"A _Motion_ was put and carried, That this House do _adjourn_: That the Speaker do _quit the Chair_. The House ROSE amid clamours for Order." In some such way the event might most technically have been conveyed to the public. But a poetical mind, not content with this dry method of narration, cannot help pursuing the effects of this tremendous blowing up, this adjournment in the air _sine die_. It sees the benches mount,--the Chair first, and then the benches, and first the Treasury Bench, hurried up in this nitrous explosion; the Members, as it were, pairing off; Whigs and Tories taking their friendly apotheosis together, (as they did their sandwiches below in Bellamy's room). Fancy, in her flight, keeps pace with the aspiring legislators, she sees the awful seat of order mounting till it becomes finally fixed a constellation, next to Cassiopeia's chair,--the wig of him that sat in it taking its place near Berenice's curls. St. Peter, at Heaven's wicket,--no, not St. Peter,--St. Stephen, with open arms, receives his own.---- While Fancy beholds these celestial appropriations, Reason, no less pleased, discerns the mighty benefit which so complete a renovation must produce below. Let the most determined foe to corruption, the most thorough-paced redresser of abuses, try to conceive a more absolute purification of the House than this was calculated to produce;--why, Pride's Purge was nothing to it;--the whole borough-mongering system would have been got rid of, fairly _exploded_;--with it, the senseless distinctions of party must have disappeared; faction must have vanished; corruption have expired in air. From Hundred, Tything, and Wapentake, some new Alfred would have convened, in all its purity, the primitive Wittenagemot,--fixed upon a basis of property or population, permanent as the poles---- From this dream of universal restitution, Reason and Fancy with difficulty awake to view the real state of things. But, blessed be Heaven, St. Stephen's walls are yet standing, all her seats firmly secured; nay, some have doubted (since the Septennial Act) whether gunpowder itself, or any thing short of a _Committee above stairs_, would be able to shake any one member from his seat;--that great and final improvement to the Abbey, which is all that seems wanting,--the removing Westminster-hall and its appendages, and letting in the view of the Thames,--must not be expected in our days. Dismissing, therefore, all such speculations as mere tales of a tub, it is the duty of every honest Englishman to endeavour, by means less wholesale than Guido's, to ameliorate, without extinguishing, Parliaments; to hold the _lantern_ to the dark places of corruption; to apply the _match_ to the rotten parts of the system only; and to wrap himself up, not in the muffling mantle of conspiracy, but in the warm, honest _cloak_ of integrity and patriotic intention. ELIA. NUGÆ CRITICÆ ON A PASSAGE IN "THE TEMPEST" (1823)