ence," or, as the universal formula in Ireland is, "had drink taken," before the car started. However, when a halt was made at a village post-office on the way, he found it necessary to be in company with John Jameson again. Though he could hardly maintain the perpendicular, it was marvellous how very slightly his powers of expression were affected. His language was well chosen, courteous, and coherent. The whole controversy was conducted in the most amicable spirit, notwithstanding the decided differences of opinion among the speakers, and was in its own way an excellent illustration of Irish conversational

He returned to Ireland with his finger in his mouth. This is the career of this man of the world. I only ask any man to say is it to such a man I ought to leave the independence I have so hardly earned.

A medical friend is remembered thus:

When I had an opportunity I called him in, which was a great advantage to him professionally, as he was well paid. Mr. C.'s case, the one when I amputated, he got a larger fee than myself. B.'s when upset by Mail Coach I now make was another, and others also. him a present of my works on surgery and any instruments I may have.

power. The car-driver himself seemed rather undecided; he declared that if a vote would put Parnell into heaven," he couldn't give it to him, for he hadn't wan to give!" And when pressed with the attitude of the bishops, he observed that "if he knew William O'Brien's mind was to go wid Parnell, he'd be for him too." William O'Brien was evidently his pope in the matter, if he could only know his mind. We desire to add here, by way of conclusion to this article, a remarkable specimen of readiness attributed to an Irish rector, father of a living Irish bishop, who was beneficed in the county where our cardriver plies his whip. A “ fish-jolter called at the rectory one day with fish for sale. "What have you to-day?" "Sole and plaice, your Reverence; the finest iver swum the say." Rector, after exam-churchyard, and that no laborer with spade ining them for some time: "Damn your sole, leave the plaice." It would not be easy to get a better specimen of a double pun than this.

A CURIOUS IRISH WILL. [TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR.] SIR, So recently as the year 1874, a professional gentleman in the south of Ireland made a will some extracts from which are here given. The will was lent to me by a parishioner; but for obvious reasons I do not give the name and address of the testator:

I leave and bequeath an annuity of 120 a year, an ample provision for an irreclaimable booby, to my nephew, I. L. C., to be paid him only in Australia or any British colony, where he may desire it to be remitted to him. Should the said I. L. C. return to Ireland, England, or Scotland, I then revoke

...

I give my medical books to Mr. W. G. I desire all other books not medical, with soup ladle and large silver Tankard being long in my family, and also my silver snuff-boxes, to be packed up in a chest down-stairs, painted [sic], properly fastened, and directed to S. M., Hobart Town, Tasmania.

I desire to be buried in my tomb in T.

or shovel be allowed to enter my tomb. I have seen this class committing great sacrilege in order to show their work and trouble. I wish quicklime to be strewed thick in bottom of coffin, and when corpse is in to have lime thrown over it. While alive I have a great abhorrence of insects, and may have the same though dead.

I leave and bequeath to Mr. J. M. an annuity of £10 a year, to be paid half-yearly, as he is the most distressed of all his respectable relations, not from any regard for him, but because he was a near relative of my deceased

wife.

I leave the Parlor maid £10 on giving up all articles entrusted to her care in good order; she has the key of plate-chest.

Scarves and hatbands may be bought at O'C. and L.'s; these men employed me; but I will not have a coffin made in T., from the way my niece was served and treated.

Are there many instances of wills such as this being made the vehicle for personal reflections? I am, sir, etc.,

COURTENAY MOORE, M.A. Mitchelstown Rectory, March 21st.

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From Blackwood's Magazine.
POLITICS IN FICTION.

human race; who fondly fancied they might regenerate and revolutionize, and POLITICS naturally play an important who subsequently either came to signal part in the fiction of a nation, where they grief or settled down into steady-going, are the common talk of all the world, practical men of business. Those good from the prince on the steps of the throne old days were the days of fiercely contested to the cottager smoking in the alehouse. elections, fought out regardless of expense Everybody is supposed to be thoroughly and law, in contempt of peace, purity, and at home in them, and Wilkie, in the sol- public order. It was then that Brougham, emn earnestness of his "Village Politi- though but a rising lawyer, somehow cians," went to the very root of the matter. found vast sums of money to fling to the In a country which has boasted of its free winds in battling in Cumberland against institutions since the Witenagemot of the the Lowthers. It was then that three Saxons, a public career is open to all great Yorkshire families must have hopecomers, and the gifted son of a scavenger lessly embarrassed themselves in a trianmay aspire theoretically to direct the gular duel, had they not had inexhaustible destinies of the British Empire. Indeed, mines beneath boundless acres. It was stranger things are likely to happen in then Earl Spencer is said to have spent these days of school boards with the ad- £150,000 on what is known as the "spendvent of free education. But in writing of thrift election." Those were the days of politics in fiction, we are less concerned the rotten boroughs, when each market. with the possibilities of the future than able borough went to the highest bidder; with the picturesqueness of the past. We when a Sir Pitt Crawley kept one seat for are sorry to think that, from the more sen- himself, selling the other to a nabob or a sational point of view, the prosaic has government nominee; when a man might been replacing the romantic. Our older qualify his bailiff and his butler to return novelists had grand opportunities, and, a couple of millionaires to represent them happily for historians, they did not neglect in Parliament; and when less strictly them. Great statesmen, when platform limited electorates in the south-western oratory was less common, and when the counties looked to clear a few hundreds practice of reporting was comparatively in per head at each welcome dissolution. its infancy, made novels the channels for Those were the days when there was no communicating their thoughts, and dis- sneaking nomination by signed papers cussing the condition of the country and within doors. The hustings were set up the masses. In their fiction they followed in the market-place in good old constituthe course of the thrilling political strug-tional fashion, and the candidate had to gles which had enfranchised the democ- stand forward and talk if he could, or in racy for good or for evil, and carried a succession of bills for "giving everything to everybody." Those statesmen, if they wrote as partisans, wrote in the ripe maturity of habitual reflection, and founded the scenes, which were brightened and colored by imagination, on personal experiences and reminiscences. Nor in their brilliant books, as in many others, was the popular and dramatic side of politics neglected. They analyzed the ambition which burned as a fever, making men hazard everything on the hope of distinction, compromising with conscience and throw-and the children petted, the men were ing principle overboard. They dwelt on the careers of youths who dreamed of being the disinterested benefactors of the

any case to pose as a cock-shy. Business first, pleasure afterwards. For days before, the free and independent electors had been making their bargain; the "men in the moon" had been shuffling and dealing handfuls of bank-notes in the back parlors of the public-houses, and the taps of liquor had been set running in the bars. Any dissolute rascal with a vote, or the possibility of influencing a vote, might count upon a retainer with nothing to do. The spirits of philanthropy and geniality reigned supreme; the women were kissed

kept in a chronic state of intoxication. In short, the business being transacted with infinite joviality, the electorate was wound

packs of hungry expectants. It was a case of every one for himself; and there seemed to be no such thing as disinterested patriotism. The prime minister was beset by noble and greedy borough

up to a proper pitch of excitement for the grand carnival of the nomination. It was then that the unfortunate non-electors had their chance of showing their interest in public affairs. The candidates were simultaneously proposed and and pilloried. mongers. Lord North complains bitterly They showed their dexterity in dodging in his confidential letters of the hard bardead cats and dogs; they had often to gain driven by Lord Falmouth for the protect themselves with stout umbrellas sale, or rather the lease, of some Cornish against well-directed volleys of apples and seats. Yet seats must be secured if the rotten eggs. Nor was the declaration of ministry were to stand. Lord Marney in the poll by any means decisive. There "Sybil," is refused a dukedom by the had generally been an abundance of brib- Whig oligarchs. He renounces his prinery and corruption, and it was only a ques-ciples, counts his boroughs, consults his tion of proving personal guilt or agency. cousins, waits for an opportunity, and If a sufficiency of evidence and money takes a signal revenge. Lucrative posts were forthcoming, the petition followed in due course, and the electioneering campaign was shifted to Westminster, to be fought out before a parliamentary committee; the scenes changed, but the same influences were still at work. There are parliamentary agents with carte blanche for their bills; there are silver-tongued counsel with fabulous fees on their briefs; there are subsidiary agents akin to the men in the moon, trying all they know to "earwig" the hostile witnesses, who are jealously guarded while they live like fighting cocks on the luxuries of the metropolis. All that, and much more of the kind, is embodied in the fiction by our best and most brilliant novelists.

The fathers of English fiction have little to say about politics. In Fielding we find casual allusions to knights of the shires; and Smollett talks suggestively of Roderick Random dancing attendance upon patrons and peers that he may obtain a surgeon's berth in the navy. Everything then, like kissing, went by favor. A vote meant something substantial, and the control of a section of voters a great deal more. There is a good story told of a Cambridge divine who preached before the elder Pitt, when the all-powerful minister paid a visit to the university. The preacher is said to have taken for his text, "There is a lad among us with some barley loaves, and a few small fishes; but what are they among so many?" The sarcastic clergyman sent the shaft home. Every man with patronage, or with the means of influencing it, was hunted by

closed the mouths of dangerous aspirants to the leadership of the House. So Macaulay tells how the avarice of the elder Fox was gratified with the paymastership of the Admiralty, which meant, in other words, that his accounts were to be passed, while he put the country to pillage. A corrupt chief was bound to connive at the malversations and peculations of his subordinates. Contracts were given away to the most influential bidders, and the men whose duty it was to check the quality of the government stores drew commissions as sleeping partners of swindlers. Perhaps Britain was in some measure indebted for her naval victories to the inferior quality of the powder, for the bite of her bulldogs was more dangerous than their bark, and they had learned to rely on the boarding-pike and cutlass. On the other hand, the maggoty beef and the weevily biscuit often brought the seamen to mutiny, or the verge of it; they died of the scurvy on the foreign stations like rotten sheep, or were sent to hospitals to be tended by unskilful surgeons and dosed with adulterated drugs. Smollett gives a terrible picture of the sufferings of the expedition to Carthagena; and even in the later days which Marryat has dramatized, things had not greatly changed for the better. The most responsible posts were often filled by the most incompetent men. The flagrant abuses could not have been tolerated had the light of parliamentary committees been flashed upon them, but the conspiracy of silence was too strong for protest. The long-descended democrat