‘From Pembroke’s princely dome, where mimic art Decks with a magic hand the dazzling bowers, Its living hues where the warm pencil pours, And breathing forms from the rude marble start, How to life’s humbler scene can I depart? My breast all glowing from those gorgeous towers, In my low cell how cheat the sullen hours? Vain the complaint! For Fancy can impart (To fate superior and to fortune’s power) Whate’er adorns the stately storied-hall: She, mid the dungeon’s solitary gloom, Can dress the Graces in their attic pall; Bid the green landskip’s vernal beauty bloom; And in bright trophies clothe the twilight wall.’ One sometimes passes by a gentleman’s park, an old family-seat, with its moss-grown ruinous paling, its ‘glades mild-opening to the genial day,’ or embrowned with forest-trees. Here one would be glad to spend one’s life, ‘shut up in measureless content,’ and to grow old beneath ancestral oaks, instead of gaining a precarious, irksome, and despised livelihood, by indulging romantic sentiments, and writing disjointed descriptions of them. The thought has scarcely risen to the lips, when we learn that the owner of so blissful a seclusion is a thorough-bred fox-hunter, a preserver of the game, a brawling electioneerer, a Tory member of parliament, a ‘no-Popery’ man!—‘I’d sooner be a dog, and bay the moon!’ Who would be Sir Thomas Lethbridge for his title and estate? asks one man. But would not almost any one wish to be Sir Francis Burdett, the man of the people, the idol of the electors of Westminster? says another. I can only answer for myself. Respectable and honest as he is, there is something in his white boots, and white breeches, and white coat, and white hair, and red face, and white hat, that I cannot, by any effort of candour, confound my personal identity with! If Mr. Hobhouse can prevail on Sir Francis to exchange, let him do so by all means. Perhaps they might contrive to _club_ a soul between them! Could I have had my will, I should have been born a lord: but one would not be a booby lord neither. I am haunted by an odd fancy of driving down the Great North Road in a chaise and four, about fifty years ago, and coming to the inn at Ferry-bridge, with out-riders, white favours, and a coronet on the panels; and then I choose my companion in the coach. Really there is a witchcraft in all this that makes it necessary to turn away from it, lest, in the conflict between imagination and impossibility, I should grow feverish and light-headed! But, on the other hand, if one was born a lord, should one have the same idea (that every one else has) of _a peeress in her own right_? Is not distance, giddy elevation, mysterious awe, an impassable gulf, necessary to form this idea in the mind, that fine ligament of ‘ethereal braid,