has not dived into the Thames, and rescued some respectable attorney from a death hitherto deemed by his friends impossible to him.  It is from no such heroism that Peter Wiggins is compelled to take refuge in John Smith from the oppressive admiration of the world about him.  Certainly not.  Depend upon it, Peter has been signalised in the Hue and Cry, as one endowed with a love for the silver spoons of other men—­as an individual who, abusing the hospitality of his lodgings, has conveyed away and sold the best goose feathers of his landlady.  What then, with his name ripe enough to drop from the tree of life, remains to Wiggins, but to subside into Smith?  What hope was there for the well-known swindler, the posted pickpocket, the callous-hearted, slug-brained Tory?  None:  he was hooted, pelted at; all men stopped the nose at his approach.  He was voted a nuisance, and turned forth into the world, with all his vices, like ulcers, upon him.  Well, Tory adopts the inevitable policy of Wiggins; he changes his name!  He comes forth, curled and sweetened, and with a smile upon his mealy face, and placing his felon hand above the vacuum on the left side of his bosom—­declares, whilst the tears he weeps would make a crocodile blush—­that he is by no means the Tory his wicked, heartless enemies would call him.  Certainly not.  His name is—­Conservative! There was, once, to be sure, a Tory—­in existence;

  “But he is dead, and nailed in his chest!”

He is a creature extinct, gone with the wolves annihilated by the Saxon monarch.  There may be the skeleton of the animal in some rare collections in the kingdom; but for the living creature, you shall as soon find a phoenix building in the trees of Windsor Park, as a Tory kissing hands in Windsor Castle!

The lie is but gulped as a truth, and Conservative is taken into service.  Once more, he is the factotum to JOHN BULL.  But when the knave shall have worn out his second name—­when he shall again be turned away—­look to your feather-beds, oh, JOHN! and foolish, credulous, leathern-eared Mr. BULL—­be sure and count your spoons!

Can it be supposed that the loss of office, that the ten years’ hunger for the loaves and fishes endured by the Tory party, has disciplined them into a wiser humanity?  Can it be believed that they have arrived at a more comprehensive grasp of intellect—­that they are ennobled by a loftier consideration of the social rights of man—­that they are gifted with a more stirring sympathy for the wants that, in the present iniquitous system of society, reduce him to little less than pining idiotcy, or madden him to what the statutes call crime, and what judges, sleek as their ermine, preach upon as rebellion to the government—­the government that, in fact, having stung starvation into treason, takes to itself the loftiest praise for refusing the hangman—­a task—­for appeasing Justice with simple transportation?