Pitt has scarcely spoken at all, but he has listened while Sir Peter Burrell prattles on about the way things are going at Carlton-neatly-made kirtle tucked up so nicely, and house, where Jack Payne, and Master Leigh from Eton, and Lord Barrymore's young brother, and Mrs. Fitz," form the cabinet, along with Fox and Sheridan; and then Pitt, in a quiet, subdued way, talks of the state of affairs at Windsor, where the prince grasped at the command, but really ordered nothing that was decent, and how it was only at his (Pitt's) entreaty that a couple of grooms of the chamber were appointed to receive the

down over the mighty city, and thinks of the
Fumum, et opes, strepitumque Roma." Lon-
don, in all its outstretched vastness, is the
material type of that great developed Empire
of which he thinks. India the Colonies-
a mighty marine a great zone of British in-
fluence circling the world—such are the ideas
that loom through the solitary statesman's
mind, as he casts his piercing glance over
the great city, whose spires and forests of
masts are only dimly, yet grandly, visible be-

are safe from any rude coalition with those of the orator before you. Madge blushes still deeper as the great man addresses her with Stay! you must let me have," and Madge thinks that he is going to say some thing like what other young bachelors would say; but, pshaw! 'tis only "a matchbox" he wants, and Madge retires, saying to herself" that he's not such a great man to look at, after all, and if her John Thomas was only dressed up he 'd be a finer gemman, that he would;" but thus it is; and, with an indiffer-neath his view. ence worthy of Sir Isaac Newton, the states- And now he is again at the Treasury. He man, unmoved by the apparition of rustic gives a look at his office book, and observes the beauty, , goes to his couch. It wants ten min- number of interviews with all manner of utes to eleven as he lays his head on his pillow, people that he has appointed for this day. and before the clock has struck he is fast While looking over it he utters a regret that asleep, and enjoys most refreshing repose be- he has not Pretyman still for a private secrefore the midnight hour has gone. And one, tary; and, while he is making a note, in and two, and three, and four, are told from comes William Grenville with a hurried letter the turret clock, and still, with the calmness from Doctor Willis, from Windsor, written in of a child, the tired statesman slumbers on. a more sanguine mood about the king; and But as the Kentish wagoner guides his their colloquy is interrupted by Dundas, who wain towards Croydon, he can see a light in talks at once of more "ratting" amongst one of the upper rooms at Addiscombe. 'Tis their supporters, but says the Scotch members scarcely half-past four; but Pitt is up, and will be faithful. I wish we could say rummaging in one of the saddle bags. He the same of more important people," cries finds what he wants. He has the full report Pitt; for example, Thurlow." The word of the proceedings at the Convention Parlia- has scarcely left his lips when the chancellor ment in 1688, and he has the written remarks is announced, and Dundas mutters a Scotch on portions of it which he made his new So- saying in which "the deil" is all that is licitor-General (Sir John Scott) note for him. heard, and soon after Pitt is closeted with one According to his usual custom, he goes back who looks black and bold enough to make us to bed, to read and meditate, and prepare for think again of Dundas' proverb. He is inthe emergencies of the coming day. How deed the black brow'd phantom" that he cool is his mind - how collected his faculties was described by Burke, and Pitt thinks of how calm is his unfaltering self-reliance! Fox's witty saying that "there never was any The crisis is one that would ruffle the temper man so wise as Thurlow looked." How calmly even of a master-spirit; but Pitt, with Fox, and proudly Pitt looks down upon the archBurke, Windham, and Sheridan in his front schemer, while the deep intriguer tries to hide with Lansdowne hovering on his flank his heart from that penetrating gaze. Well, with Thurlow acting traitorously towards him they have not broken with each other yet. with the princes above him, conspiring for Thurlow has come to talk about the Irish his fall-and with his royal master out of chancellorship, for Lord Lifford has resigned his reason amid the falling funds and dreary at last, and Fitzgibbon wants to get it. In a forebodings of frightened capitalists even in few minutes he departs, and Pitt is forced the monarchy's travail-Pitt is undaunted to select from his crowded antechamber what as a Marlborough amid the roar of battle, in persons he will see. The first he names is his own person incarnating the one poetic Bob Smith"-Phoebus! passage of Addison, like whose "angel" he, too,

Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm.

Pitt feels that still the public voice of England is with him, not with his foes. And the minister, after three hours' pondering, descends to an early breakfast, hurriedly swallowed, and he is soon scouring on his high-trotting steed over the road to London.

He sees the rural landscape around him, beautiful even in November, with as utter indifference as on the evening before. But as he advances his mind is roused when, descending from the heights near Norwood, he looks

What a name ! He is quite a pet of the great statesman, and, like most of his favorites, he comes from the city —a banker, still residing east of Temple-bar, but shortly to emerge into a splendid mansion in the Green Park, and wear the sparkling coronet of "Carrington. And next he sees the Irish Fitzgibbon-small in stature, but great in audacity of design a provincial Thurlow, as towering in arrogance as his English prototype yet Pitt likes his clear intellect and his ready comprehension of the minister's imperializing views. come the thronging deputations from the city-West Indian planters raising an alarm about Wilberforce's plans for abolition, and

Then

East Indian merchants with talk about ship- | is so ill. But still volley after volley is heard ping, voyaging, cargoes, excise, Eastern pos-joyous, exhilarating, and heart-stirring. sessions, and all that perplexed business But it is of genuine Highland laughter, as matter on which Pitt's mind rejoices to exercise itself. He is quite happy in listening to all their statements; his intuitively logical intellect grasps the relations of their facts to that scheme of a commercial empire which is ever and anon recurring to his great, teeming brain. Yet he listens without emotion, while he is told of the city prophet of yesterday to purchase him an annuity of three thousand a year, in case he should be driven from power.*

But he must assimilate all this knowledge with vast plans of his own, and he desires that a certain person from his thronged waitingroom should be next shown in. Let us follow one of his assistant private secretaries, and see whom he calls in to the minister. Several members of Parliament are waiting their turn, but he does not call on them, nor on that Irish lord who, for further promotion in the peerage, is waiting to offer five seats in support of the Lord Lieutenant at Dublin Castle; nor that general officer with a letter of introduction; nor that bishop wanting translation; nor the dean wishing for a stall. There are Burke and Sir Philip Francis, also, come about arranging certain forms of the Hastings case and they, too, are passed by; and there is Lord Bulkely, crammed with gossip and scandal ;t and he, too, is passed by, and the secretary whispers a clerical-looking person, at whom my Lord the Bishop, and Mr. Dean, have looked rather disdainfully, for they guess that he has graduated only in a Hackney academy. He looks awkward, with a stoop in the shoulders of his ungraceful person, yet there is frankness, intelligence, and the unmistakable stamp of mind upon that meditative face. How angry Burke looks when he finds that this oracle of Newington-green is called in before himself, and how the throng in the antechamber is impatient at the long tarrying of the dissenting divine! And, if they could have seen through stone walls, they might have beheld Pitt deep and absorbed in converse with that downright Unitarian parson Richard Price - who is "like a conjurer drawing forth coil after coil of statistical tables," and results in finance, which the sanguine and figure-loving minister swallows with only too much avidity.

wildly, madly joyous as if each burst were the echo of another Burns striking his lyre in praise of "John Barleycorn." In comes the cause of it, mingling her saucy air of fashion with a familiar popularity-hunting style the bold and brilliant Duchess of Gordon. Yes- "she must see him," and, while the officials stare at her masculine assurance, she succeeds in forcing her company on the minister. But, no!not even after all her active services in counteracting Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire Pitt obstinately refuses to go over this evening to Pullmall, to a quiet private dinner at Buckingham-house (where the duchess now resides), and she makes her exit in another volley, and vows, in joking mood, that she 'll set on her friend Sir John Sinclair to write pamphlets against Mr. Pitt.

And Sir John is a canny chiel wi' the pen. Ye dinna ken Sir John as she does, Mr. minister. Fast as ye wad empty decanters of claret, Sir John wad clean out ink-bottles ;" and, bidding the minister take that for not being more "douce" to a lady fra' the north, off she goes, making the walls ring again with another burst of cheery laughter.

And then Pitt clears out the rest of the antechamber, and tells Lord Mornington "to come along with him to Chatham's,' and they can talk about what "Arthur, wants (and Arthur is a good boy) to have done with the yeomanry at Trim :" and they stroll up together to the Admiralty. They are met by a strange-looking person, walking on tiptoe, flourishing his right hand in the air, while, with his eyes upon the ground, he converses eagerly with Sheridan. He salutes Lord Mornington. That 's Grattan, doubtless over here intriguing about the Regency." And Pitt thinks how, if he could have persuaded the English manufacturers to adopt his Irish Commercial Propositions of 1785, Irish "nationality," with its dangerous

66

66

patriots," might have been neutralized. But the English manufacturers, led on by this very gentleman, with a cold, purse-proud manner, coming hither, prevented his plans. And Pitt then speaks with much courtesy to one of his new baronets, Sir Robert Peel; but the day will come when Pitt will play the new Irish Chancellor (Fitzgibbon) against Their interview would have lasted longer Grattan, and incorporate Ireland with Engbut for a volley of - what? Artillery an- land. And now they are on the steps of the nouncing an anniversary -or a review in the Admiralty, and they are going in to the First park? For shame! Think not of such jubi-Lord's door; but the valet, running out, tells lant sounds in days when the King of England

Courts and Cabinets of George III. (vol. ii.,

See his character, under the title of "Simplidian," in Mrs. Chapone's Letters.

them "Lord Chatham is not up yet," and the words "O degenerem Neoptolemum !" almost leap out of Pitt's mouth, while Lord Morning

* Idem (vol. ii., p. 90; and vol. i. p. 348, and supra).

ton spouts a Homeric line against men of pub- Seen in the distance, these rocky piles, so lic council sleeping long: but Pitt's ear is tall, so vast, so multitudinous, intersected by arrested, not by the high-sounding Greek, but labyrinthine passages, their turreted walls, by the eager whisper of the half breathless truncated pyramids, and sharp, clustering George Rose, telling him that a king's mes-spires, rising into light from the black masses senger has come from Windsor with a "special of their shadows, assume the appearance of arand immediate" despatch from the queen. tificial structures -a wild night-mare dream Within twenty-four hours from the time when of Cyclopean architecture-flanking butwe saw him yesterday on Westminster bridge, the minister is posting to Windsor to aid with his loyal counsels the consort of his royal

master.

tress and lofty arch, shaft, colonnade, and spire

a scene to remind one

the Petrea of the Western wilderness -& silent city of the dead-stretching out to the horizon's line on the right hand and on the left, In "A Day with Fox" we saw the mighty and mural escarpments, to the grim background and westwardly in endless succession of towers chiefs matched against each other as orators. of the Black MountainsOn the floor of the House of Commons criticism of the ruinous stony halls of Istakar, through would pause in assigning the palm of superi- the portals of which the mad Caliph in Vathek ority to either, magis pares quam similes. Contrasted together as men, the sympathies sought the presence of the infernal deities. "So thickly," says the geological surof the human heart will more powerfully be evoked by the union of the amiable and bril-veyor of this wonderful tract, in his report to liant in Fox's nature; but history can have no over this extraordinary region, that the travCongress, doubt in assigning victory in statesmanship to eller threads his way through deep, intricate that vigilant spirit of command shown by the passages, not unlike some quaint old town of subject of "A Day with Pitt,” the European continent.

Who, when terror and doubt through the universe reigned,

66

are these natural towers studded

"One might almost imagine oneself approaching some magnificent city of the dead, While rapine and treason their standards un-where the labor and genius of forgotten nafurled,

The heart and the hopes of his country maintained,
And Old England preserved 'mid the wreck of

the world.

From the National Era.

PART OF A LETTER FROM J. G. WHITTIER.

tions had left behind them a multitude of monuments of their art and skill.

"On descending from the heights, however, and proceeding to thread this vast labyrinth, and inspect in detail its deep, intricate re

THE MAUVAISES TERRES OF NEBRASKA. Cesses, the realities of the scene soon dissipated the illusions of distance. The castellated forms which fancy had conjured up vanish, THE traveller who enters the Territory of and around one, on every side, is bleak and Nebraska from the Great Bend of the Mis-barren desolation." souri, and takes the direction of Fort Laramie, The whole region is, in fact, one of savage along the valley of the White river, finds him- and irremediable desolation. The curse of self passing over a fine high prairie country, sterility broods over it treeless and pathless luxuriant with unshorn grasses, and gay with -a maze of innumerable defiles, choked with uncultured flowers. Suddenly, from one of debris, and overhung with ash-colored walls of the terraced elevations which slowly and grad-rock. ually uplift the prairie to the spurs of the Rocky Mountains, the calm monotony of the landscape is broken by an abrupt depression of from one to three hundred feet below the level of the surrounding country. Before him stretches a vast valley, the width of which is estimated at thirty miles, and which reaches westerly to the feet of the Black Hills, a distance of nearly ninety miles. He looks out upon a dreary waste, scantily clothed with grass, and rough and ridgy with tall, irregular, prismatic, and columnar masses of rock, rising, splintered and abraded, into every conceivable form, to the height of from one to two @hundred feet.

It is as if, in some great convulsion of nature, this vast and dismal tract had suddenly sunk from the great prairie level, leaving its bony articulations of rock standing thickly over it, like the ribs of some gigantic skeleton from which the flesh had fallen.

For the geologist, however, this melancholy tract has no lack of interest. It is rich in fossil remains of animal races long extinct, and heretofore unknown. Grim secrets of an early world, unshapely and monstrous forms of rudimental life, present themselves in some localities at every turn. The enormous Palocotherium, which formed a connecting link between the tapir and the rhinoceros, the horse and the hog-one specimen of which measured five feet along the range of its teeth- the Archiotherium, uniting in itself the characters of the pachydermous, plantigrades, and the digitigrades, foreshadowing in its singular combination the hog, the bear, and the cat the small rhinoceros Nebrascensis, bearing a marked resemblance to the living babyrousa and peccary, together with many other remarkable and novel varieties of animal life, roamed over these lands at a period so remote that the mind staggers under the effort of computation.

in

Geology ascribes the date of their existence or at home. I never heard on the Turon of any to a time when, of all which now constitutes outrage or incivility. (I have heard screaming Europe and Asia, only a few scattered islands, and rows, but from whom did it proceed? slowly rising from a wide waste of ocean, variably husband and wife.) At the period of were visible; when Mount Etna and the my leaving, great numbers of respectable women plateau of Sicily were still deep under the were arriving daily, and in the town of Sofala, tertiary Mediterranean Sea; when the Alps three or four inns, had sprung up; the latter, bark, log, and weather-boarded houses, with and the great sub-Himmalayan range of Northern India were yet unformed; when, on the very properly, always keeping closed on Sundays. continent, the now far inland mountain chains ere this many houses of that description are to A brickmaker was hard at work; and no doubt were the scaboard of the Atlantic, whose be seen, with good shops, stores, &c. As it was, waves washed the great Mississippi valley, the town had a lively appearance, which but and beat against the bluffs of Vicksburg. twelve months before was inhabited only by These fossil deposits are exciting a great kangaroos, cockatoos, and opossums, or a solitary degree of interest in the scientific world; and shepherd with a flock of sheep. I understood already, during the present season, three ex- that the shepherd at Sheep Station Point had repeditions, one of them composed of European sided there twenty-two years, and never had savans, have left St. Louis, to renew the in- been away but three times during that period. vestigation of their mysteries, and decipher Even the gold fever had not affected him. their marvellous record of the history of our argument was, he cared for nobody, and nobody cared for him; therefore, what inducement was planet. getting money for some one else to spend ? there for him to go and make a fool of himself by

The Mauvaises Terres, notwithstanding their great extent, occupy in reality but a small portion of the beautiful Territory of Nebraska. Close around their waste and desolation,

Spreading between the streams are the wondrous beautiful prairies,

Billowy bays of grass ever rolling in sunshine and shadow,

Bright with luxuriant clusters of roses and purple amorphas.

Over them wander the buffalo herds, and the elk, and the roe-buck,

Over them wander the wolves and the herds of riderless horses,

Fires that blast and blight, and winds that are weary of travel.

And over all is the sky, the clear crystalline heaven,

Like the protecting hand of God inverted above them.

SUNDAY was always kept as a holiday, not only on account of work being forbidden by the authorities on the Sabbath, but I should say eight-tenths of the people would not have worked had they been allowed; and, in spite of all that has been said about the immorality caused by the discovery of gold and its consequences, I was perfectly surprised at the small amount of crime that existed amongst so mixed a population, consisting of every grade of society, from the most hardened wretch from Norfolk Island, to a representative of every trade and profession that ever was heard of, not excepting honorables and captains in the royal navy, army officers, barristers, &c.; and I am confident there was not more vice (if even so much) than there would be in any town; of course, there was plenty of riotously disposed people, but far more of the other way of thinking.

As far as females are concerned, I have no hesitation in saying that they might and did consider themselves as safe, both regarding their persons and feelings, as if they were in Sydney

His

The greatest vice that men and boys (the latter especially) at the diggings used to habituate themselves to, was swearing the most horrible oaths, and using coarse, low-life language; so much so, that a man would hardly speak to his friends without calling them some sort of unmentionable name; but I invariably saw even that checked in a moment, if there was any female of apparent respectability in a tent, near, or passing; showing the moral influence woman Read's Australia. has, even over the "roughs" at the diggings.

The Philosophy of Atheism Examined and Compared with Christianity. A Course of Popular Lectures, delivered at the Mechanics' Institute, Bradford, on Sunday Afternoons in the Winter of 1852-'53. By the Reverend B. Godwin, D. D. Third edition.

There is some interest attached to the story of these plain and popular lectures against Atheism. Some twenty years ago, when political and religious or irreligious fever ran higher than it does now, a divine at Bradford made some allusions in the pulpit, which excited the anger of the sceptics of the town. A sort of challenge to persons to speak in a place where their dogmas could be gainsaid was thrown out. Dr. Godwin in consequence gave a series of lectures, which were well attended, and subsequently printed both in this country and America. Years passed; the doctor left semi-Infidel Bradford for semi-Papistical Oxford, and returned to find Atheism rampant in another form, or under another name Secularism, meaning, Attend only to things of this world. Again he mounted the platform, and again with acceptance; the lecturer bearing full testimony to the fairness and courtesy of the working men, who formed the majority of his audience. His lectures were in substance the same that he delivered in 1834, but with many changes. The second edition appears to have been published last spring, and autumn produces a third. Spectator.