populated, with a people second only to ourselves in commercial energy and respect for law and order. England for years has spent wealth, energy, and precious lives in opening China to Western influence and civilisation. To-day, her success is certain. The Government and people of China both ask us to aid them in their hour of trouble, and in return they will assuredly grant us that access and commercial freedom for which we have so long laboured and so often fought. The portals of ignorance and heathenism are opening. Shall we, who are in the vanguard of nations, hesitate? No—assuredly not! Our motto must ever be “Forward;” and will not all enlightened Christendom join us in wishing “God speed” to those about to put forth in this fresh enterprise to the land of Cathay? CAXTONIANA: A SERIES OF ESSAYS ON LIFE, LITERATURE, AND MANNERS. By the Author of ‘The Caxton Family.’ PART XIII. NO. XIX.—MOTIVE POWER (_continued_). The next morning the sun shone into my windows so brightly that I rose at an earlier hour than I had been accustomed to do for months, and strolled into the gardens, interesting myself in considering the painter’s charge against dressed ground and Tracey’s ingenious reply to it. The mowers were at work upon the lawns. Perhaps among rural sounds there is none which pleases me more than that of the whetting of the scythe—I suppose less from any music in itself, than from associations of midsummer, and hay-fields, and Milton’s ‘Allegro,’ in which the low still sound is admitted among the joyous melodies of Morn. As the gardens opened upon me, with their variety of alleys and by-walks, I became yet more impressed than I had been on the day before, with the art which had planned and perfected them, and the poetry of taste with which the images of the sculptor were so placed, that at every turn they recalled some pleasing but vague reminiscence of what one had seen in a picture, or in travel; or brought more vividly before the mind some charming verse in the poets, whose busts greeted the eye from time to time in bowery nook or hospitable alcove, where the murmur of a waterfall, or the view of a distant landscape opened from out the groves, invited pause and allured to contemplation.