I HAVE sometimes thought that if it were possible for a person of mature years now living to return to the world, with memory unimpaired, after a period of five hundred or even of one hundred years hence, how strangely new to him everything would appear! Events succeed each other in these times with such startling rapidity, that he would be a bold man who would venture to predict what even a generation will bring forth. We may speculate on the effects likely to result from agencies now in operation,—as to what, for example, may be the future of Great Britain, looking to the gigantic scale on which hazardous enterprise is carried on; to the contests of labour with capital in which natural laws are set at defiance; to the growth of Ritualism in the English Church; to the penchant which our rulers seem to have for annexing or conquering remote provinces, stern and wild or insalubrious; to a thousand other things which are with more or less force influencing or disquieting our country commercially, socially, or politically,—but none of us can possibly foresee the actual consequences and the condition of things to which they will lead. In the future there is so much dependent on occurrences which appear to us to be fortuitous (though truly under the guidance of Supreme Wisdom), that we can only feel that over all there hangs an impenetrable veil of mysterious darkness. A single unexpected event may turn aside the policy of an age, or even alter the divisions of the world. A single man by a foolish blunder may plunge nations into protracted war. A single happy discovery, a single clever invention, may affect the fortunes or alter the habits of a whole people. A single convulsion of nature may change the aspect of a state. But when we turn from the future to the past, the case is different, and we can pretty well realize what the feelings of one who has lived, say, sixty years ago would be if he could now return to earth. It would, indeed, be some time ere he would begin to grasp the extent of the wonderful changes which, since he formerly lived, have been effected. But of all the changes flowing from the inventions and discoveries which the long peace succeeding Waterloo was instrumental in producing, he would probably be most struck by the revolution accomplished in the matter of travelling.