Flat burglary as ever was committed! O villain! thou wilt be condemned into everlasting redemption for this--so say the political Dogberrys to the gentleman whom they used to applaud. We are not surprised at their wrath. It _is_ rather hard to be told at this time of day that ballot-boxes and extension of the suffrage are included in Mr Carlyle's catalogue of Shams, and that Messrs Thompson, Fox, and Co., must even submit to the charge of talking unveracities and owlism. Surely there is some mistake here. Not a whit of it. Mr Carlyle is in grim earnest, and lays about him like a man. He has not studied the records of the French Revolution for nothing; and he is not able to discern in the late Continental revolts any ground for general congratulation on the improved prospects of mankind. Such language as the following must sound as a strange rebuke in the ears of divers organs of the public press, who, not long ago, were flinging up their caps in ecstasies at the fall of constitutions, backing up Garibaldi against the Pope, Charles Albert against Radetsky, the Sicilian insurgents against their Sovereign of Naples, Kossuth against the Emperor, Von Gagern against Federalism, Ledru Rollin against Civilisation, and Lamartine against Common-sense. "Certainly it is a drama full of action, event fast following event; in which curiosity finds endless scope, and there are interests at stake, enough to arrest the attention of all men simple and wise. Whereat the idle multitude lift up their voices, gratulating, celebrating sky-high; in rhyme and prose announcement, more than plentiful, that _now_ the New Era, and long-expected Year One of Perfect Human Felicity has come. Glorious and immortal people, sublime French citizens, heroic barricades; triumph of civil and religious liberty--O Heaven! one of the inevitablest private miseries, to an earnest man in such circumstances, is this multitudinous efflux of oratory and psalmody from the universal human throat; drowning for the moment all reflection whatsoever, except the sorrowful one that you are fallen in an evil, heavy-laden, long-eared age, and must resignedly bear your part in the same. The front-wall of your wretched old crazy dwelling, long denounced by you to no purpose, having at last fairly folded itself over, and fallen prostrate into the street, the floors, as may happen, will still hang on by the mere beam-ends and coherency of old carpentry, though in a sloping direction, and depend there till certain poor rusty nails and wormeaten dovetailings give way:--but is it cheering, in such circumstances, that the whole household burst forth into celebrating the new joys of light and ventilation, liberty and picturesqueness of position, and thank God that now they have got a house to their mind?"