(We make this proposal in no thoughtless—­no bantering spirit.  He can see very little into the most transparent mill-stone who believes that we pen these essays—­essays that will endure and glisten as long, ay as long as the freshest mackerel—­if he think that we sit down to this our weekly labour in a careless lackadaisical humour.  By no means.  Like Sir LYTTON BULWER, when he girds up his loins to write an apocryphal comedy, we approach our work with graceful solemnity.  Like Sir LYTTON, too, we always dress for the particular work we have in hand.  Sir LYTTON wrote “Richelieu” in a harlequin’s jacket (sticking pirate’s pistols in his belt, ere he valorously took whole scenes from a French melo-drama):  we penned our last week’s essay in a suit of old canonicals, with a tie-wig askew upon our beating temples, and are at this moment cased in a court-suit of cut velvet, with our hair curled, our whiskers crisped, and a masonic apron decorating our middle man.  Having subsided into our chair—­it is in most respects like the porphyry piece of furniture of the Pope—­and our housekeeper having played the Dead March in Saul on our chamber organ (BULWER wrote “The Sea Captain” to the preludizing of a Jew’s-harp), we enter on our this week’s labour.  We state thus much, that our readers may know with what pains we prepare ourselves for them.  Besides, when BULWER thinks it right that the world should know that the idea of “La Vailiere” first hit him in the rotonde of a French diligence, modest as we are, can we suppose that the world will not be anxious to learn in what coloured coat we think, and whether, when we scratch our head to assist the thought that sticks by the way, we displace a velvet cap or a Truefitt’s scalp?)

Reader, the above parenthesis may be skipped or not.  Read not a line of it—­the omission will not maim our argument.  So to proceed.

If we cast our eyes over the debates of the last six months, we shall find that hundreds of members of the House of Commons have exhibited the most extraordinary powers of ill-directed labour.  And then their capacity of endurance!  Arguments that would have knocked down any reasonable elephant have touched them no more than would summer gnats.  Well, why not awake this sleeping strength?  Why not divert a mischievous potency into beneficial action?  Why should we confine a body of men to making laws, when so many of them might be more usefully employed in wheeling barrows?  Now there is Mr. PLUMPTRE, who has done so much to make English Sundays respectable—­would he not be working far more enduring utility with pickaxe or spade than by labouring at enactments to stop the flowing of the Thames on the Sabbath?  Might not D’ISRAELI be turned into a very jaunty carpenter, and be set to the light interior work of both the Houses?  His logic, it is confessed, will support nothing; but we think he would be a very smart hand at a hat-peg.