meat: and, again, we, must take into consideration the care and attention paid by the farmers and graziers to improve the stock of those unfortunate benefactors of the human family." How full of milky kindness is his language, still breathing the spirit of that predominant idea--the tranquillisation of the universe by "Copious Dinners!" He has given up "basting" with success. Men may as well give up basting one another. Nobody will envy the Regenerator the bloodless fillets worthily encircling his forehead, should the aspirations of his benevolent soul in his lifetime assume any tangible shape. But if a more distant futurity is destined to witness the lofty triumph, he may yet depart in the confidence of its occurrence. The most precious fruits ripen the most slowly. The sun itself does not burst at once into meridian splendour. Gradually breaks the morning; and the mellow light glides noiselessly along, tinging mountain, forest, and city spire, till a stealthy possession seems to be taken of the whole upper surface of creation, and the mighty monarch at last uprises on a world prepared to expect, to hail, and to reverence his perfect and unclouded majesty. THE LATE AND THE PRESENT MINISTRY. Our sentiments with regard to the change of policy on the part of Sir Robert Peel and his coadjutors, were early, and we hope forcibly, expressed. We advocated then, as ever, the principle of protection to native industry and agriculture, not as a class-benefit, but on far deeper and more important considerations. We deprecated the rash experiment of departing from a system under which we had flourished so long--of yielding to the clamours of a grasping and interested faction, whose object in raising the cry of cheap bread, was less the welfare of the working man, than the depression of his wages, and a corresponding additional profit to themselves. The decline of agricultural prosperity--inevitable if the anticipations of the free traders should be fulfilled--seems to us an evil of the greatest possible magnitude, and the more dangerous because the operation must be necessarily slow. And in particular, we protested against the introduction of free-trade measures, at a period when their consideration was not called for by the pressure of any exigency, when the demand for labour was almost without parallel, and before the merits of the sliding-scale of duty, introduced by Sir Robert Peel himself in the present Parliament, had been sufficiently tested or observed. Those who make extravagant boast of the soundness and sagacity of their leader cannot deny, that the facts upon which he based his plan of financial reform, were in reality not facts, but fallacies. The political Churchill enunciated his _Prophecy of Famine_, not hesitatingly nor doubtfully, but in the broadest and the strongest language. Month after month glided away, and still the famine came not; until men, marvelling at the unaccountable