" exclaim the door-keepers. The police point us the
door: we take the hint while all the bells are tinkling, and all the
members are rushing from every quarter, through the Lobby to the House,
as if members and bells were alike mad. We wait outside. By the clock
nearly a half-hour is gone. Hark, what a cheer! By Jove! the division
is taken, and the ministry are saved. It is midnight; yet the Lobby is
full and gay. We won't go home yet. Just behind is the bar, and members
are drinking pale ale and sherry, and soda with a little brandy in it,
and the whole place begins to have the air of the London Tavern after an
anniversary dinner on behalf of the Indignant Blind. Look at those
swells just entering the House: evidently they have been dining out, and
presently one of them will speak, and the whole House will be in a roar
at his vinous oratory; out in the Lobby we catch faint echoes of the
mirth. The House is in committee on the Cab Act, and are now enacting a
clause relative to drunken and disorderly cabmen. Our friend is
vehement, inconclusive, and indistinct. Happily the reporters will
merely mention that he addressed the House amidst considerable laughter.
As we leave the Lobby, we hear hints about "physician, heal thyself."

OUR LONDON CORRESPONDENT.

Where's Eliza? Who was the man in the iron mask? Who was Junius? Whose
were the bones discovered last year in a carpet-bag under
Waterloo-bridge? You cannot tell. Neither can I tell you who is our
London Correspondent. Yet he exists. I find traces of him in the most
Boeotian districts of England.

"Caledonia, stern and wild,
Fit nurse for a poetic child,"

knows him. In "Tara's halls" he has superseded the harp, and is a
presence and a power. Before newspapers were, when Addison was writing
the "Spectator," and Dick Steele "Tatlers" innumerable, and De Foe his
Review and all sorts of romances, in Grub-street there was an immense
deal of activity in the way of letter writing. Country gentlemen wanted
news, and were willing to pay for it. When there was a frost or when it
was wet, when the nights were long or amusements few, when the squire was
laid up with the gout or when my lady had the vapours, it was pleasant to
read who ate cheesecakes and syllabubs at Spring Gardens, who drank
coffee at Button's or chocolate at the Cocoa Tree, what was the gossip of
the October or Kit Kat clubs, what had become of Mrs. Bracegirdle, and
how