A was King ALFRED, a monarch of note;
  B is BURDETT, who can well turn a coat.

Here we would have the chief incidents of Alfred’s life nicely painted, with BURDETT, late Old Glory, and now Old Corruption.  As for the poetry, when we consider the capacities of the learners, that cannot be too simple, too homely.  The House, however, may order a Committee of Versification, if it please; all that we protest against is D’ISRAELI being of the number.

  C is the CORN-LAWS, that famish’d the poor;
  D is the DEBT, that will famish them more.

Here, for the imaginative artist, is an opportunity!  To paint the wholesale wickedness and small villanies of the Corn-laws!  What a contrast of scene and character!  Squalid hovels, and princely residences—­purse-proud, plethoric injustice, big and bloated with, its iniquitous gains, and gaunt, famine-stricken multitudes!  Then for the Debt—­that hideous thing begotten by war and corruption; what a tremendous moral lesson might be learned from a nightly conning of the terrific theme!

We have neither poetic genius nor space of paper to go through the whole of the alphabet; we merely throw out the above four lines—­and were we not assured that they are better lines, far more musical, than any to be found in BULWER’S SIAMESE TWINS, we should blush much nearer scarlet than we do—­to give an idea of the utility and beautiful comprehensiveness of our plan.

The great difficulty, however, will be to compress the subjects—­so multitudinous are they—­within the thousand feet allowed by the architect.  To begin with the Wittenagemot, or meeting of the wise men, and to end with portraits of Mr. Roebuck’s ancestors—­to say nothing of the fine imaginative sketch of the Member for Bath tilting, in the mode of Quixote with the steam-press of Printing-house-square—­will require the most extraordinary powers of condensation on the parts of the artists.  Nevertheless, if the undertaking be even creditably executed, it will be a monument of national wisdom and national utility to unborn generations of Members.  What crowds of subjects press upon us!  The History of Bribery might make a sort of Parliamentary Rake’s Progress, if we could but hit upon the artist to portray its manifold beauties. The Windsor Stables and the Education of the Poor would form admirable companion-pictures, in which the superiority of the horse over the human animal could be most satisfactorily delineated—­the quadruped having considerably more than three times the amount voted to him for snug lodging, hay, beans, and oats, that the English pauper obtained from Parliament for that manure of the soil—­as congregated piety at Exeter Hall denominates it—­a Christian education!