ion, from the oligarchy of Sunderland to the democracy of Charles Fox, is consistent with it, though in the hands of the latter the accidental appendage to the doctrine began to obscure the doctrine itself. est. Such was our old party arrangement. The political world was dominated by two parliamentary factions, both essentially aristocratical and essentially conservative, both entirely alien from the people, but the one under the dominion of Church traditions of loyalty and obedience to the Crown, the other possessed with classical maxims of liberty. The nation outside ranged itself with one or the other parliamentary party, having as yet no political consciousness, properly speaking, but swayed towards Toryism by the clergy, and towards Whiggism by the great towns and the Dissenting interSuch an arrangement of things could not but be entirely altered when a political life was first created and then developed and educated in this hitherto torpid nation. When it, in its turn, felt the impulse to divide into parties, they were not Whigs and Tories. There were two good reasons for this. The first was that the old controversy of Whig and Tory was over and settled. The power of the Crown, which was the real bone of contention, had now been limited as the Whigs wished; and public opinion, when its reign began, was occupied with quite different questions. The other reason was, that the nation, when it took up politics, had not the same inducement that a privileged class sitting in an ancient hall and debating according to the precedents of centuries had to accept the Constitution as unalterable and sacred. The question of altering the Constitution, which under the old régime had been carefully suppressed, or, if sometimes actually debated, yet always debated under a disguise, was now pushed into the foreground by one large party, and not rejected from consideration by a still larger one. The general result is, first, that whereas the name Conservative" was before equally applicable to both sides, it has now become the name of one side; and, secondly, the old quarrel with the Crown being at an end, and the notion of altering the Constitution to suit some ideal of national well-being having been admitted into politics, there has sprung into existence a great party of Reform. the popular movement than the Tories, could not watch in idleness that vast process of the organization of public opinion that I have described. To meet the new régime that it instinctively foresees, it modifies itself. There appears what we may call a Whiggism of transition, the founder of which is Charles Fox. It is Whiggism inoculated with democracy_and inspired by the French Revolution. It so happened that this new Whiggism, at the very beginning of its career, was met by that violent tide of reaction which put off for thirty years the era of Reform. Involved in this misfortune, it made matters worse by conceiving an admiration for Napoleon Banaparte, and making common cause with that incarnation of evil. But as soon as the war-time was fairly left behind, the transformed Whigs emerged from their unpopularity. If we used these political epithets with any exactness, we should not call them Whigs any longer. Some of them had been Whigs, and most of them were the sons of Whigs, but their doctrine was different from Whiggism. It was a doctrine no longer about the Crown, but about that other power with which their forefathers had had little to do, viz. the people. It was the doctrine of the new national party of Liberals or Reformers that was forming, adopted by one of the old parliamentary parties in the moment of disappearing. Between the old Parliament at Westminster and the new universal parliament of public opinion, that had acquired by this time its vast organization, and was in the act of creating new parties and beginning a new conflict of opinion, the transformed Whigs built a bridge. They prevented the two organizations from becoming permanently hostile; they introduced the new party division into Parliament; they found a place and function for Parliament in the new régime; and they fixed the deliberative power of the nation in the form which it has retained throughout the present period. They became a sort of Upper House in the new National Parliament. A voice in Parliament we all have now, if we consider it: for there must be few of us who cannot command occasionally the space of six lines in the corner of some newspaper, and how many of us have a right to greater prominence than Such a change seems simple and natural, that in the national debate? We have all and I believe it can be traced in history. been admitted to the National Parliament, But it has been somewhat obscured by the but there is an inner chamber in which the fact that the old parties were not content to old House of Commons still sits, revising, pass out of date without a struggle. In resuming, arbitrating, and deciding with particular the Whig party, which, though responsibility. It is like nothing so much not a popular party, had more affinity for as Milton's Pandemonium. There, you re 66 member, there was a spacious hall, freely an editor, and thus reduced they are "at open to the multitude. It was so immensely spacious that it is compared to "A covered field, where champions bold Wont ride in armed, and at the Soldan's chair Defied the best of Paynim chivalry To mortal combat or career with lance." This is the image of our free and swarming Press. It is brusht with the hiss of rustling wings." It is so crowded that the incomers have to be miraculously diminished. They are squeezed into small print and mercilessly abridged by the magic wand of large, though without number still, amidst the hall of that infernal court." But this is not all. There is also an inner chamber of deliberation, where there is more dignity and more ceremony. The old historic Parliament still meets, and still preserves its superiority: "Far within THE German people in general and Count | war; I feel convinced they never will be, they Bismarck in particular have found a champion never can be." in Mr. Max Muller, who in a letter to the Times, which fills two columns, contends that the Prussian Premier has done nothing to forfeit the good opinions of England. It does not follow, Mr. Muller says, that he approved Count Benedetti's proposals because he did not instantly repudiate and make them public. A Foreign Minister is not like a private individual. He stands in the position of counsel for his country, and is bound by the simplest rules of prudence not to disclose many a secret of which, as a private person, he might decline to become the depositary. "Do you suppose," Mr. Max Muller asks, that Lord Palmerston had never to listen for a moment to suggestions about Turkey and Saxony, about Savoy and Nice, and was he driven from office by an indignant people?" Professor Muller maintains further that since 1866 Count Bismarck's policy has been patriotic and peaceful, sans reproche, though, no, doubt, also, sans peur. Germany had to be united; everybody who had tried to unite it had failed; Bismarck succeeded. His procedure was not in all respects strictly regular, but "there are in the history of all countries great convulsions which one cannot criticize according to the ordinary rules of right and wrong. We do not criticize thunderstorms that darken heaven and earth, strike down palaces, and carry off the harvest of peaceful villages.' Mr. Max Muller refuses to believe that England and Germany can ever be at enmity. "If Germany conquers, a new era of peace will dawn on Europe; for Germany, if once united, would tolerate no war of conquest. An army in which every second man is the father of a family is the best guarantee for the peace of the world. There need be no formal alliance between England and Germany. The two nations are one in all that is essential, in morality, in religion, in love of freedom, in respect for law. They are both hard workers, hard thinkers, and, where it must be, hard hitters, too. In the whole history of modern Europe Germany and England have never been at Pall Mall Gazette. A TALKING MACHINE.-ON Saturday an exhibition of quite a novel character was opened at the new building called the Palais Royal, Arof a talking machine, which by mechanical apgyle-street, Oxford-circus. It is an exhibition pliances is made to give forth utterances reseinbling those of a human being. It is the invention of Professor Faber, of Vienna, and has been constructed and patented by him, and is cerIt is true, the question may arise, where is the tainly a wonderful specimen of human ingenuity. utility of it? seeing that every man, woman, and child possesses a talking machine, more or less perfect, of his or her own. But the machine has its utility nevertheless, for it illustrates a much neglected science of acoustics. Moreover, it is highly interesting as showing how far ingenuity may go. The machine has a mouth, with tongue and lips, which are set in motion by a mechanical apparatus which sets free trols it as to produce the sound required. It a portion of air from a large bellows, and so conof the alphabet, many words, and a few senpronounced, with great clearness, every letter tences perfectly; not merely set words, but any words the audience chose to name. It also human passions, to the astonishment, apparlaughed, and uttered other cries expressive of Public Opinion. ently, of all who heard it. AT a recent auction sale in New York, the finest known copy of " Elliott's Indian Bible " (Cambridge, 1663), printed in the Indian language, was sold for 1050 dollars, about 2107. There is one copy of this celebrated Bible in the British Museum, one in the Island of Nantucket, and a third on Gardner's Island, or Long Island Sound. Nature. PART XI. CHAPTER V. IT was the very first time that Félix had come across Angélique since her marriage; and he had of late been so much in the habit of visiting her cousin without seeing herself, that he was never prepared to meet her now, and had quite forgotten that the frequency of his visits had originated in his desire to see her and not Marie. The situation was therefore more than sufficiently embarrassing for a man who like him had never graduated in the school of society that teaches its scholars never to find any situation in the world embarrassing, from the extrication of an army from an enemy's country, up to the extrication of one's foot from a lady's dress in a ballroom. Certainly there was no reason on earth, in the nature of things, why he should be dissatisfied with himself. He had been the victim, she the betrayer; and he had therefore every right, if he was so minded, to claim the dignity that is the privilege of the injured party in such matters. And so, had he been Angélique and had she been Félix, he would have both felt and acted. But being as they were be the man and she the woman-it was he who somehow felt as though it had been he and not she who had been the one to blame. A woman who is no longer a child is always mistress of such a situation, and if she has only a very little tact may always shine in it to advantage, however much she may in reality be in the wrong; while, on the other hand, a man requires to have both experience and genius in such matters to come out of it with even as much as decent credit, however much he may be in the right. Perhaps Félix was also weighted with the feeling that, when all was said and done, he had sinned against the gospel of romance by not having been altogether so true to the memory of his old passion as he had once vowed to be; for inconstancy on the one side is not, in the creed of such as he, held to be a set-off against inconstancy on the other. On sounder grounds there was plenty of excuse for him, no doubt; but then, "Qui s'excuse Not that Angélique's large eyes supported any such self-accusation by the faintest touch of upbraiding. She did change colour for one imperceptible moment; for there are some things which the least worldly and practical-minded of women is incapable of forgetting, or at least of remembering without some shadow of regret. The less of true romance that there is in the composition of any one, the more apt is the voice of false sentiment to make itself heard; and of false sentiment Madame Lester had always had her full share - no less now that her reading consisted of little that was more sentimental than butchers' bills, than when she used to identify herself with Byronic heroines. Moreover, it did not by any means seem to follow in her eyes that because she chanced to be so unfortunate as it had turned out to be married, she should lose her sway over any of her adorers, even though, as in the case of Félix, she should gain from them nothing more valuable than a little adoration. And then she felt kind to him for old recollections' sake, and as a woman cannot help feeling towards one who has once loved her and whom she supposes to love her still. But still she was far from allowing any trace of her emotion to be visible; and indeed it was far too slight, such as it was, for her to be conscious of having felt any whatever. On the contrary, she at once frankly held out her hand with the air of welcoming an old friend, and said, - "Mais, Monsieur Créville, you come in time to convince this doubter. Is it not true that Miss Raymond is to be married?" "What! my old pupil? I had not heard it." Her manner had put him at his ease, so far as she was concerned; and so it could not be that his pre-occupied air had been caused by embarrassment alone. Angé lique noticed his worn appearance; and, taking it as a compliment to herself, felt more kindly towards him still. "And you do not ask to whom? But I forgot -you would not know him. We provincials forget that there are people in the world to whom our little celebrities are unknown. And yet you might know him, though you are a friend of Mr. Barton?" "Of Barton ?" "Yes; and so is he." "I should scarcely have thought that any friend of Barton would have fallen in Miss Raymond's way." 66 Oh, I don't know. Marriages are made in heaven, they say. Mark Warden is the favoured mortal. Do you know him? For what purpose Félix, full of involuntary suspicion of Marie as he was, had still once more come to see her, is not difficult to guess, as long as moths will insist upon flying into the flame in spite of the warning that ought to be taken from the fate of millions of ancestral generations. It may, however, be assumed that, as he himself supposed, he had come to bid adieu to the last of his illusions before he cast the dust of England from his feet forever. Now Angélique had been able to take great credit to herself for her passing gleam of sentiment. She was proud of it, and of herself for having been capable of feeling it. But Félix, except for the feeling of embarrassment when he first perceived her, and of which he now felt almost ashamed, had felt not even a passing gleam. No sooner had he met her eyes, no sooner had she spoken, than it was plain to him that the Angélique whom he now saw before him was the Angélique of his grande passion no more; if, indeed, the Angélique of his grande passion had ever really existed in the flesh. In that moment he felt that something else besides his own heart had changed; or rather, that his heart had been false to her because it had never ceased to be true to the ideal he had sought in her and had found — where? Where indeed? It was clear enough even to him, in the light of the flood of joy that rushed into his heart when he heard the last words of Angélique, and looked up suddenly at Marie. His doubts of her had then, after all, been as absurd as he had been trying vainly to persuade himself that they were, and Barton had in truth been slandering her as grossly as he had been trying, with equal ill-success, to force himself to assume. Had any sort of connection really existed between her and Warden, it was not thus and in her presence that Angélique who must have known of it would have spoken. 66 sigh of Do you has he "Ah!" he exclaimed, with a something more than relief. know Barton, then? How long known this?" "Not long. It is only just settled, it It is a curious match, is it not?" Any way the bridegroom is to be congratulated. And how is Barton? I did not know you knew him." seems. 66 "No more we did, till yesterday. Is it true that he writes the dramatic criticism for the Trumpet'? and that you actually allowed him to insert that odious review of poor Miss Marchmont? For shame! Ah, you cared a little more about her than that once upon a time, did you not? What a couple of silly children we were; but they were pleasant days, all the same those delightful days when we were so miserable. We shall never have such pleasant ones again—- no, not when you have all the world at your feet, and when I well, I shall have dropped out of your life then, n'est ce pas, Monsieur? Marie, my angel, now I must go and carry the news of your generosity to poor Hugh. Au revoir, donc, mon ange et vous, Monsieur, s'il vous plaît — and then we will talk about the old times once more, and you will not laugh at me if I cannot quite laugh at them, will you?" And so, with a parting embrace to her angel and another presentation of her hand to the lover for whose death she had so nearly and so lately been answerable, she once more carried into the street her last purchase from Madame Jupon. But although Félix had received an unmistakable lesson from the unspeakably joyful relief that the words of Angélique had given him, he was certainly no nearer reading what was in the heart of Marie. All that he could think of now was that she was in reality all that he had supposed her to be; that she had once more been restored to her pedestal above the altar. How could he ever have committed the treason, the blasphemy, of having even for a single moment cast her down? Surely, it now seemed to him, he could never really have done so - he must always, in his heart of hearts, have remained loyal; the disturbance could only have been in his fancy in his mind. But Marie! Whether she still loved her husband or no, there is but one word to describe her state; and that word is desolation. Whatever her feelings towards Félix might be, they did not subtract from the force of the word. The state of nervous excitement, or rather exhaustion, in which she was, and in which the activity of the memory and of the imagination fully made up for the loss of calm reason, caused her to comprehend at once and to the letter every word that had passed between Mark Warden and herself in the course of her last interview with him, and that had then been so unintelligible. So plain had the meaning of it grown now, that the amount of truth that might lie in the report which she had just heard was altogether immaterial. Whatever might be the explanation of that report, the fact remained and stared her in the face-not, perhaps, the fact that he was actually about to leave her for another that must be as she willed, to say the least of it; but certainly the fact that he wished to do so, and that he had actually proposed it to her almost in so many words. At present, though she realized this, she was incapable of realizing how it affected her. It is weaker women than she whose feelings in such matters are sufficiently simple to find at once a way into action, whether by the road of anger or by that of tears. Besides, the mind of Marie was always a little slow to bring itself into action whenever it was necessary to blame others, or even to think them in the wrong, while her eyes were not apt to weep for her own sorrows. So, for the present, she was simply turned to stone; and the last words of Angélique had fallen upon deaf ears. Félix.-"So my first pupil is to be married! How old it makes one feel! And the bridegroom-is he the Mr. Warden whom I once met here, and to whom you introduced me?" Marie (starting from her stupor, suddenly). -"I beg your pardon -“Are you not well, dear Félix. rie ? " and Ma quite I am Marie (dreamily). -"Oh, I am well-only a little tired, I suppose. not used to late hours yet, you see.' Félix. And your head aches, does it not?" 66 Marie. "A little but it is nothing." Félix. "And I am boring you to death, I suppose." Marie. Oh no; why should you be?" Félix. 66 - I am sure I must be, though. And I really came for no purpose in the world SO Marie. "Oh, you need not hurry to go: and yet - yes, I really am quite well; I am only very stupid, as usual. There," -drawing herself up with an effort, but with a smile "Io son Guglielmo Tell !' — What was it you asked me just now and that I was rude enough not to answer?" Félix. “Oh, only about my old pupil's futur." Marie (bravely).· "Mr. Warden. You met him once here. They will make an admirable match, though Angélique does not seem to think so. She has a great fortune, and is good enough for any body, and so amiable! - and he has great talent and great ambition, and will make her the wife of a great man, as she deserves." Felix (coldly).- "Indeed! Marie. Yes. He only wanted the means, and now he will have them." Félix. You seem to have great faith in him." Marie."I go by what I hear ing more. 66 noth Marie." Or when we do see them as they are, it is only to find out that we stand in their way." Félix (unable to help observing the scarcely perceptible tinge of bitterness in her tone, and the involuntary comparison that she had suggested between herself and Miss Raymond).- "And you think, then, that Miss Raymond will not stand in the way of this friend of yours?" Marie (alarmed for her husband's secret, and exaggeratedly alarmed about what her words, which she had forgotten, might have led Félix to suspect). -"I hope not. I wish him well, like all my friends. But have you no news of yourself?" Félix. -"I? Not a word. I never have. I manage to keep body and soul together or at least the body without the soul-which can scarcely be called news. That is about all and the process is not very interesting to lookers-on." Marie." But it is interesting to me, mon ami. I can read the stars, and like to watch how my prophecies come true." Félix.-"I am afraid that is not a very profitable knowledge. I thought I could once; but it was only to find them as ambiguous as earthly oracles, and even more treacherous." Marie."I want you to promise me something. Will you?" Félix." If it is do anything for you. I owe you so much and have never, done anything for you yet." Marie.-"Yes, it is for me, if that is any satisfaction to you. But it is not because it is for me that you must do it." Félix.-" Why not? I am sick of trying to do things for myself - and you, I think I hope - are the only person likely to care about what I do." Of course I promise." Marie.-"Félix, my friend, I cannot help seeing that for some reason or other you are bent upon making a wreck of your whole life. Yes it is perfectly true. You have plenty of talent; and I have not known you all this long time so well not to know that you might easily in due time take the position that, as you have often told me, you were once ambitious of taking. Besides, is it not due to Prosper, to your old benefactors, to Moretti himself, to justify them in the interest they have taken in you, and the sacrifices they have made for you? - I may speak plainly to you, I hope? Félix. "But you know him?" Marie. What can girls like me know about the lives and careers of men? We see them as they condescend to show themselves to us Félix. the outside; but as they are to each other and to themselves 99 -never. Félix. "Never ? " Always." Marie.-"Do you remember telling me of your childhood, and of your first insight |