avoid, only the reeling of them could make it a changing phantasmagoria. And why, when we have so much deeper tragedies to recount, ought we to stop our narrative to record--unless, indeed, for the mere sake of the arithmetic of murders--a mere interlude resorted to as a relief from dithyrambism? Childermas day came round again! Poor Joe the miller could bring his price of eleven pounds as well as the rest of them. No doubt, when he offered himself, in the heyday of his life, to Jenny the farmer's daughter, he thought himself of greater account than merely eleven pounds; but men undergo deterioration. Even when rejected, he would have spurned the valuation when he sung that jolly song of independence so often sung by his craft, and which declares the determination that neither lawyer nor doctor would "e'er get a fee from him,"--true enough, yet, alas! not false in the reverse, that doctors would give a fee _for_ him. Joe's miscalculations were due to his ignorance of the effects of intemperance, for it will not do to say that these are known when every day brings up new developments of consequences resulting from this most dangerous of all the voluntary evils of man. Say that the drunkard dares the advent of poverty, crime, the horrors of _delirium tremens_--death,--could he say that this last is a greater violence to nature than that produced by the grip and the pressure which, in all these cases, were only consequent upon the inebriation, which, again, was the act of his own will? It was while in a state of inebriety that the prowler met Joe. He was already made and prepared, and the subsequent decoyment, the additional drink, the final onset of the grim actors, their success, were only the development of a drama wrought out by actors who took an advantage accorded by himself. Our authority for treating this case as a mere interlude is derived from the admission of Burke himself, who, as a great judge could estimate the importance of what by others cannot be estimated at all, for the simple reason that the smallest of these tragedies so far transcends all power of comprehension that comparison becomes a farce; yet though this once jolly son of a jolly craft might have earned the contempt attributed to a facility of dying, he was, we are assured, mourned in the hamlet of his birth, where his frailties, if condemned, were placed, as is too often the case, to the account of a good heart. Nay, for aught we know,--and we say it the more readily that no one can trace or enumerate the threads which the poorest of God's creatures leaves ramifying from heart to heart, all to respond, as by electric sympathy, to the shock of his death,--the farmer's daughter might even be concussed to tears--how much too late--when the terrible tragedy was divulged. We may be at least certain that Joe never dreamed that a man's character in the world depends upon his manner of leaving it, or he would have saved his reputation by a