The old park has been reduced to the same state. A scrupulous homage has been paid to every new mode of cultivation; a thousand emendations, and additions, and improvements have been successively introduced. But it is easier to plant new customs than to eradicate the old. Lycaon was turned into a beast, but he retained his old habits of atrocity. Arachne was transformed into a spider, but she did not forget her spinning. The park of the Weathercocks has, in like manner, assumed various novel shapes, without losing the traces of its old ones. At one time it was dressed out in all the stiff regularity of alleys and arcades; at another, it was dubbed a “wilderness,” and was immediately laid waste by a terrible inroad of shrubs and weeds without number. In one part your eye rests upon the muddy vestiges of an artificial cascade; in another, your foot stumbles over a heap of rubbish, which has been produced by the demolition of an artificial ruin. Some people object to these things; for my part, I own I am delighted with them. They show a proper distrust of one’s own opinion, a decorous compliance with the unstable will of the world, an eager spirit of enterprise; in short, they prove that the Weathercocks have not an ounce of obstinacy in their composition. Sir Wilfrid Weathercock, the present head of the family, is a cheerful and hale man, between forty and fifty years of age. He is about the middle stature, although, upon some occasions, by the affectation of a fashionable stoop, he appears somewhat dwarfish; while, upon others, by the assumption of a military gait and a pair of high heels, he bids fair to be accounted a giant. With a self-denial worthy of a Cincinnatus, he has avoided all offers of place or pension, all invitations to embark in public life; he has confined his manifold talents and his extraordinary versatility to the limits of his own estate. Perhaps, indeed, his determination, in this respect, may have been a prudent one; for, although any ministry would have been benefited by the unusual facility with which Sir Wilfrid would have flown from patriotic speeches to taxation and gagging bills, from prayers for peace to declarations of war, from professions of economy to measures of profusion; yet it must be confessed that his reluctance to remain a minute stationary would have driven him from one side of the House to the other oftener than is seemly in a public man. Let it be understood that we speak with all due deference and respect for the numerous precedents which are to be found in our English history. Leaving great statesmen to settle this point, we can only express our opinion that our friend has certainly acted best for his own comfort, by choosing a quiet privacy, where he may “change every hour,” undisturbed by the malevolence of envy or the violence of faction.