ve their lucid intervals, and who upon this
occasion displayed a more than usual portion of sanity, mingled with
good humour and humanity.

In this quarter of the city, where our friends expected to find
distracted, or at least abstracted intellect, they were very pleasingly
disappointed at discovering they were associated with reasonable and
intelligent beings; although some of them, fatigued by their exertions
during the election, were so strongly attacked by Somnus, that
notwithstanding the bustle with which they were surrounded, they
occasionally dropped into the arms of the drowsy god, and accompanied
the proceedings with a snore, till again roused to light and life by
some more wakeful inhabitant.

At the appointed time, the high bailiff announced the election closed,
and after an examination of the votes, declared the choice to have
fallen on Sir William, a circumstance which drew forth a unanimous
burst of approbation, long, loud, and deep, which in a few moments being
communicated to those without. This was as cordially and as vociferously
answered by anxious and admiring crowds.

The influx of citizens, upon the event being known, to hear the speeches
of the different candidates, choaked up every avenue to the hustings,
and beggars all description; the inimitable pencil of a Hogarth could
hardly have done justice to the scene, and a Common Hall of the City of
London might be considered a common fool to it; every voter had a right,
established that right, and enjoyed it. Here stood the well-dressed
Corinthian in his bang-up toggery, alongside of a man in armour, one
of the Braziers Company, armed with a pot-lid and a spit, and decorated
with a jack-chain round his neck. There stood a controller of the prads,
a Jarvey, in close conversation with one of the lighters of the world,
with his torch in hand. A flue faker in one corner, was endeavouring
to explain a distinction between smoke and gas to a lamplighter, who
declared it as his opinion, "that the City of Lushington,--at all times
a luminous and deservedly revered City,--had had more light thrown upon
it that election, by the introduction of the link carriers, than it ever
had before; and likewise that his dissertation on smoke and gas was not
worth one puff from his pipe."

~~246~~~ In the midst of this bustle, noise and confusion, it was some
time before the high bailiff could obtain silence; when Sir William
made his appearance on the hustings, and in