ing, it is felt by
all, to the motion of the warlike tune, though now across the Waterloo
Bridge sounding like an echo, till the glorious war-pageant is all gone
by, and the dull day is deadened down again into the stillness and
silence of an ignoble peace.

"Now all the youth of Scotland are on fire!"

All her cities and towns are rejoicing in the welcome Winter; and mind,
invigorated by holidays, is now at work, like a giant refreshed, in all
professions. The busy bar growls, grumphs, squeaks, like an old sow with
a litter of pigs pretending to be quarrelling about straws. Enter the
Outer or the Inner House, and you hear eloquence that would have put
Cicero to the blush, and reduced Demosthenes to his original stutter.
The wigs of the Judges seem to have been growing during the long
vacation, and to have expanded into an ampler wisdom. Seldom have we
seen a more solemn set of men. Every one looks more _gash_ than another,
and those three in the centre seem to us the embodied spirits of Law,
Equity, and Justice. What can be the meaning of all this endless
litigation? On what immutable principles in human nature depends the
prosperity of the Fee-fund? Life is strife. Inestimable the blessing of
the great institution of Property! For without it, how could people go
together by the ears, as if they would tear one another to pieces? All
the strong, we must not call them bad passions, denied their natural
element, would find out some channels to run in, far more destructive to
the commonweal than lawsuits, and the people would be reduced to the
lowest ebb of misery, and raised to the highest flow of crime. Our
Parliament House here is a vast safety-valve for the escape of the foul
steam that would otherwise explode and shatter the engine of the State,
blowing the body and members of society to smash. As it is, how the
engine works! There it goes! like Erickson's Novelty or Stephenson's
Rocket along a railroad; and though an accident may occur now and then,
such as an occasional passenger chucked by some uncalculated collision
into the distant horizon, to be picked up whole, or in fragments, by the
hoers in some turnip-field in the adjacent county, yet few or none are
likely to be fatal on a great scale; and on goes the Novelty or Rocket,
like a thought, with many weighty considerations after it, in the shape
of waggons of Christians or cottons, while Manufactures and Commerce
exult in the cause of Liberty and Locomotio