Henry the fourth of France had but one coach between himself and his queen; whereas no respectable person can now dispense at the least with a travelling chariot, a barouche, a cab, and a dennet.  Civilization, which received a temporary check during the revolutionary war, has resumed its march in double-quick time since the Continent has been opened.  Champaigne and ices have now become absolute necessaries at tables where a bottle of humble port and a supernumerary pudding were esteemed luxuries, fit only for honouring the more solemn rites of hospitality.  I say nothing of heads of hair, and false (I beg pardon—­artificial) teeth; without which, at a certain age, there is no appearing.  A bald head, at the present day, is as great an indecency as Humphrey Clinker’s unmentionables; and a dismantled mouth is an outrage on well-bred society.  Then, again, how necessary is a cigar and a meerschaum to a well-appointed man of fashion, and how can a gentleman possibly show at Melton without at least a dozen hunters, and two or three hacks, to ride to cover!  Yet no one in his senses would tax these things as luxuries; or would blame his friend for getting into the King’s Bench for their indulgence.  Even the most austere judges of the land, and the most jealous juries of tradesmen, have borne ample testimony to the reasonableness of this modern extension of the wants of life, by the liberal allowance of necessaries which they have sanctioned in the tailors’ bills of litigating minors.  This liberality, indeed, follows, as consequence follows cause.  Some one has found, or invented, a story of a shipwrecked traveller’s hailing the gallows as the sure token of a civilized community.  But the jest is by no means a ben trovato; the member of gibbets being inversely as the perfection of social institutions; and if any one object, that England, while it is the best-governed country in Europe—­its envy and admiration—­is also a hanging community par excellence, I must beg to remind him of the intense interest which an English public feels in the victims of capital punishment, in the Thurtells and the Fauntleroys; as also of the universal conviction prevailing in England, that the gallows is a short and sure cut to everlasting happiness.  From all this, if there is any force in logic, we must conclude, that hanging, in this country, is only applied honoris causa, as an ovation, in consideration of the great and magnanimous daring of the Alexanders and Caesars on a small scale, to whom the law adjudges the “palmam qui meruit ferat.”  The real and true test of a refined polity is not the gallows; but is to be found rather in such well-imagined insolvent laws, as discharge a maximum of debt with a minimum of assets; and rid a gentleman annually of his duns, with the smallest possible quantity of corporeal inconvenience.  When luxuries become necessaries, insolvency is the best safety-valve to discharge the surplus dishonesty of the people, which, if pent up, would explode in dangerous overt acts of crime and violence; and it should be encouraged accordingly.