in his enlarged humanity, he can feel for so helpless a creature as the Earl of COVENTRY, so mild, so unassuming a prelate as the Bishop of EXETER—­if he can sympathise with the wants of even a D’ISRAELI, and tax his mighty intellect to make even SIBTHORP comfortable,—­surely the same minister will have, aye, a morbid sense of the wants, the daily wretchedness of hundreds of thousands, who, with the fiend Corn Law grinning at their fireless hearths—­pine and perish in weavers’ hovels, for the which there has as yet been no ’adoption of measures for the warming and ventilating.’” “Surely”—­they will think—­“the man whose sympathy is active for a few of the ‘meanest things that live’ will gush with sensibility towards a countless multitude, fluttering into rags and gaunt with famine.  He will go back to first principles; he will, with a giant’s arm, knock down all the conventionalities built by the selfishness of man—­(and what a labourer is selfishness! there was no such hard worker at the Pyramids or the wall of China)—­between him and his fellow!  Hunger will be fed—­nakedness will be clothed—­and God’s image, though stricken with age, and broken with disease, be acknowledged; not in the cut-and-dried Pharisaical phrase of trading Church-goers, as a thing vested with immortality—­as a creature fashioned for everlasting solemnities—­but practically treated as of the great family of man—­a brother, invited with the noblest of the Caesars, to an immortal banquet!”

Such may be the hopes of a few, innocent of the knowledge of the stony-heartedness of Toryism.  For ourselves, we hope nothing from Sir ROBERT PEEL.  His flourish on the warming and ventilation of the new Houses of Parliament, taken in connexion with his opinions on the Corn Laws, reminds us of the benevolence of certain people in the East, who, careless and ignorant of the claims of their fellow-men, yet take every pains to erect comfortable hospitals and temples for dogs and vermin.  Old travellers speak of these places, and of men being hired that the sacred fleas might feed upon their blood.  Now, when we consider the history of legislation—­when we look upon many of the statutes emanating from Parliament—­how often might we call the House of Commons the House of Fleas?  To be sure, there is yet this great difference:  the poor who give their blood there, unlike the wretches of the East, give it for nothing!

Sir ROBERT’S speech promises nothing whatever as to his future policy.  He leaves everything open.  He will not say that he will not go in precisely the line chalked out by the Whigs.  “Next session,” says.  Sir ROBERT, “you shall see what you shall see.”  About next February, Orson, in the words of the oracle in the melo-drama, will be “endowed with reason.”  Until then, we must accept a note-of-hand for Sir ROBERT, that he may pay the expenses of the government.