ejoiced that skill and power,
Servants to science, compass all men's good;
And over all Religion's banner stood,
Upheld by _thee_, true Patriarch of the plan
Which in two hemispheres was schemed to shower
Mercies from God on universal man.
Yes, this electric chain from East to West
More than mere metal, more than Mammon can,
Binds us together kinsmen, in the best
As most affectionate and frankest bond,
Brethren at one, and looking far beyond
The world in an electric union blest."

CHAPTER XXXVI.

THE RIFLE: A PATRIOTIC PROPHECY.

There is an extinct pamphlet, now before me, published by Routledge in
1860, entitled "The Rifle Movement Foreshown in Prose and Verse from
1848 to the Present Time,"--from my pen,--which proves that, in
conjunction with my friend Evelyn and a few others, I may justly claim
to have originated that cheap defence of England, at Albury, more than a
dozen years before it was thought of anywhere by any one else. Take the
trouble to read the following longish extract from the fifth edition of
the above, and please not to omit the leash of ballads wherewith it
ends.

"And now, next, about this Rifle pamphlet. Every page carries its date
honestly, and several very curiously. In some of the editions there
appears a rifle ballad of mine, written in 1845, and published in 1846
(in the first issue of my Ballads and Poems--Hall & Virtue) with the
strange title "Rise Britannia, _a Stirring Song for Patriots in the Year
1860_:" an anticipation by fourteen years of the actual date of the
Rifle Movement. In all the editions, the papers on 'Cheap Security'
(being Talks between Naaman Muff (a Quaker), Till (a commercial gent),
Dolt (a philanthropist), Funker (an ordinary unwarlike paterfamilias),
and a certain Tom Wydeawake (patriotic but peculiar)) contain detailed
allusions, though written several years before any definite existence,
to the National Rifle Association, and to exactly such annual prize
gatherings of riflemen as those at Wimbledon Common and Brighton Downs,
and this latest at Blackheath. The discouragements of Tom Wydeawake and
his few compeers were remarkable. He himself might fairly have claimed
the honours of origination, discussed some two or three years ago, but
he left them to others--_Sic vos non vobis_, &c."

"Without mentioning names, several--since distinguished as prominent in
Rifledom--were once, to