nothing without the signet and the sign-manual of most devout Chancellors of the Exchequer.  Not to dally longer with the sympathies of our readers, we think it right to premonish them that we are composing an epicedium upon no less distinguished a personage than the Lottery, whose last breath, after many penultimate puffs, has been sobbed forth by sorrowing contractors, as if the world itself were about to be converted into a blank.  There is a fashion of eulogy, as well as of vituperation, and, though the Lottery stood for some time in the latter predicament, we hesitate not to assert that “multis ille bonis flebilis occidit.”  Never have we joined in the senseless clamor which condemned the only tax whereto we became voluntary contributors, the only resource which gave the stimulus without the danger or infatuation of gambling, the only alembic which in these plodding days sublimized our imaginations, and filled them with more delicious dreams than ever flitted athwart the sensorium of Alnaschar.

Never can the writer forget, when, as a child, he was hoisted upon a servant’s shoulder in Guildhall, and looked down upon the installed and solemn pomp of the then drawing Lottery.  The two awful cabinets of iron, upon whose massy and mysterious portals the royal initials were gorgeously emblazoned, as if, after having deposited the unfulfilled prophecies within, the King himself had turned the lock, and still retained the key in his pocket,—­the blue-coat boy, with his naked arm, first converting the invisible wheel, and then diving into the dark recess for a ticket,—­the grave and reverend faces of the commissioners eying the announced number,—­the scribes below calmly committing it to their huge books,—­the anxious countenances of the surrounding populace,—­while the giant figures of Gog and Magog, like presiding deities, looked down with a grim silence upon the whole proceeding,—­constituted altogether a scene which, combined with the sudden wealth supposed to be lavished from those inscrutable wheels, was well calculated to impress the imagination of a boy with reverence and amazement.  Jupiter, seated between the two fatal urns of good and evil, the blind goddess with her cornucopia, the Parcae wielding the distaff, the thread of life, and the abhorred shears, seemed but dim and shadowy abstractions of mythology, when I had gazed upon an assemblage exercising, as I dreamt, a not less eventful power, and all presented to me in palpable and living operation.  Reason and experience, ever at their old spiteful work of catching and destroying the bubbles which youth delighted to follow, have indeed dissipated much of this illusion; but my mind so far retained the influence of that early impression, that I have ever since continued to deposit my humble offerings at its shrine, whenever the ministers of the Lottery went forth with type and trumpet to announce its periodical dispensations; and though nothing has been doled out to me from its uudiscerning coffers