No, dear public! you will put your hand in your breeches' pocket like a crocodile, as you do now, and say nothing. Yon are fully aware how much of the fault is your own; but you are stultified and hardened to shame. With the disgrace of your National Gallery, and National Regency Buildings, and Pimlico Palace, and all your other vulgarisms and trivialities on your shoulders, you bully your way out of your disgrace of duncehood, like Mike Lambourne on forgetting his part in the Kenilworth pageant. "For your part, you can do very well without book-learning. You've got Shakspeare, and if with that a nation can't face the literature of Europe, the deuce is in it! With Cocker's arithmetic and Shakspeare, any public that knows what it's about, may snap its fingers at the world!" Such, such are the demoralizing results of the ascendancy of the circulating libraries! Such is the monster-misery of literature! Again, therefore, we say, confound those fifteen talents! What have ye not to answer for, O ye Athenians! in the consequences of your malpractices of old! MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN. PART XI. "Have I not in my time heard lions roar? Have I not heard the sea, puft up with wind, Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat? Have I not heard great ordnance in the field, And Heavens artillery thunder in the skies? Have I not in the pitched battle heard Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang?" SHAKSPEARE. Our procession had more than the usual object of those dreadful displays: it was at once an act of revenge and an act of policy. During the period while the gates of the convent shut out the living world from us, a desperate struggle had been going on between the two ruling factions. In this contest for life and death, the more furious, of course, triumphed; such is the history of rabble revolution in all ages. The Girondist with his eloquence naturally fell before the Jacobin with his libel; the Girondist, affecting a deference for law, was trampled by the Jacobin, who valued nothing but force; the tongue and the pen were extinguished by the dagger; and this day was the consummation. A debate in the Convention, of singular talent and unexampled ferocity, had finished by the impeachment of the principal Girondists. Justice here knew nothing of the "law's delay;" and the fallen orators now headed our melancholy line, bound, bareheaded, half naked, and more than half dead with weariness, shame, and the sense of ruin;--there could scarcely be more in the blow which put an end to all their perturbations on this side of the grave.