Still break the benches, Henley, with thy strain,

While common sense and common ears complain;

so magnificent, that they would consume themselves amidst their own fires, were they not instinct with celestial vigour, and rolling upon the axles of immortality—(Great cheering). There is a time coming, after which never, never more shall the mind of man be fettered and chained—no more shall the press, with its ten thousand voices, be gagged and bound-no more shall thegolden key of knowledge be wrenched from the grasp of intellectualized humanity. Then shall no dungeon yawn for victims-no prison doors be barred upon a preacher too zealous, or a philosopher too enlightened for his age-no prostituted justice shall deliver its sentences of legal murder, nor the scaffold wait, amidst the pomp of death, for the blood of the last patriots of their country-(Cheers). And how, as to mere human instrumentality, shall this be brought to

wage,

A wondrous full-grown Zany for thy age.
O worthy thou of Egypt's wise abodes,
A decent priest where monkeys were the
gods;

But Fate with butchers bade thee rise and fall,

principles of liberty will have been acted out in their perfection and completeness because knowledge and experience will have imparted practical wisdom through all classes-because the throne of freedom will have been reared upon the ruins of all that is

"We are at length approaching another and a better era, the genuine dawning of a brighter, of which the earliest rays already streak the horizon; as we are favoured to behold the birth of its bursting splendors-(cheers). The sun of Europe is, indeed, about to arise, that it may go down no more; it shall culminate, but never decline! it will gild every cloud, and ultimately disperse it! it will outshine every obstacle in its paths! it will illuminate every land and every shore, until the whole globe revolves in its glory! it will go forth in the fulness of its power, as at once the source and the emblem of its own mighty principles of light, and life, and love-principles so vehement, so expansive, so brilliant, and

is beautiful in the universe--and, above all, because religion, delivered from every fetter and manacle, shall work her wondrous way, and open up through the vistas of time a view into those invisible realities by which we are at every moment surrounded. This will be the result of a real reformation; and every man who promotes it is a friend, and they that oppose it are enemies to the very noblest interests of their species."

Upon which, the paper says, the orator sat down" amidst long and loud cheering." We are quite charmed by this proof of the patience of the patriots under their present deplorable condition. What! with the principles of liberty unknown in the land; with the ten thousand voices of the press "gagged and bound;" with knowledge denied to them-or, in the orator's own phraseology, "the golden key wrenched from the grasp of intellectualized humanity," whatever that may be; with the dungeon yawning for innocent victims; with justice so prostituted, that murder is made legal, and the scaffold, in all the pomp of death (we have the orator's

word for it), is waiting only for "the blood of the last patriots of their country?" We are only astonished that they did not dissolve into universal tears: "Oh, 'tis so moving I can weep no more!" was the pathetic outcry of the stage heroine. It would have admirably answered the Bristol orator's appeal to their sensibilities; but may not we be permitted to ask what has been the use of the Reform Bill? We are pronounced gagged, fettered, victimized, manacled, and betrayed by prostituted justice. What is to help us in this dismal condition? The orator, like Dr Slop, has his panacea "the instrumentality of the grand principles of liberty" rolling upon, we presume," the axles of immortality." And this is the stuff that Radicalism talks, and to which Radicalism listens, yet calls itself rational!

We are not fond of seeing Lord John Russell rise up with the preface "Mr Speaker, I have the honour to move that a commission," &c. &c. &c. Lord John's commissions, by some curious fatality, generally being best known by the number of individuals salaried, and the inordinate amount of their salaries. But we should make an exception in favour of a commission to inquire the grounds and reasons why the metropolis has such a love for being burned. During the last twelve months the firemen reckon no less than 664 fires in London alone! many of them of great magnitude, and probably, on the whole, destroying property to the amount of a million of money. This itself is a sufficient ground for inquiry. A million of pounds sterling yearly sent into smoke and cinders! A million of money, spread in agriculture over any county of England, would turn it into a garden; a million of money would carry a hundred thousand labourers to Canada; a million of money would build five hundred churches, and thus go further to extinguish feuds and follies than a million of soldiers; a million of money would set half the pauperism of Ireland to work, and strip rebellion of its best ally. Yet this sum, vast as it is, is suffered to pass away, like so much dust, into the elements; so much utterly lost to all the uses of man. The subject is well worth legislative interference, and the time of the honour

able House, and its committees, would be infinitely better employed in finding some remedy for this perpetual calamity, which amounts to a national loss of the interest of twenty-four millions a-year, than in listening to dull debates on municipal bodies which had better been unborn, or deciding on the merits of Mr Joseph Hume's plans for the further gullibility of mankind.

Some expedients have been adopted, but their failure shows only that we have gone in the wrong track. The firemen of the different insurance offices have been combined into one body-" brigaded," as the rather affected phrase is—and put under the superintendence of intelligent officers. The men, too, have been armed capa-pie in all the accoutrements which are supposed fittest to go to war with the destructive element," as the newspapers poetically and invariably term it. Powerful engines are provided; and the unhappy persons who lie awake on their too luxurious couches, counting the hours of which the Irish paviour, the English postman, and the city watchman knows nothing, is often startled by the roll of their swift yet heavy wheels, and may fairly imagine himself in the centre of a siege, with all the parks of artillery thundering in the assault. The firemen are active; every street is a fount of rushing and gushing waters; the Thames lies ready to reinforce them all; and yet every week exhibits a space devoted to conflagration which would make a reviewground for a battalion, and whose ruins would build a village.

The fault lies in the system of building. An old law has provided, that in the city of London no house shall be built unvisited by the city surveyor to ascertain its substantiality, and no house shall be built without a party wall. This law, inefficient in the city, is apparently altogether set at defiance in that ten times greater world of brick and mortar which constitutes the metropolis. But more than the old law is required in both. Why should not the Legislature interfere to prevent the use of a style of building which actually, like Packwood's razors, made to sell, seems made only to burn. Nothing would be easier than to build houses incapable of being consumed-at least fur.

ther than the apartment in which the fire broke out. Iron is finally cheaper than wood; as it is more manageable, more permanent, stronger, and infinitely more secure. The joists, the stairs, and all the more solid parts, might be made of iron, and of iron modelled and wrought into every shape of strength and convenience; the floors might be made of sheetiron, and made of a smoothness and elasticity amounting to a new feature of elegance and enjoyment; the doors, the cornices, the ceilings, all the conspicuous portions of the apartments might be iron, easily decorated and moulded into every classic ornament --sometimes taking the hues of the marbles, sometimes of the metals, sometimes of the finer woods—and, in all, uniting beauty, permanence, and especially safety against fire. When we see steam-boats built of iron, and actually cheaper, lighter, and more rapid than those built of timber; when we see the most beautiful of all bridges, that look less like strong and almost indestructible means of transit over great rivers than fantastic networks thrown from rock to rock, as romantic ornaments of the landscape, we can feel surprise only at the singular neglect of obvious means, when the result of that neglect is so fatal to property, and often to life. All that gives additional security to human existence is not merely an addition to human happiness, but a benefit to the state. The life of man is the most important possession of man; and the community sustains a loss in every instance of the individual being swept away, peculiarly in the vigour of his powers-in his being reduced to beggary, in his being compelled to abandon his habitual business, in the mutilation of his limbs, or in his being driven from his country. If we are to be told that the loss by fire is relieved by the insurance offices: it is true that the individual may be saved, from ruin, and this is undoubtedly a fine result of the expedients of civilisation, but the money is not the less lost to the nation. The insurer loses though the insured escapes ;-the fire has destroyed a portion of the national property, which nothing can restore. It is annihilated.

For those reasons we should wish to see the Legislature direct its attention to the remedy, and look for the remedy

in the use of the more permanent material. We have not a doubt that the next generation will laugh at our folly in trusting life and property to one of the most frail, as well as most inflammable of all substances, and regard us as much more ridiculous in our negligence than we now regard the ancestors who slept under thatched roofs, and covered their floors with rushes; both only less combustible than gunpowder.

But we might not be limited to a single metal, nor to any metal. Of all the products of human art, glass is the simplest, the most ductile, the most universal, and the most beautiful. It can be made wherever sand and seaweed are to be found; it can be moulded into every form, and it can take every hue of sky, plant, or metal. The interposing necessities of a government which lives on the mercy of the Humes and Roebucks (we are almost ashamed to mingle our topic with such recollections), have compelled the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with palpable reluctance, to pronounce that cheap newspapers are the primary want of the state; and he has therefore continued his taxes on some of the most important articles of life, in evident fear of the frown of the Humes. If the Chancellor of the Exchequer had left the newspaper readers, of whom there was certainly no deficiency in the land, to pay for their newspapers, the few pence which had hitherto been found no obstacle to their penetrating every corner of the land and the world, he would have been enabled to relieve the glass manufactory of all encumbrance, and have given us the full enjoyment of this most brilliant of all human productions. It is remarkable, that superior as the system of decoration seems in the Continental capitals to the general style of England, that decoration resolves itself chiefly into two materials, silk and glass, and the glass certainly the more prominent. The mirrors, the lustres, the dessert services of the foreign mansion constitute the superiority which first strikes the stranger's eye. But all this we should have in unrivalled excellence, if the industry and admirable skill of our manufacturers were not checked by the Excise. Thus the cheap newspapers, whatever light they may throw on the lucubrations of the alehouse and the gin palace, undoubtedly deprive

us of an enjoyment at least to the full as harmless. But they do more; they actually disable the Englishman from rivalling the foreigner in a product of universal demand, and in which England, already superior in the excellence of the product, would inevitably soon command the market of the world. The village politician's penny saved, is thus ten thousand times its value lost to the manufacturer, and through him to the country.

Yet the uses of this incomparable material might extend to much more than luxury. Those uses might be available to every species of building, and almost to every thing that the building contained. Fanciful as it may sound at this time, nothing would be easier than to build walls of glass, as thick as we now build them of stone, and much more durable; to supersede our dark, heavy, and perishable roofs of wood, slate, and tiles, by sheets of glass which could be made of any magnitude, of any thickness, and perfectly impenetrable to all the effects of weather. Glass may be made more solid than stone. The glass hemispheres fixed in the decks of our ships to throw light below, bear the rolling of the ship's guns over them without a flaw. The most dazzling architecture might be thus in the power of the builder; roofs of every shape and elevation, Gothic, Greek, and Roman; the arched, the concave, the lofty dome, might be constructed with almost the facility of a fabric of snow, but with a permanency all but indestructible. A new element would be thus introduced into architecture, light, boundless, flowing, perpetual. The finest effects of colour ing might be produced in the most endless variety. We might sit under cupolas of seeming emerald and chrysolite, gaze on walls and pillars glittering as diamond, and receive the full glory of the skies through sheets of crystal radiant with all the hues of heaven.

We admit the strangeness with which all this may sound in the general ear. Let our houses of glass be talked of as a dream. But all this dream will yet be realized. And might be realized within the next dozen years, but for the absurd and base impediments thrown in the way of all national improvement by ignorant, venal, and brute faction. Any one of those most meagre-minded and most miserable of men who live on the breath of popu

larity, would not lose a rabble shout, the chance of being carried into Parliament on the shoulders of a troop of drunkards and paupers, or even a newspaper paragraph, to pave the streets of London with gold. The manufacturers and citizens of England should know who are their true enemies; who throw the real obstacles in their progress; who cheat, cajole, impoverish, and degrade. One Jacobin would do more mischief to the very populace whom, in his hypocrisy, he courts, and in his arrogance he scorns, than the most undisguised despot, from Nero to Napoleon.

But we are already actually making use of metals in building, and in a very curious and advantageous way. We are not merely forming the whole of the rich and complicated tracery of our church windows, and other windows on that scale, of iron, thus very much diminishing the expense, and al. most entirely extinguishing the labour, for these frames are merely cast, but we are building our chimneys of zinc, a metal remarkably ductile, and almost indestructible. In our cold climate chimneys are essential. In our damp and foggy climate those chimneys must be high. And in our stormy climate chimneys built of brick must be not merely high, but massive. But this height and massiveness together are expensive, and what is worse, hazardous. He who has listened to the groaning and racking of the pile of chimneys in a huge English mansion, on some night

"When the sky it is dark,

And the winds are abroad," will not require much evidence to prove that a weight of three or four tons nodding over his pillow is not among the incentives to repose. A mass of this size, decayed by time and overthrown from its base by one of our winter gusts, has often plunged from the top of the house through every floor to the bottom. The terror felt in sleeping under what is phrased a "stack of chimneys" in a high wind, was once one of the most frequent and most natural in our gusty winter. Yet by the simple use of a metal so tenacious and yet so light, as to be capable of being raised in tubes of great length without giving way, or breaking through the roofin case of their being thrown down, the old terror is removed in every instance where the

new expedient is applied, and a few years more will probably see it wholly removed. It is to matters like these that a truly patriotic government should, could, and would apply itself. We have newspapers enough, radical inflammation more than enough; if ten thousand copies of Mr Hume's best speeches were published at the "reduced rate" of the ten thousandth part of a farthing a-piece, the world would have only so much more nonsense and nausea. But premiums for great discoveries (things which seldom reward the first discoverer), suggestions to point the track of ingenious men towards discovery nationally useful, public aid, where the discovery is incontestably useful, and acts of the legislature directing the habits of the people into their readier and more extensive adoptionthose would be benefits on which no doubt could exist, efforts in which the public would join with cordiality, and therefore with irresistible effect; steps in national advance, each growing wider and loftier in a progress, to which there absolutely appears to be no limit in either the powers of man, the nature of things, or the will of Providence.

The death of Bannister, the comedian, Jack Bannister, as all the world fondly called him, has caused great regret in a large circle of acquaintance. As a comedian, he had ceased to exist twenty years ago, and the rising generation could know nothing of his delightful performance, for delightful it was. There was no constraint, no effort, no error.

Every look was characteristic of the part, and yet every look of the actor seemed to be the

everyday look of the man. His conception was admirable. The preparation which the artificial actor makes for a point and a plaudit seemed never to enter into his thoughts; the jest, the point, or the sentiment, came from his lips with the apparent unconsciousness of one to whom they were the simplest of all possible things. But no man winged his wit with happier dexterity, or guided it to the heart with finer knowledge of nature.

Bannister had the advantage of being a handsome man; his figure was good, his face intelligent, and his eye a ball of brilliant fire. Yet his line was limited. He wanted elegance for the man of fashion, and finish for the fop; but as the easy English humorist, the Englishman of middle

life, of middle age, and of middle fortune: the man of independence, oddity, originality, and pleasantry, he was altogether unrivalled. He could adopt the generous, the grave, and even the melancholy; but the restless vivacity of his eye, and the almost irrepressible gladness of his smile, showed that his province was the eccentric, the goodnatured, and the gay. It is gratifying to know that he made a considerable fortune, and was enabled to enjoy his retirement in something not far from affluence; though he often blamed the memory of his ultra-opulent relative, Rundell, the millionaire jeweller, for not leaving him enough to keep a coach. He possessed, however, what the millionaire could not leave him, health, spirits, good looks, and the use of his legs to the last. The gout touched him now and then, but it was with the tenderness of an old friend come to remind him occasionally of the pleasantries among which they first made acquaintance. Bannister was constantly seen taking his exercise in the streets, and enjoying the scenes which make London a perpetual panorama, with the animation of one who defied old age.

Bannister was a wit himself as well as the instrument of the wit of others. Some of those recollections still remain. In giving them here, it must be remembered how much is necessarily lost in losing the look, the tone, and the moment. One day, as he was walking with the celebrated Suett, a fellow on the top of a coach cried out, Hope you're well, Master Dickey Gossip." Suett, not prepared for the acquaintanceship, said, peevishly, "What an impudent ruffian ! ”— "He seems one of the profession, however," observed Bannister. "Don't you see he is upon the Stage?"

66

A shoemaker in Piccadilly, determined to astonish the world, had put up a motto, from Euripides, over his window. Bannister happened to be passing with, I believe, Porson. "That is Greek," said Bannister. "What! are you acquainted with Greek," asked the Professor, with a laugh?" I know it by sight," was the happy reply.

On the night of Mrs Siddons's retirement from the stage, she withdrew, much affected with the sympathy of the audience; but, as the curtain fell, one of those sounds followed, from some enemy of the great actress,