Some old, feeble, partizan of the ministry, who has worn himself to a skeleton by late sittings; dried, like a potted herring, by committee labour; hoarse with fifty years' cheering of his party, and deaf from the cries of “divide” and “adjourn” that have been ringing in his ears for the last cycle of his existence, is selected for promotion to the peerage. He was eloquent in his day, too, perhaps; but that day is gone by. His speech upon a great question was once a momentous event, but now his vote is mumbled in tones scarce audible.--Gratefully mindful of his “has been,” his party provide him with an asylum, where the residue of his days may be passed in peace and pleasantness. Careful not to break the spell that has bound him to life, they surround him with some semblance of his former state, suited in all respects to his age, his decrepitude, and his debility; they pour water upon the leaves of his politics, and give him a weak and pleasant beverage, that can never irritate his nerves, nor destroy his slumbers. Some insignificant bills--some unimportant appeals--some stray fragments that fall from the tables of sturdier politicians, are his daily diet; and he dozes away the remainder of life, happy and contented in the simple and beautiful delusion that he is legislating and ruling just as warrantable the while, as his compeer of Chelsea, in deeming his mock parades the forced marches of the Peninsula, and his Sunday guards the dispositions for a Toulouse or a Waterloo. A NUT FOR THE ART UNION. [Illustration: 159] The battle between the “big and little-endians” in Gulliver, was nothing to the fight between the Destructives and Conservatives of the Irish Art Union. A few months since the former party deciding that the engraved plate of Mr. Burton's picture should be broken up; the latter protesting against the Vandalism of destroying a first-rate work of art, and preventing the full triumph of the artist's genius, in the circulation of a print so credit' able to himself and to his country.