Lord Brougham's Chancery practice was only to be equalled by one of Lord Waterford's steeple-chases. He took all before him in a fly--he rode straight, plenty of neck, baulked nothing--up leap or down leap, sunk fence or double ditch, post and rail, or quickset, stone wall, or clay bank, all one to him--go it he would. Others might deny his judgment; he wanted to get over the ground, and _that_ he did do. The West-end physician, in the same way, visits his fifty patients daily, walks his hospital, delivers a lecture to old ladies about some “curious provision” of nature in the palm of the human hand (for fee-taking); and devoting something like three minutes and twelve seconds to each sick man's case, pockets some twenty thousand per annum by his dispatch. Speed is now the _El Dorado_. Jelly is advertised to be made in a minute, butter in five, soup seasoned and salted in three seconds of time. Even the Quakers--bless their quiet hearts!--could n't escape the contagion and actually began to walk and talk with some faint resemblance to ordinary mortals. The church alone maintained the even tenor of its way, and moved not in the wild career of the whirlwind world about it. Such was my gratulation, when my eye fell upon the following passage of the _Times_. Need I say with what a heavy heart I read it? It is Mr. Rushton who speaks:-- “In the month of December, 1841, he heard that a man had been found dead in the streets of Liverpool; that all the property he possessed had been taken from his person, and that an attempt to trace his identity had been made in vain. He was taken to the usual repository for the dead, where au inquest had been held upon him, and from the 'dead house,' as it was called, he was removed to the workhouse burial-ground. The man who drove the hearse on the occasion was very old, and not very capable of giving evidence. His attendant was an idiot. It had been represented to Mr. Hodgson and himself that the dead man had been taken in the clothes in which he died and put into a coffin which was too small for him; that a shroud was put over him; that the lid of the coffin would not go down; and that he was taken from the dead-house and buried in the parochial ground, no funeral rites having been performed on the occasion. It had also been communicated to Mr. Hodgson and himself that, after two days, the clergyman who was instructed to perform those rites over the paupers, came and performed one service for the dead over all the paupers who had been buried in the intermediate time.”