Conductor. Hold HARD!-Beg pardon, ma'am; only a few doors

down.

Gentlew. A few doors! There's a dozen, if there's one. Why do n't you back? Do you think I am to get out and walk all that way in the mud?

Cond. Backing's wery bad for the horses, ma'am, jist by this here place, but the pavement's quite neat and genteel.

Gentlew. Horses! And what's to become of my shoes, I should be glad to know, and my gownd,-eh, you sir?

Cond. Lord love ye, ma'am! the ground aint wet, no more than a widow's eye.

Gentlew. Don't widow me, feller! I'm no widow, but Mrs. Blenkinsop; you know me well enough; and if you don't back directly, I'll complain at the office.

Passengers, interfering. It really is not very wet, ma'am, and we are all kept waiting.

Gentlew. Have I paid my money, or have I not? And if I have, have n't I a right to be set down at my own door. It's only the fellow's insolence: he does it to spite me :-I saw him smiling to-day as I got in.

Cond. Shall I call a cab, ma'am?

Gentlew. (tnrning round from the window triumphantly.) There, you see it's nothing but the fellow's imperence! Here! let me out! Oh, you shall suffer for this, my man! I'm not the person to be imposed upon, whatsomdever other ladies and gentlemen may choose. [Exit the "fat, fair, and forty" Blenkinsop.] A very pleasing combination of efs, but not in her case. How delightful, as she looked out of the window, to be able not to touch her! How different from the charming creature that was let down a few minutes before, and who sat on one's knee that she might make room for the fat publican!

"Who is mighty Mistress Blenkinsopp, pray?" inquires a passenger sitting next the door.

Cond. Wife of a gentleman in the pork and sausage line, sir, as has taken a country-box up here in Pig Hill Row. She's a fine madam, she is.

Pass. A good deal of money, I suppose?

Cond. A mint, sir; and has everything her own way, Sundays and all, when her husband comes down (the only day o' the week) and brings a friend to interduce him.

Pass. To introduce him?

Cond. Yes, sir, to dine and make the a'ternoon pass comfortable

like, with his rum-and-water, and all that, and save him from a having his nose chucked in his face!

Pass. His nose chucked in his face!

Cond. Ay, sir, his defects like, and his di-wargencies from what she thinks proper. I've heerd our governor's foreman tell all about it, and make missus laugh till you might hear the glasses ring in the bar. Pass. She seems no very wise person herself, however.

Cond. Why, you see, sir, when people has had no edication, and yet got a nat'ral cunning like, and arned a sight of money, they thinks there nothing in the world comparable with their own selves; and so gets a huffing and making fools of theirselves, till the bigger they look the littler they're thought on.

Oh 'faith, your Conductor sees a great deal of the world, and if he has brain enough not to become a blackguard, turns out no mean bit of a sage.

"Mores hominum multorum vidit, et urbis."

Much of mankind he sees, and much of city,
And thus, though ungrammatical, grows witty.

Really (to avail ourselves of the philosophic temper of the age, and speak boldly out), we know few objects more respectable, considering what temptations he must surmount in the way of little sixpences and long scores, than a good, civil, reasonably honest, intelligent, ungrammatical, father-of-a-family sort of Omnibus-Conductor, who wears dirty brown gloves, or worsted, and has a worsted handkerchief round his neck in bad weather (put by his wife), and so stands placidly on his step,

"Collected in himself, and whole."

alternately intimating Bank and Mile End to foot-passengers, and discussing some point of life and manners with the gentleman next the door. We have no disrespect for his badge; we are grave with his aspirations, whether in morals or on the letter a; our eyes are willing, as he there stands, to grow intensely intimate with his waistcoat, and rejoice to see how well his wife has mended the buttons. He has had all those experiences of right and wrong, both in himself and others, which, where there is no innate disposition to petty larceny or a mere absorption in "number one," produce, as the poet phrases it, "the philosophic mind;" and provided you treat him with a decent civility (which the "indignant" and "Police!shouting" may depend upon it is a pretty sure way of getting civility from all his tribe), "nothing can touch him further," but the gentleman who has left his sixpence in his "other waistcoat."

(And here we solicit of the reader his most respectful attention to the opinion of Viscount Melbourne, Prime Minister, as expressed in the House of Lords, in the second year of the reign of the virgin Victoria.)

"My opinion is, let a man's understanding be as bright as it may; let a man's genius be what it may; that profession (i. e., the profession of the law) does little else but cramp the understanding, and fetter the mental faculties; and that almost universally." To this, the chronicler of the speech adds, "great laughter."*

If we believe in Lord Melbourne, we must be visited with throes of pity for all lords-chief-justices past and to come; all judges, sergeants, barristers;—we must, through our tears, behold them dwarfed, distorted, manacled. The shining, constant lights of the courts, are no other than jack-o'-lanterns; the upright pillars of the law are pillars lamentably twisted!

When we shall henceforth read the names of victims called to the bar, we shall look upon the sufferers as doomed men; individuals sentenced to an inevitable decrease of understanding; to a daily discipline that crooks their finest wits; to an atmosphere that dims and tarnishes the brightest capabilities. They have, however, this consolatory reflection, that, with all these manifest disadvantages, they are the chosen and appointed best advisers of their fellows: that though their understanding be "cramped," it is the distorted Mentor to the minds of others; that though their mental faculties be in gyves, they are, for that reason, the surest steps to the fettered capacities of their fellow subjects.

Now, if this be the inevitable condition of men disposed to study the transcendant beauties of the law, what must be the hapless state of the wretched individual self-doomed to ponder on its deformities?

* See Lord Melbourne's Speech on the "Canada Government Act Declaratory Bill," August 10, 1838.

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