_Barclay and Perkins._ Have you ever amused yourself by tracing historical parallels? did you ever note how often one age reflects the character of another, so that the stage of real life seems to us at intervals as a theatre on which we see represented the passions of the past, its political tendencies, and monied speculations; the only change being that of costume, and a wider but more modified method of action? So true it is that men change, institutions vary, and that human nature is always the same. The church reproduces its Laud, the railway exchange its Law, the bench has its Mansfield, the Horse Guards its greater Marlborough, and Newgate its Mrs. Brownrigg. We have giants as great as King Charles's porter, and a Tom Thumb who would have frightened the very _ghosts_ of all departed Jeffery Hudsons,--a class not generally accused of fear, except at daybreak,--by his unequalled _diminutiveness_. Take the great questions which agitate the church and the senate-house, which agitated them in the sixteenth, during much of the two following centuries, and you will find the same theological, political, commercial, and sanitary questions debated with equal honesty, equal truth, and similar prospects of satisfactory solution. I confess, however, that for one historical coincidence I was unprepared; and that "Barclay and Perkins," in the case of assault upon a noted public character, should have an historical antecedent in the seventeenth century, has caused me some surprise. It is not necessary for me to recall to your attention how Barclay and Perkins were noised about on the occasion of the attack on General Haynau. The name of the firm was as familiar to our lips as their porter: "Never came reformation in a flood With such a _heady_ currance."