gave it up, and left before the end. As I came out into Old Palace Yard, and saw the towers of the Abbey in the still solemnity of the night, it seemed more strikingly majestic than before. I thought what mighty interests of Empires had been settled here, and how often Chatham, Fox, Pitt and Canning, had emerged at midnight from such scenes as I had just left, looking on the same towers, beneath which they now moulder in the dust. The sombre mass of the Abbey seemed a commentary on the hot debates from which I was retiring; a speaking monitor of the transient interests of the present, and of the eternal issues of futurity, as well as of the unchangeableness of the past. As I walked slowly to my lodgings, I passed Whitehall. Scarce any one was in the street, and all was silence. I stopped, and gazed on the white walls of the Banqueting-room, and said to myself, ‘how strange! here I am alone on this most memorable spot, in the deep and solemn night. Can it be that here, where all is now so quiet, there stood two hundred years ago a crowd of human beings, every one of whom was experiencing, at the moment, emotions the most singularly mixed and tumultuous that ever agitated the human soul? Can it be that from this same white wall issued the figure of King Charles, and that there—just there—he knelt at the block, and in a moment was a headless corpse? Even so! Here rose that groan of a mighty multitude, sighing as one man, and there the ghastly headsman stood, holding up the royal head by its anointed locks, and crying—_this_ _is the head of a traitor!_’ I almost turned about to see whether Cromwell’s troopers were not charging down upon me, so strong was the impression of the spot; but just then, the sight of a solitary policeman, patrolling beneath a gas-lamp, recalled me to myself, and I fared thoughtfully, by the statue at Charing-Cross, towards my temporary home. The Papal aggression was still, in spite of the Crystal Palace and its wonders, an absorbing topic, and my second visit to the House of Commons had been set for an evening when a debate upon that exciting subject was to be part of the entertainment. I felt sure that such an evening in the House would be, in some measure, an historical one, and might be useful to me through life, in watching the course of religious and political events. Besides, I wanted to hear a debate that should enable me to compare, by its unity of subject, a Parliament of Victoria, with those of the Plantagenets and Tudors. I had my desire.