ied approval of the state. If you do,
rely upon it that one change will be merely the forerunner of
another--that the statute-book, in each succeeding session of
Parliament, will exhibit new changes and new modifications, until,
gradually and by piecemeal, we shall lose all the benefits of those
national institutions which you are now ready and pledged to maintain
whole and unimpaired. Any other line of tactics must, in the long run,
prove not only injurious, but fatal, to the cause you support.

And now we have said our say. It is not for us--more especially as the
batteries of our opponents are still masked--to remonstrate with an
administration which assuredly, on many points, has a just claim to
the support and confidence of the nation at large. Still we may
insinuate the question--Is it very politic, in the present state of
matters, to rouse up a feeling in peaceful Scotland which may, with
little fanning of the fuel, terminate in an agitation quite as
extensive as that which at present unhappily prevails in Ireland? It
is not only wrong, but--what Talleyrand held to be a greater sin in a
statesman--most injudicious, to overlook in such a matter the tendency
of the national character. Scotchmen have long memories; and although
the days of hereditary feuds have gone by, they are not the less apt
to remember and to cherish injuries. Would it not, therefore, be
prudent to adhere to the homely but excellent maxim, "Let well be
alone;" and to abstain from forcing the country into a position which
it is really unwilling to assume, merely for the sake of illustrating
another proverb with which we close our remarks upon the Scottish
Banking System--"IT IS POSSIBLE TO BUY GOLD TOO DEAR."

THE MILKMAN OF WALWORTH.

CHAPTER I.

I was just fifteen, when the battle of Waterloo, (it will soon be
thirty years ago,) by giving peace to Europe, enabled my father to
gratify one of the principal desires of his heart, by sending me to
finish my education at a German university. Our family was a
Lincolnshire one, he its representative, and the inheritor of an
encumbered estate, not much relieved by a portionless wife and several
children, of whom I was the third and youngest son. My eldest brother
was idle, lived at home, and played on the fiddle. Tom, my second
brother, two years older than myself, had just entered the army time
enough to be returned in the Gazette as severely wounded in the action
of the 18th. I was desti