Another chapter is dedicated to “Sixpenny Miracles in England,” which is chiefly composed of rechauffees from our own press, and with which the reader is probably familiar; but there are some passages sufficiently amusing for quotation:—­“English officials are invariably impertinent, from the policeman at the corner to the minister in Downing-street ... a stranger might suppose them paid to insult, rather than to oblige ... from the clerk at the railway depot to the secretary of the office where a man is compelled to go about passports, the same laconic rudeness is observable.”  How the American mind must have been galled, when a cabinet minister said, “not at home” to a free and enlightened citizen, who, on a levee day at the White House, can follow his own hackney-coachman into the august presence of the President elect.  Conceive him strolling up Charing Cross, then suddenly stopping in the middle of the pavement, wrapt in thought as to whether he should cowhide the insulting minister, or give him a chance at twenty yards with a revolving carbine.  Ere the knotty point is settled in his mind, a voice from beneath a hat with an oilskin top sounds in his ear, “Move on, sir, don’t stop the pathway!” Imagine the sensations of a sovereign citizen of a sovereign state, being subject to such indignities from stipendiary ministers and paid police.  Who can wonder that he conceives it the duty of government so to regulate public offices, &c., “as to protect not only its own subjects, but strangers, from the insults of these impertinent hirelings.”  The bile of the author rises with his subject, and a few pages further on he throws it off in the following beautiful sentence:—­“Better would it be for the honour of the English nation if they had been born in the degradation, as they are endued with the propensities, of the modern Egyptians.”

At last, among other “sixpenny miracles,” he arrives at the Zoological Gardens,—­the beauty of arrangement, the grandness of the scale, &c., strike him forcibly; but his keen inquiring mind, and his accurately recording pen, have enabled him to afford his countrymen information which most of my co-members in the said Society were previously unconscious of.  He tells them, “It is under control of the English Government, and subject to the same degradation as Westminster, St. Paul’s, &c.”—­Starting from this basis, which only wants truth to make it solid, he complains of “the meanness of reducing the nation to the condition of a common showman;” the trifling mistake of confounding public and private property moves his democratic chivalry, and he takes up the cudgels for the masses.  I almost fear to give the sentence publicity, lest it should shake the Ministry, and be a rallying-point for Filibustero Chartists.  My anticipation of but a moderate circulation for this work must plead my excuse for not withholding it.  “The Government basely use, without permission, the authority of the people’s name,