Witness it! ye many years of wondrous alternation--of lurid tempest and sunny calm--of disastrous rout and triumphant procession--of shouting paean and wailing dirge--witness the imperturbable tenor of our way! Attest it, thou goodly array of the tomes of Maga, laden and sparkling, now as ever, with wisdom and wit, science and fancy!--attest the unwavering fidelity of our career! All this is very true; but the secret annals of the good can never be free from temptations, and never are in reality unblotted by peccadilloes. The fury of the demagogue has been our laughing-stock--the versatility of trimming politicians, our scorn. We have crouched before none of the powers which have been, or be; neither have we been carried off our feet by the whirlwinds of popular passion. Yet it is difficult to resist a good dinner. The victories of Miltiades robbed Themistocles of sleep. The triumphs of SOYER are apt to affect us, "with a difference," after the same fashion. There was, we remember, a spirit of surly independence within us on visiting, for the first time, the "high capital" of Whiggery, where the Tail at present "New rubb'd with balm, expatiate and confer Their State affairs." To admire any thing was not our mood: "The ascending pile Stood fix'd her stately heighth; and straight the doors, Opening their brazen folds, discover, wide Within, her ample spaces, o'er the smooth And level pavement." And as these lines suggested themselves, we recollected who the first Whig is said to have been, and whose architectural glories Milton was recording. We never yet heard a Radical disparage a peer of the realm without being convinced, that deep in the pocket, next his heart, lay an incautious hospitable invitation from the noble lord, to which a precipitate answer in the affirmative had already been dispatched. Analogously, in the magnificent edifice, whose tesselated floor we were treading gingerly, it seemed to us that we surveyed an unmistakable monument of an innate predilection for the splendours and comforts, the pomp and the _abandon_, of a "proud aristocracy." This was before dinner, and we were hungry. To tell all that happened to us for some hours afterwards, would, in fact, force us to transfer to our pages more than half of the volume which is prompting these observations. Suffice it to say, that when we again stood on Pall-Mall, a bland philanthropy of sentiment, embracing all races, and classes, and sects of men, permeated our bosom. Whence came the mellowing influence, seeing that we had been, as our custom is, very innocent of wine? Nor could it be the seductive eloquence of the company. We had indeed been roundly vituperated in argument by the Liberator. Oh yes! but we had been fed by the Regenerator.