than Portia, take a fee from the opposite party, and, by an influence only known to herself, cause you to quail before you have proceeded half-way in the exposition of the cause of your client? Or are you a doctor—Harriet Hunt, M.D., forgive us for this supposition; for your image, albeit we never saw you and never may, often haunts us in our dreams, and from your imaginary hand have we received multitudes of indescribable but seemingly celestial pills—how would you like your wife to be called in as an adviser on the homœopathic principle, after you had staked your existence on the superiority of the drastic method, and see her recover a patient in less than a week, whereas you had calculated upon a month’s legitimate fees under the ordinary curatory process? Or let us suppose that one of the fairest dreams of the strong-minded women of our generation should be realised, and that all political disabilities were removed from the fair sex, so that they might be admitted to sit and vote in Parliament. We scorn to take up the objection which might occur to a common mind of the impossibility of the Speaker maintaining order—we shall suppose a far worse case; and that is the possible disagreement between man and wife in political principle and conduct. How could you possibly endure the spectacle of your spouse accompanying the smiling Mr Gladstone to a division in one lobby, whilst your stern sense of duty compelled you to retire into another? How could you possibly remain at bed and board with a woman who was in the habit of attending those meetings at Chesham Place, which Lord John Russell is so fond of calling whenever he requires a friendly castigation, as Henry II. bared his brawny shoulders to the monks? And how, as a gentleman and a man of honour, could you reconcile it with your conscience to lay your head on the same pillow with a woman who can support the Coalition Ministry, and even go the length of declaring that she has confidence in the Earl of Aberdeen? Or we shall come to preaching, which is perhaps the more germain to the matter. The Rev. Asahel Groanings, of some undefined shadow of dissent, marries Miss Naomi Starcher of corresponding principles, with a fortune of some few hundred pounds, which are speedily sunk, beyond hope of extrication, in the erection of an Ebenezer. Both are licensed to the ministry, Asahel officiating in the morning and his helpmate in the afternoon. But somehow or other, Asahel is not popular with his congregation. His style of oratory reminds one unpleasantly of the exercitations of a seasick passenger in a steamboat, and his visage is ghastly to look upon, being distorted as if he laboured under a permanent attack of colic. Whereas, the voice of Naomi is soft as that of a dove cooing in a thicket of pomegranates, her countenance is fair and comely, and the thoughts of the elders, as they gaze upon her, revert to the apocryphal history of Susannah. The result