Now that so many years are past since that abominable machination was happily frustrated, it will not, I hope, be considered a profane sporting with the subject, if we take no very serious survey of the consequences that would have flowed from this plot if it had had a successful issue. The first thing that strikes us, in a selfish point of view, is the material change which it must have produced in the course of the nobility. All the ancient peerage being extinguished, as it was intended, at one blow, the _Red-Book_ must have been closed for ever, or a new race of peers must have been created to supply the deficiency; as the first part of this dilemma is a deal too shocking to think of, what a fund of mouth-watering reflections does this give rise to in the breast of us plebeians of A.D. 1823. Why you or I, reader, might have been Duke of ---- or Earl of ----: I particularize no titles, to avoid the least suspicion of intention to usurp the dignities of the two noblemen whom I have in my eye:--but a feeling more dignified than envy sometimes excites a sigh, when I think how the posterity of Guido's Legion of Honour (among whom you or I might have been) might have rolled down "dulcified," as Burke expresses it, "by an exposure to the influence of heaven in a long flow of generations, from the hard, acidulous, metallic tincture of the spring."[46] What new orders of merit, think you, this English Napoleon would have chosen? Knights of the Barrel, or Lords of the Tub, Grand Almoners of the Cellar, or Ministers of Explosion. We should have given the Train _couchant_, and the Fire _rampant_ in our arms; we should have quartered the dozen white matches in our coats;--the Shallows would have been nothing to us. [46] Letter to a Noble Lord. Turning away from these mortifying reflections, let us contemplate its effects upon the _other house_, for they were all to have gone together,--King, Lords, Commons.---- To assist our imagination, let us take leave to suppose,--and we do it in the harmless wantonness of fancy,--to suppose that the tremendous explosion had taken place in our days;--we better know what a House of Commons is in our days, and can better estimate our loss;--let us imagine, then, to ourselves, the United Members sitting in full conclave above--Faux just ready with his train and matches below; in his hand a "reed tipt with fire"--he applies the fatal engine---- To assist our notions still further, let us suppose some lucky dog of a reporter, who had escaped by miracle upon some plank of St. Stephen's benches, and came plump upon the roof of the adjacent Abbey, from whence descending, at some neighbouring coffee-house, first wiping his clothes and calling for a glass of lemonade, he sits down and reports what he had heard and seen (quorum pars magna fuit) for the _Morning Post_ or the _Courier_,--we can scarcely imagine him describing the event in any other words but some such as these:--