mode of dogmatic instruction, yet with the majority, and
especially with the young ladies, it was decidedly in favour.

One rainy afternoon Lord Curryfin was entreated to deliver in the
theatre his lecture on Fish; he readily complied, and succeeded in
amusing his audience more, and instructing them as much, as any of his
more pretentious brother lecturers could have done. We shall not report
the lecture, but we refer those who may be curious on the subject to the
next meeting of the Pantopragmatic Society, under the presidency of Lord
Facing-both-ways, and the vice-presidency of Lord Michin Malicho.

At intervals in similar afternoons of bad weather some others of the
party were requested to favour the company with lectures or recitations
in the theatre. Mr. Minim delivered a lecture on music, Mr. Pallet on
painting; Mr. Falconer, though not used to lecturing, got up one on
domestic life in the Homeric age. Even Mr. Gryll took his turn, and
expounded the Epicurean philosophy. Mr. MacBorrowdale, who had no
objection to lectures before dinner, delivered one on all the affairs of
the world--foreign and domestic, moral, political, and literary. In
the course of it he touched on Reform. 'The stone which Lord Michin
Malicho--who was the Gracchus of the last Reform, and is the Sisyphus of
the present--has been so laboriously pushing up hill, is for the present
deposited at the bottom in the Limbo of Vanity. If it should ever
surmount the summit and run down on the other side, it will infallibly
roll over and annihilate the franchise of the educated classes; for it
would not be worth their while to cross the road to exercise it against
the rabble preponderance which would then have been created. Thirty
years ago, Lord Michin Malicho had several cogent arguments in favour of
Reform. One was, that the people were roaring for it, and that therefore
they must have it. He has now in its favour the no less cogent argument,
that the people do not care about it, and that the less it is asked for
the greater will be the grace of the boon. On the former occasion the
out-of-door logic was irresistible. Burning houses, throwing dead cats
and cabbage-stumps into carriages, and other varieties of the same
system of didactics, demonstrated the fitness of those who practised
them to have representatives in Parliament. So they got their
representatives, and many think Parliament would have been better
without them. My father was a staunch Ref