whose earliest records carry us back to the world's dawn, whom the legions of the Macedonian failed to conquer, whom the hosts of Timour, and Nadir Shah, never thoroughly subdued, have yielded up to British supremacy, the vast extent of territory that stretches from the Himmalaya mountains to Cape Comorin; and this land, with a soil as rich as that of the Delta of the Nile, with a climate wooing the fruits and flowers of the earth to bud and blossom with a luxuriance, of which the inhabitants of this northern clime can but faintly conceive this land, prodigal with pearls and gold-for thus sang the poets of remotest antiquity, and their more modern successors have re-echoed the same strain, this land, separated from us by natural barriers, which we might imagine that no amount of skill, or cunning, or prowess, or all three of them together, could overOctober, 1847.-VOL. L.-NO. CXCVIII.

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leap, was won, not so much by armed hosts, as by a company of merchants, who went forth to trade, and in time to reign, on the shores of Hindoostan. The morality of all this may be more than questionable. On that head, we imagine christian men can have but one idea. We refer to the great fact of Britain's supremacy in the East, as a proof, not of her virtue, but of her power and skill. This island, of which Pomponius Mela speaks with such contempt, though in later times it gave to Rome many of her bravest troops, and more than one pretender to her purple, has done, by her merchants and adventurers, what the boasted legions of Scipio and Cæsar were unable to effect. Nor is this all. The English mind has become yet more potent than the English sword. Beyond the waves of the Atlantic, in the far distant West, one hundred and fifty millions, our sons and brethren, our rivals in the great work of the world's regeneration, speak our common tongue. We are not blind to the faults of America, but we have full confidence in its onward career.

So much for historical facts. Rome's greatness and Rome's decay, have become a household tale. Historians, from the days of Herodotus to Mr. Alison, look upon decay as the natural law of nations, as well as of men. They may think they are right; we think they are wrong.

The father of inductive philosophy has observed, and Mr. Alison, whose work on the History of Europe, praiseworthy though it be, on many accounts we should be glad to see replaced by an historian of more liberal views and brighter, and as we deem them, more philosophical, hopes, has quoted the observation as an authority,that, in the infancy of a state, arms do prevail; in its maturity, arms and learning for a short season; in its decline, commerce and the mechanical arts; and the gifted seer, who preaches of heroism and truth to a race, but too much inclined to forget the one, and forsake the other, has denominated the age in which we live, a mechanical one. Thomas Carlyle is right: whether Lord Bacon is equally so, we more than doubt. If Lord Bacon be correct, we must look upon our national state as one of decline; we must embrace the melancholy conviction that England has seen her best days, that the sun of her glory and greatness is setting, never more to rejoice and bless the earth; and that, whatever may be the mental and moral light which, though long delayed, shall eventually cheer the eyes and gladden the hearts of emancipated men, the morning of England's resurrection can never dawn. Can this be true? Is England's career to be but a tale of the past? Another instance of vigour extinct, of departed glory, of greatness withering like the grass that perisheth, by the stroke of the destroyer, Time? This is the question which we now propose to discuss.

And first we observe, that to us the idea of decline and decay