father liked them, and his partiality is consistent. But Parallel would scorn to patronise only one at a time; there would be little consistency in that: so when he has dined at the Bolt-in-Tun, he feels that he ought to sup at the Bull-and-Mouth; it looks so consistent.

A different habit, however, is Parallel beginning to carry with him in his visitations among acquaintances. His consistency seems to tell him here, in language more explicit than new, that where he dines he should sup; in other phrase, that where he calls he ought to stay. Leaving a house after supper where there is a spare bed, appears to him a mere inconsistency. His family being away, home seems so very inconsistent, such an absurd place to go to. It would be equally so to prefer a stranger's tenement to a friend's. Parallel stops.

He has a tendency to be religiously consistent in his cups. At one house, demons could not tempt or intimidate him into drinking a third glass; at another house, angels could not persuade him to stop on the staggering side of intoxication. There consistency absolutely requires him to go quite down, and perfect propriety stretches Parallel under the table.

It will be found on investigation that he drank sodawater the first time he dropped in at one place; and that he struck his head against the bottom of a punchbowl on his first visit at the other. He is consistent ever afterwards. The return visit to Parallel is sure to be attended with precisely the same consequences, and the toper who was his host yesterday, admits that the new orgie has at least consistency to excuse it.

One allusion may here be made that will show as well as any the present temper of Parallel, and prove that he is not invariably an answerer to his surname. Far less placid indeed than indignant is he, when he hears of

that ever audible and ubiquitous compound of simples, the great perambulating invisibility, Young England!

Young England! He cannot understand the name, and he knows there is no such thing. He understands Old England. Ah! that indeed is consistent. But there never was so monstrous an inconsistency as the bare idea of a Young England. There's the Isle of Man, he remarks, you may as well call that Young England. Britannia has now braved the battle and the breeze for a thousand years, and it is notorious that she has never had a boy. Search the births in the "Times" from before the Conquest. The British Lion himself might as reasonably be expected to present the nation with a cub. Young England! the whole thing is the wildest of inconsistencies!

Parallel, of course, is not theatrically given. Open theatres with a banished drama, constitute, as he declares, the climax of the inconsistent. He never goes to the Opera; he holds it to be inconsistent to pay for French dance and Italian song with English gold, especially as we have a little of that sort of thing of

our own,

A sentence or two will suffice to indicate the opinions of the consistent man upon one or two topics of the day. He deems it extremely inconsistent to describe the small allotment system as a little cluster of paradises for the poor; but he is convinced at the same time that the refusal to acknowledge, in the allotment of even half an acre, a something infinitely more beneficial than nothing, is a decided inconsistency. He is friendly to bathing and wash-houses; thinks soap a blessing, and rejoices when everybody is well off for it. But soap he believes to be a material that requires something like consistency, or the peaceful ablution may end in hot water and a bubble.

From these, a few of his late opinions, we pass to a late event, and to Parallel Placid himself; and with a rapid sketch of the very last incident of his life with which we have been made acquainted, shall we bid him adieu.

Parallel then, after running a consistent course of wedlock for thirty years, is a widower. The lady who traduced Mrs. Crony in so friendly a spirit, and who in turn was belied by Mrs. Doubleshuffle with such genuine affection, that fair breaker-up of consistently-formed friendships between married immaculates, is no more. Parallel Placid might well say that home was an inconsistent place to go to.

Parallel's seven sons are in seven different counties just at present; he prefers the consistency of that equal dispersion. He himself is in an eighth; almost sixty, and quite solitary. What remains for such a man as Parallel to do? Is he to remain a widower? that at all events would be perfectly consistent. Is he to marry again? Consistency, the most rigid and scrupulous consistency, has not invariably condemned the alternative. Speculation may take to her perch upon the ground and sit on either end of it, while her eggs are being hatched in the clouds.

Will Parallel continue widower, or become Benedick the Second! a "married man" the second time! Further catechising would be inconsistent. Parallel will marry again, and there's an end.

Yes, the end is here, for what remains! The man of consistency is to take a second wife, and being "always consistent" his choice is doubtless made. It is. Parallel is nearly sixty, and chooses accordingly. He is not old, though far from young. He may count twenty white winters upon his dark gray hair yet. He looks well, is well, and is likely to be well. His family are self-sup

ported, sheltered, havened, so far beyond all fear of peril to any of them, that even the youngest of the seven revels in a sunshine where he can never feel a fit of shivering from the chilling embraces of a step-mother. With a consistency, almost, if not entirely unimpeachable, Parallel may marry again at fifty-five and upwards! And yet there is something in a marriage at that age! sons! grandsons! But this is perfectly absurd. All depends on a consistent choice; and that once made, the world may well wish the wedded joy, and the wedded may well calculate on the realisation of the wish. Happiness, therefore, will light on the choice of Parallel. He is a man of undeviating consistency, and the new Mrs. Placid will be gay, charming, good-humoured, vastly good-humoured; she will be pretty, ripe, radiant with a desire to please, hospitable to a fault (if such a thing could be), kind to every body that deserves kindness, and a few here and there who do not; resolved to please all her husband's friends, but especially determined, of all earthly things, to delight her husband. Such is the lady whom Parallel will choose, and her age

must be

Ah! there's the point. All else is unexceptionable. But Parallel you know is a man of consistency!

And addresses himself to a lady

True, of the exact age of his first wife; and he and his first wife married almost as a girl and boy.

"I am consistent in everything," placidly remarked Parallel. "My first wife when we married was eighteen ; my second wife when we marry next week will be eighteen also! Ah! I am always consistent !"

Alas! for the man of undeviating consistency! Every body is wishing every body else a happy new year just now; and possibly Parallel may come in for his small pickings in the scramble of the millions. But, if we

remember rightly, he once philosophically remarked that having long since made up his mind to live, he thought he should one day or other make up his mind. to die; just for the sake of consistency. Now when sixty marries eighteen-but he knows best about the time. He is always consistent !

KEEPING IT UP.

"OH! what a pity!" exclaimed little Lucy S-, as she read in the newspaper the other day how Mr. Green, instead of attempting to fulfil his design of crossing the Channel in his balloon, had, in consequence of adverse weather, descended on the coast of Sussex; "how provoking! Why didn't he keep it up!"

Lucy S is certainly one of the liveliest little ladies living, but desperately bent upon running to an extreme, and alarmingly prepossessed by a fondness for keeping it up.

Ah! poor child, thought I (though she's as old as I am, and wiser, in all things but this one), that pretty, fair-haired head of thine will surely go, some of these days, bump against the full moon. No need of a balloon to help you to rise into the air; and once aloft, you would be for keeping it up though you were within a mile of Mercury!

What notions, to be sure, some people have of keeping it up! Squarer and solider heads than Lucy's are often known to run themselves against the same wall, though from a different point; heads, well-lined with lead, too, yet there is no keeping them steady.

Keep it up they will, like Lucy S

at a ball. She, the small, slight, fragile thing, apparently incapa