liberties, and the safest guarantee for our not drifting from our snug roadstead of constitutionalism, where we can ride at anchor, and smile at the timid argosies and caravels of despotism, moored and chained in the grim granite basins of the inner port, and all without launching into the troubled oceans, full of breakers and white squalls, of utter democracy. We seize upon a wrong, and grumble at it, till, after a few months’, and sometimes a few years’ grumbling, we find that the wrong exists no more, and that we have gained another Right. But we have had no barricades _ad interim_, no fusillades, no bombardment of private houses, no declarations of the “solidarity” of anybody, no confiscations, no deportations, and no guillotinings. Our rulers, grown wise by experience of smashed windows, pelted heads, and occasional (when the people were very hard driven) political annihilation, and hurling into the limbo of red tapism, have of late years placed few or no restrictions upon grumbling. The noble lord at the head of the Government daily receives deputations, who grumble at his measures, or at the measures he won’t guarantee to propose, fearfully. In the Parliament House, no sooner does our gracious Queen, in her silver bell-like voice, speak the speech that others have written down for her (I daresay she could write a much more sensible discourse herself), than Lords and Commons begin to grumble about the sense of her words, and move amendments to the address which is to be presented to her. Downstairs, all through the session, parliamentary committees are grumbling at witnesses, and witnesses are grumbling at the committee; and in outlying boroughs vicious electors are grumbling at the members of the Commons’ House of Parliament. The country newspapers and the London newspapers grumble. The barristers grumble at the judge, and the judge at the jury. The public grumbles at the way soldiers are treated by the officers, and the soldiers (who are about the only citizens who are not addicted to grumbling) go out and fight and win battles, at which we at home grumble, because so many lives have been lost. And I daresay the Prime Minister grumbles because he has the gout, and the Queen on her throne grumbles because “Punch” caricatures the Prince Consort, and “Punch” grumbles because the Prince Consort does not often enough give occasion to be grumbled at. I grumble at being obliged to write for your amusement, and you grumble because I am not half amusing enough. We grumble at the cold dinners at school, at the price of the marriage license, at the doctor’s bill for our first child’s measles, at the cost of the funeral of Uncle John, who left us all his money. We grumble because we have to live, and grumble when the physician tells us that we must die. Does it not all resolve itself into our purer, better Fielding’s aphorism in “Vanity Fair”—“Ah! _vanitas vanitatum_? Who of us has not his hobby, or, having it, is satisfied?” Yet there is much