be sure of our Parliamentary seat; not when we have it in our pockets!  The Romans have left us golden words with regard to the fickleness of the populace; we have our Horace, our Juvenal, we have our Johnson; and in this vaunted age of reason it is, that we surrender ourselves into the hands of the populace!  Panem et circenses!  Mr. Caddis repeated it, after his fathers; his fathers and he had not headed them out of that original voracity.  There they were, for moneyed legislators to bewail their appetites.  And it was an article of his legislation, to keep them there.

Pedestrian purchasers of tickets for the Charity Concert, rather openly, in an envelope of humour, confessed to the bait of the Radnor bread with bit of fun.  Savoury rumours were sweeping across Wrensham.  Mr. Radnor had borrowed footmen of the principal houses about.  Cartloads of provisions had been seen to come.  An immediate reward of a deed of benevolence, is a thing sensibly heavenly; and the five-shilling tickets were paid for as if for a packet on the counter.  Unacquainted with Mr. Radnor, although the reports of him struck a summons to their gastric juices, resembling in its effect a clamorous cordiality, they were chilled, on their steps along the halfrolled new gravel-roads to the house, by seeing three tables of prodigious length, where very evidently a feast had raged:  one to plump the people—­perhaps excessively courted by great gentlemen of late; shopkeepers, the villagers, children.  These had been at it for two merry hours.  They had risen.  They were beef and pudding on legs; in some quarters, beer amiably manifest, owing to the flourishes of a military band.  Boys, who had shaken room through their magical young corporations for fresh stowage, darted out of a chasing circle to the crumbled cornucopia regretfully forsaken fifteen minutes back, and buried another tart.  Plenty still reigned:  it was the will of the Master that it should.

We divert our attention, resigned in stoic humour, to the bill of the Concert music, handed us with our tickets at the park-gates:  we have no right to expect refreshment; we came for the music, to be charitable.  Signora Bianca Luciani:  of whom we have read almost to the hearing her; enough to make the mistake at times.  The grand violinist Durandarte:  forcibly detained on his way to America.  Mr. Radnor sent him a blank cheque:—­no!—­so Mr. Radnor besought him in person:  he is irresistible; a great musician himself; it is becoming quite the modern style.  We have now English noblemen who play the horn, the fife—­the drum, some say!  We may yet be Merrie England again, with our nobles taking the lead.

England’s nobles as a musical band at the head of a marching and dancing population, pictured happily an old Conservative country, that retained its members of aristocracy in the foremost places while subjecting them to downright uses.  Their ancestors, beholding them there, would be satisfied on the point of honour; perhaps enlivened by hearing them at fife and drum.