These are specimens of the difficulties by which we are beset, when we endeavour to obtain an exact and faithful image from the troubled medium through which human affairs are reflected to us. Dr Arnold dwells on this point with his usual felicity of language and illustration. "This inattention to altered circumstances, which would make us be Guelfs in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, because the Guelf cause had been right in the eleventh or twelfth, is a fault of most universal application in all political questions, and is often most seriously mischievous. It is deeply seated in human nature, being, in fact, no other than an exemplification of the force of habit. It is like the case of a settler, landing in a country overrun with wood and undrained, and visited therefore by excessive falls of rain. The evil of wet, and damp, and closeness, is besetting him on every side; he clears away the woods, and he drains his land, and he, by doing so, mends both his climate and his own condition. Encouraged by his success, he perseveres in his system; clearing a country is with him synonymous with making it fertile and habitable; and he levels, or rather sets fire to, his forests without mercy. Meanwhile, the tide is turned without his observing it; he has already cleared enough, and every additional clearance is a mischief; damp and wet are no longer the evil most to be dreaded, but excessive drought. The rains do not fall in sufficient quantity; the springs become low, the rivers become less and less fitted for navigation. Yet habit blinds him for a long while to the real state of the case; and he continues to encourage a coming mischief in his dread of one that is become obsolete. We have been long making progress on our present tack; yet if we do not go about now, we shall run ashore. Consider the popular feeling at this moment against capital punishment; what is it but continuing to burn the woods, when the country actually wants shade and moisture? Year after year, men talked of the severity of the penal code, and struggled against it in vain. The feeling became stronger and stronger, and at last effected all, and more than all, which it had at first vainly demanded; yet still, from mere habit, it pursues its course, no longer to the restraining of legal cruelty, but to the injury of innocence and the encouragement of crime, and encouraging that worse evil--a sympathy with wickedness justly punished rather than with the law, whether of God or man, unjustly violated. So men have continued to cry out against the power of the Crown after the Crown had been shackled hand and foot; and to express the greatest dread of popular violence long after that violence was exhausted, and the anti-popular