nd all such pleasant adjuncts of that most
fortunate of pleasure-hunters, a country squire, with a princely
rent-roll. Then should be detailed, circumstantially, the lord of the
beautiful home, a picture of the hospitable virtues; the wife of the
beautiful home, a portraiture of happy domesticity, admirable also as a
mother, a nurse, a neighbour, and the poor's best friend: children must
abound, of course, or the home is a heaven uninhabited; and shrewd hints
might hereabouts be dropped as to the judicious or injudicious in
matters educational: servants, too, both old and young, with discussions
on their modern treatment, and on that better class of bygones, whom
kindness made not familiar, and the right assertion of authority
provoked not into insolence; whose interest for the dear old family was
never merged in their own, and whose honesty was as unsuspected as that
of young master himself, or sweet little mistress Alice.

After all this, might we descant upon the squire's characteristics. Take
him as a politician: liberal, that is to say, (for his frown is on me at
a phrase so doubtful,) generous, tolerant, kind, and manly; but none of
your low-bred slanderers of that noble name, so generally tyrants at
home and cowardly abroad--mean agitating fellows, the scum of disgorging
society, raised by turbulence and recklessness from the bottom to the
surface: oh no, none of these; but, for all his just liberality, an
honest, honourable, loyal, church-going, uncompromising Tory: with a
detail of his reasons, notions, and practices thereabouts, inclusive of
his conduct at elections, his wholesome influence over an otherwise
unguided or ill-guided tenantry, and as concerning other miscalled
corruptions: his open argumentation of the representative doctrine, that
it ought to stop short as soon as ever the religion, the learning, and
the wealth of a country are fairly represented; that in fact the poor
man thinks little of his vote, unless indeed in worse cases looking for
a bribe; and that the principle is pushed into ruinous absurdities when
the destitution, the crime, and the ignorance of a nation demand their
proper representatives; that, almost as a consequence of human average
depravity, the greater the franchise's extension, the worse in all ways
become those who impersonate the enfranchised; and so, after due
condemnation of Whiggery, to stultify Chartism, and that demoralizing
lie, the ballot. Then as to the squire's rel