CROMWELL'S STATUE.

POOR English Public, they really are exceedingly bewildered with Statues at present. They would fain do honour to somebody, if they did but know whom or how. Unfortunately they know neither whom nor how; they are, at present, the farthest in the world from knowing! They have raised a set of the ugliest Statues, and to the most extraordinary persons, ever seen under the sun before. Being myself questioned, in reference to the New Houses of Parliament some years ago, "Shall Cromwell have a Statue ?" I had to answer, with sorrowful dubiety: "Cromwell? Side by side with a sacred Charles the Second, sacred George the Fourth, and the other sacred Charleses, Jameses, Georges, and Defenders of the Faith,-I am afraid he wouldn't like it! Let us decide provisionally, No."

-L. D. P. VII.

PUBLIC STATUES IN ENGLAND.

WHAT good in the æsthetic, the moral, social or any human point of view, we are ever to get of these Brazen Images now peopling our chief cities and their market-places, it is impossible to specify. Evil enough. we, consciously or unconsciously, get of them; no soul looks upon them approvingly or even indifferently without damage, all the deadlier the less he knows of it. Simple souls they corrupt in the sources of their spiritual being: wise souls, obliged to look on them, look with some feeling of anger and just abhorrence; which is itself a mischief to a peaceable man. Good will never be got of these Brazen Images in their present form. Of what use, till once broken-up and melted into warmingpans, they can ever be to gods or men, I own I cannot see. Gods and men demand that this, which is their sure ultimate destiny, should so soon as possible be realised. -L. D. P. VII.

IF the world were not properly anarchic, this question 'Who shall have a Statue?' would be one of the greatest and most solemn for it. Who is to have a Statue ? means, Whom shall we consecrate and set apart as one of our sacred men? Sacred; that all men may see him, be reminded of him, and, by new example added to old perpetual precept, be taught what is real worth in man. Whom do you wish us to resemble? Him you set on a high column, that all men, looking on it, may be continually apprised of the duty you expect from them. What man to set there, and what man to refuse forevermore the leave to be set there: this, if a country were not anarchic as we say,-ruleless, given up to the rule of Chaos, in the primordial fibres of its being, would be a great question for a country!

And to the parties themselves, lightly as they set about it, the question is rather great. Whom shall I honour, whom shall I refuse to honour? If a man have any precious thing in him at all, certainly the most precious of all the gifts he can offer is his approbation, his reverence to another man. This is his very soul, this fealty which he swears to another: his personality itself, with whatever it has of eternal and divine, he bends here in reverence before another. Not lightly will a man give this, if he is still a man. -L. D. P. VII.

MODERN PEERAGES.

TILL the time of James the First, I find that real heroic merit more or less was actually the origin of peerages; never, till towards the end of that bad reign, were peerages bargained for, or bestowed on men palpably of no worth except their money or connexion. But the evil practice, once begun, spread rapidly; and now the Peerage-Book is what we see;—a thing miraculous in the other extreme. A kind of Proteus' flock, very curious to meet upon the lofty mountains, so many of them being natives of the deep!-Our menagerie of live

Peers in Parliament is like that of our Brazen Statues in the market-place; the selection seemingly is made much in the same way, and with the same degree of felicity, and successful accuracy in choice. Our one steady regulated supply is the class definable as Supreme Stump-Orators in the Lawyer department; the class called Chancellors flows by something like fixed conduits towards the Peerage; the rest, like our Brazen Statues, come by popular rule-of-thumb. —L. D. P. VII.

MODEL PRISONS.

ON the whole, what a beautiful Establishment here fitted-up for the accommodation of the scoundrel-world, male and female! As I said, no Duke in England is, for all rational purposes which a human being can or ought to aim at, lodged, fed, tended, taken care of, with such perfection. Of poor craftsmen that pay rates and taxes from their day's wages, of the dim millions that toil and moil continually under the sun, we know what is the lodging and the tending. Of the Johnsons, Goldsmiths, lodged in their squalid garrets; working often enough amid famine, darkness, tumult, dust and desolation, what work they have to do:-of these as of 'spiritual backwoodsmen,' understood to be preappointed to such a life, and like the pigs to killing, 'quite used to it,' I say nothing. But of Dukes, which Duke, I could ask, has cocoa, soup, meat, and food in general made ready, so fit for keeping him in health, in ability to do and to enjoy? Which Duke has a house so thoroughly clean, pure and airy; lives in an element so wholesome, and perfectly adapted to the uses of soul and body as this same, which is provided here for the Devil's regiments of the line? No Duke that I have ever known. Dukes are waited-on by deleterious French cooks, by perfunctory grooms of the chambers, and expensive crowds of eye-servants, more imaginary than real: while here, Science, Human Intellect and

Beneficence have searched and sat studious, eager to do their very best; they have chosen a real Artist in Governing to see their best, in all details of it, done. Happy regiments of the line, what soldier to any earthly or celestial Power has such a lodging and attendance as you here? No soldier or servant direct or indirect of God or of man, in this England at present. Joy to you, regiments of the line. Your Master, I am told, has his Elect, and professes to be 'Prince of the Kingdoms of this World;' and truly I see he has power to do a good turn to those he loves, in England at least. Shall we say, May he, may the Devil give you good of it, ye Elect of Scoundrelism? I will rather pass by, uttering no prayer at all; musing rather in silence on the singular 'worship of God,' or practical 'reverence done to Human Worth' (which is the outcome and essence of all real 'worship' whatsoever) among the posterity of Adam at this day.

For all round this beautiful Establishment, or Oasis of Purity, intended for the Devil's regiments of the line, lay continents of dingy poor and dirty dwellings, where the unfortunate not yet enlisted into that Force were struggling manifoldly,-in their workshops, in their marble-yards and timber-yards and tan-yards, in their close cellars, cobbler-stalls, hungry garrets, and poor dark trade-shops with red-herrings and tobacco-pipes crossed in the window,-to keep the Devil out-of-doors, and not enlist with him. And it was by a tax on these that the Barracks for the regiments of the line were kept up. Visiting Magistrates, impelled by Exeter Hall, by Able-Editors, and the Philanthropic Movement of the Age, had given orders to that effect. Rates on the poor servant of God and of her Majesty, who still serves both in his way, painfully selling redherrings; rates on him and his red-herrings to boil right soup for the Devil's declared Elect! Never in my travels, in any age or clime, had I fallen-in with

such Visiting Magistrates before. Reserved they, I should suppose, for these ultimate or penultimate ages of the world, rich in all prodigies, political, spiritual,— ages surely with such a length of ears as was never paralleled before. L. D. P. II.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT.

AND so you take criminal caitiffs, murderers, and the like, and hang them on gibbets 'for an example to deter others.' Whereupon arise friends of humanity, and object. With very great reason, as I consider, if your hypothesis be correct. What right have you to hang any poor creature 'for an example'? He can turn round upon you and say, "Why make an ‘example' of me, a merely ill-situated, pitiable man? Have you no more respect for misfortune? Misfortune, I have been told, is sacred. And yet you hang me, now I am fallen into your hands; choke the life out of me, for an example! Again I ask, Why make an example of me, for your own convenience alone?"-All 'revenge' being out of the question, it seems to me the caitiff is unanswerable; and he and the philanthropic platforms have the logic all on their side.

The one answer to him is: "Caitiff, we hate thee; and discern for some six thousand years now, that we are called upon by the whole Universe to do it. Not with a diabolic but with a divine hatred. God himself, we have always understood, 'hates sin,' with a most authentic, celestial, and eternal hatred. A hatred, a hostility inexorable, unappeasable, which blasts the scoundrel, and all scoundrels ultimately into black annihilation and disappearance from the sum of things. The path of it as the path of a flaming sword: he that has eyes may see it, walking inexorable, divinely beautiful and divinely terrible, through the chaotic gulf of Human History, and everywhere burning, as with unquenchable fire, the false and death-worthy from the