Politics being a subject everybody understands by instinct, young men will naturally turn their attention that way. The number of offices with salaries make this country almost that Frenchman's Utopia imagined by Madame de Staël, where every adult male was to be a public officer paid by the state. We have even more than this. When all other hopes break down, there is the custom-house,--that last infirmary of noble minds who have failed in every attempt to cure the aches that empty pockets are heirs to. No doubt the profession of politics is generally remunerative; but where I live, a foreign order of nature's nobility rules us. We Saxons have fought our battle of Hastings at the polls, and have lost it; and no one can hope to hold office here, unless he came over with Murphy the Conqueror. Even should he combine in his person that profitable conjunction of knavery, impudence, and laziness which we call a politician, with the physical requisites described by a philosopher of the last century,--_Vox stentoria, sempiterna, cum cerebello vacuo_,--it would profit him nothing. The poet Gray makes Jemmy Twitcher marry Divinity, after being refused by Law and Physic. These two smile only upon serious admirers. They who follow the law--at a distance, as some one remarks, never pick up a living. And in medicine, unless the indolent practitioner can invent a pill or a syrup, and can borrow enough to publish lying certificates from country clergymen, and to hire bill-stickers to dirty the face of Nature with the names of his specifics and the wonders they work, he will never earn his daily bread. But Divinity is more easily pleased. It was usual in the generation now passing away to recommend the Church to young gentlemen of moderate energy without capital. And indeed the path seemed easy, and the prospect pleasant.