A writer or compiler of statistics should ride his own hobby. Pegasus is hard-mouthed to his hand; if he attempts the use of the curb, he is thrown, and thus is sure to be run away with. So here he has got quite beyond the ground of matter-of-fact. By the Vikings’ soul in the British seamen—the burning soul too—he declares himself of the Pythagorean philosophy, quite gratuitously; and in the following sentence carries his transmigration notions to a strange but practical conclusion, for he tells us of a race “_impregnated with the sea_,” imaging sailors’ mothers and wives as mermaids—that is, previous to the marine and marital alliances; by which unaccountable flight of poetic diction, I presume, he means only that the sea was rather a rough nursing-mother: and how could he imagine that such an untutored race ever read, or could read, a syllable of what Horace wrote? Doubtless, he must have been weary, counting up these five hundred mostly barren islands, and, coming in the list to “_Rum_,” it must have made for him a comfortable suggestion; and in consequence, a pretty stiff tumbler set all his ideas at once afloat, and poetically, “half seas over” among the islands, steering, however, steadily, as he was bound towards Mull Port, and the more pleasant hospitality of its 7485 inhabitants. Having descended from this marine Pegasus, the author proceeds in his statistics. The number of inhabited houses in Great Britain in 1801 amounted to 1,870,476; in 1851, to 3,648,347: these contained 4,312,388 families—persons, 20,816,351. Thus it is seen that the number of houses since 1801 is nearly doubled. How commonly we boast, Eusebius, of things that have passed away! You hear it now often said that an Englishman’s house is his castle, the garrison of which has been hitherto supposed to be known only to himself. There has been an idea that not only the master, but all down to the very scullion, are ready to stand with spits and skillets to keep out unwelcome invaders; whereas the truth is, as shown in this Census, that the castle has its government inspector, who notes down and registers the numbers, ages, names, sexes, and occupations of every individual the said castle contains. Houses are a very nice tangible property for the convenience of government taxation; by judicious scrutiny, of which the Census Commission provides ample means, it will be easily ascertained what each family has to live upon; or, what is quite the same thing for the getting the taxation, what on “an average” the Commissioners may think the said family ought to have to live upon; thus the income-tax is facilitated in computation and collection. These are surely encroachments, that, by little and little, are domineering over the subjects’ liberty. There are other Acts of Parliament also which affect this liberty in the “castle;” some general, some local. In few places can a man make alterations in his building,