si, Mimnermus uti censet, sine amore jocisque           nil¹ est jucundum, vivas in amore jorisqne.
          HOR. Epist. I. vi 65, 66.
 
          If, as Mimnennus held, nought² else can move
          Your soul to pleasure, live in sports and love.
The theatre was completed, and was found to be, without the echeia, a fine vehicle of sound. It was tried, not only in the morning rehearsals³, but occasionally, and chiefly on afternoons of bad weather, by recitations, and even lectures; for though some of the party attached no value to that 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 entreated⁵ 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 pretentious⁶ 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 presidency⁷ of Lord Facing-both-ways, and the vice-presidency of Lord Michin Malicho.
 
At intervals⁸ 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 expounded⁹ 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 laboriously¹⁰ pushing up hill, is for the present deposited at the bottom in the Limbo¹¹ of Vanity. If it should ever surmount¹² the summit and run down on the other side, it will infallibly roll over and annihilate¹³ the franchise¹⁴ of the educated classes; for it would not be worth their while to cross the road to exercise it against the rabble¹⁵ preponderance which would then have been created. Thirty years ago, Lord Michin Malicho had several cogent¹⁶ 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 boon¹⁷. On the former occasion the out-of-door logic¹⁸ was irresistible¹⁹. 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 Reformer. In his neighbourhood in London was the place of assembly of a Knowledge-is-Power Club. The members at the close of their meetings collected mending-stones from the road, and broke the windows to the right and left of their line of march. They had a flag on which was inscribed²⁰, "The power of public opinion." Whenever the enlightened assembly met, my father closed his shutters²², but, closing within, they did not protect the glass. One morning he picked up, from where it had fallen between the window and the shutter²¹, a very large, and consequently very demonstrative, specimen²³ of dialectical granite²⁴. He preserved it carefully, and mounted it on a handsome pedestal, inscribed with "The power of public opinion." He placed it on the middle of his library mantelpiece, and the daily contemplation of it cured him of his passion for Reform. During the rest of his life he never talked, as he had used to do, of "the people": he always said "the rabble," and delighted in quoting every passage of Hudibras in which the rabble-rout is treated as he had come to conclude it ought to be. He made this piece of granite the nucleus²⁵ of many political disquisitions. It is still in my possession, and I look on it with veneration²⁶ as my principal tutor, for it had certainly a large share in the elements of my education. If, which does not seem likely, another reform lunacy should arise in my time, I shall take care to close my shutters against "The power of public opinion."
 
The Reverend Doctor Opimian being called on to contribute his share to these diversions of rainy afternoons, said—
 
'The sort of prose lecture which I am accustomed to deliver would not be exactly appropriate to the present time and place. I will therefore recite to you some verses, which I made some time since, on what appeared to me a striking specimen of absurdity²⁷ on the part of the advisers²⁸ of royalty²⁹ here—the bestowing³⁰ the honours of knighthood, which is a purely³² Christian³³ institution, on Jews and Paynim; very worthy³⁴ persons in themselves, and entitled to any mark of respect befitting their class, but not to one strictly³⁵ and exclusively Christian; money-lenders, too, of all callings the most anti-pathetic to that of a true knight³¹. The contrast impressed itself on me as I was reading a poem of the twelfth century, by Hues³⁶ de Tabaret—L'Ordène de Chevalerie—and I endeavoured to express the contrast in the manner and form following:—
 
     A NEW ORDER OF CHIVALRY³⁷
 
     Sir Moses, Sir Aaron, Sir Jamramajee,
     Two stock-jobbing Jews, and a shroffing Parsee,
     Have girt on the

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