NORTH.

And to the Red Sea from thence, not more than five hundred.

TICKLER.

Yes-these were his very words. Now, all this is done so easily, so gently, so quietly, so gingerly, that people would think they were reading a French road-book, with all its mysterious calculations of postes and postes et demi. Then, continued Sir Bob, they have nothing to do but get down the Red Sea.

NORTH.

Perfectly regardless of the fate of King Pharaoh of Egypt.

TICKLER.

Through the Straights of Babelmandeb, (which, by the way, they used to call Babelmandel, in my school-boy days,) and then, with fair weather to their tail, they would have nothing to do but to take Sir John Malcolm, or whoever else should reign in his stead, by the back of the neck, and drown him in any convenient part of the harbour of Bombay.

NORTH.

Or else there was Persia open to the march-get through Daughistaun, and Shirvaun, Tchiraun, and many more places ending in aun, and floating gaily adown the Persian Gulf, sail from Ormus, and so make themselves masters of India.

TICKLER.

It is amusing to remember the mouthing of our Modern Munchausen. All the time several people, otherwise respectable, were so shallow-pated as to believe that this cock-and-bull history had as much sense and truth in it as the Adventures of Aladdin and the Princess Badroulboudoŭr. And it remains a standing proof of the imbecility of human intellect, that it was seriously answered in the Quarterly Review.

NORTH.

For our parts, when we read it, we said that we had a higher opinion of Bob's reading in consequence, as it was perfectly evident he must have been fresh from the perusal of that most admirable of all romances-that most philosophical of all works of science-that most delightful of compilations of Ethics, viz. the Romance of Gargantua, as written by Master Alcofribas.

TICKLER.

You are more at home, North, in Rabelais than I am-his prodigality overwhelms my senses and my reason.

NORTH.

For-Vertue-Bœuf, as Rabelais would say himself—the whole idea-many of the very phrases and locutions-almost the places-the entire plan, spirit, and regulation of the campaign-are pillaged, plundered, conveyed, and abducted from a celebrated chapter thereof,—that, I mean, in which the three Captains of his host come before King Picrochele, and promise that prince that they · will make him, if he follows their advice, the most honoured and renowned monarch that ever made his appearance on the face of the world, since the days of Alexander the Macedonian.

TICKLER.

Brush up my memory of the wittiest work of the wittiest of all Frenchmen.

NORTH.

Swashbuckler, Dustaille, and Smelltrash, came before their king, and told him how they were to overcome the world—to make him, among other things, King of Trebizond-to massacre all the Mahometans, unless they were baptized-to rebuild Solomon's temple-to sweep through Syria, Palestine, Lydia, and many other places most abominably mis-spelt in the usual editions of Sir Thomas Urquhart, as they probably will be in Maga-and returning thence, to make but one mouthful of Europe-England, Ireland, and Scotland being gulped up in a single parenthesis. Picrochele having believed all this, went to war, which ended in his being a beggarman, awaiting for the coming of the Cocklicranes, to be restored to his kingdom.

TICKLER.

I see the application; though that the Emperor Nicholas has any chance of coming to this humble estate, I am far from believing; and sorry should I be if there were any chance of seeing his diademed head covered with a beggar's clout.

NORTH.

I should be most sorry, too, Tickler, because he is a good Anti-Catholic of the Greek persuasion, who would vote, if he had a vote, for the restoration of the penal laws in Ireland to-morrow. Secondly, because he the representative of that house which crushed the Jacobin power, and broke up the Continental System. Thirdly, because he is a good free-mason, having been made in our presence in the Canongate Kilwinning.

TICKLER.

Reasons sufficient for being sorry were he ever to be so far reduced as to look for the advent of the Cocklicranes to be reinstated on the throne of all the Russias; yet I am not in the least degree grieved that he is now, in his proper person, exhibiting the enormous absurdity of the Bob Wilsonian school of Munchausenism.

NORTH.

Why, I, who flatter myself I know a thing or two, said from the very first, that Russia, unsubsidized, unassisted by foreign armies, unsupported by foreign cabinets, could not move forty thousand real soldiers,-I put Cossacks, &c. admirable as they are at home, or in pursuit of a defeated enemy, out of the question, I say, that Russia, of herself, could not move forty thousand men forty miles beyond her own frontier, without being cursedly hampered.

TICKLER.

And the more uncivilized the enemy, North, the greater the difficulties. In rich countries, where there are wealthy cities,-fat burghers to be robbed,greasy monasteries to be rifled,-golden chests and golden plains to be broken open or cut down,-there the honest system of perquisitions, the vivere rapto plan might suceed. Will that do in Turkey?

Alas! No. The invading army must there bring all its provisions, all the demands of its commissariat, all its ordnance and battering train with it; and these things are to be paid for in one way or another, either way being equally inconvenient to his Imperial Majesty.

TICKLER.

"Here goes the EmperorNicholas," shouted all the Gentlemen of the Press all over Europe," one day at Moscow, the next in Constantinople. What is the Duke of Wellington doing? Oh! unhappy Ministry, you are ruining the country, by permitting the conquest."

NORTH.

How intensely, Tickler, the Duke of Wellington must have laughed! Somewhat as Hannibal did when he heard the old snuffling sophist,-one of a class of men, who, by the way, very much resembled, in information and honesty, our journalists at present,-lecturing him-him of Canna-on the art of war. How actively he must have rubbed his ear, as he heard blinkard after blinkard talk of walking to Constantinople, as the Cockneys on Easter Sunday walk to Greenwich fair.

TICKLER.

Wait, gentlemen, he might have said, all's not over yet. Wait till Russia is aggrandized by the taking of the city of the Cæsars.

NORTH.

Well did he know that this campaign of Russia, on her own resources, was the most impolitic act she could commit; and he had no objection that she should divert herself, by flinging away, in an idle and uncalled for contest, the stamina of ten years' political existence.

TICKLER.

The poor paltry politicians-the creatures whose names have become a byeword of scorn-the sitting-part of the Canningites-had, by that most bungling of all pieces of diplomacy, the treaty of the 6th of July, made us auxiliaries-art and part-in this Russian invasion; and the cunning men about the Czarmust have chuckled at their triumph over them, the idiots xar' εξοχην.

NORTH.

But "A change came o'er the spirit of our dream," my boy. These gen

tlemen found the laugh considerably altered. They were left to fight the battle by themselves-with what success, all the world knows.

Proo!

TICKLER.

NORTH.

Now, my good little Masters and Misses, did the Duke do right or wrong? Was it better for him to let the Russians cut their own throats, or to mount his grand Waterloo horse, and play their game?

TICKLER.

The boy who has been booby for five years in each successive class of the High School could answer that question aright.

These fellows must be settled as the interests of Europe dictate. They or their petty affairs cannot be of any consequence, now that the great European interests are at stake. And I think that, since they got into the hands of Messrs Joe Hume, Orlando, Luriottis, Capo d'Istria, Trelawney, Steam-Engine Galloway, Apollo, and Mercurius, and the rest, the world in general care as little about them, as they do about the last cargo of Christian and Liberal patriots shipped for the colonies of Australasia.

TICKLER.

But then, says some interminable querist, holding you by the button, there's the French expedition to the Morea-Chateaubriand writes an immensity about it in the Journal des Debats? Are not you horribly afeard of that? Come, confess.

NORTH.

Afeard! not we. Why, it is ours when we want it. Why it should intend us harm, we cannot see; and even if it contemplated any, have not we, the rulers of the seas, the absolute disposal of all persons and things in the Peloponnesus? Had we not in more noisy days the French garrison in Malta, and the French army in Egypt, as completely in our hands as if they were in the hulks?

TICKLER.

Come-come-what do you say about the Pacha of Egypt?

NORTH.

An excellent fellow, lately converted to Christianity, and inrolled as a ru ling elder of the Relief Kirk of Kirkintulloch, by the persuasion of the Reverend Mr Dobbie, and Miss Elizabeth Shanks. He will not annoy us. Perhaps in course of time he may yield to good advice, and surrender his country to our safe keeping, with the same good humour that the Great Mogul surrendered his.

India?

TICKLER.

NORTH.

Dinna fash your thoomb about India. It is a long march from the Caspian to the Passes of Altock-and there is many a stumbling-block in the way, And, moreover, listen to one word-if there was as fine an army as Napoleon Bonaparte marched against Russia herself, at the Passes of Altock, we could prove it to you, that without firing a gun, we (the English, we mean, not ourselves, C. N.) have it in our power to make it "a' wede away" almost as rapidly as the army of King Sennacherib of Assyria; and that by the time it came within sight of the foredoomed ground of Panniput, it would not be able to put 50,000 men, and they jaded and worn out, to cope against quadruple the number of as fine a set of fellows as ever pulled a trigger.

TICKLER.

Barring always the grenadiers of England.

NORTH.

No, laddie-for it must be to a very young person we are addressing this argument if we lose India it will not be by an invasion from Russia. When

the time comes we shall give the world an Essay on that subject, which will illuminate it to the centre of its soul.

TICKLER.

North, you are in great force to-night! And now having thus most triumphantly proved, that we have no need to go to war with Russia-that she is injuring herself much more than we could injure her-that no English interest, direct or indirect, is at stake-you have not degraded yourself by an swering the nonsense talked about "Rule Britannia" being in any danger, from sailors bred in icy seas, or the lakes which go by the names of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean-that if she want to fight, we are ready for itsuppose you turn your nose away from the North, and, like a cock on a steeple, point your neb to the South.

NORTH.

What is Don Miguel or Don Pedro to us? For the kingdom of Portugal we feel great respect, because we have been for more than fifty years swallowing the wine, the name of which is identified with its own-A liquid to be honoured to be loved. Let Theodore Hook's admirable Sayings and Doings say and do what they please-that is the sound, constitutional, episcopal, presbyterian, protestant, godfearing liquor, in which I toss off Sempiternal bumpers to Church and King.

TICKLER.

I saw a prime pipe whaumled into my cellar this blessed day. Dine with me to-morrow, Kit.

NORTH.

I will.-Days, or rather nights of our youth! Shall we dishonour your memory by a word derogatory to that solid-fluid-a compound epithet, which, let mathematicians sneer as they please, is in this case no bull. Revering Portugal, therefore, on this ground, and having a hankering recollection of Vimeira, and other doings there, we shall not be suspected of saying a word in its disparagement. But really we cannot see why we are bound to cram a constitution down the throats of the Portuguese against their will.

TICKLER.

Unless the old lady were in a strait waistcoat, and could not feed herself with her own hands.

NORTH.

We cannot see that we were justified in sending five or six thousand soldiers there, to compel people to be free at the point of the bayonet.

TICKLER.

By the soft persuasion of military law.

NORTH.

No wonder that such proceedings-that the diplomatic pedantry of prating about a casus fœderis-and the schoolboy pedantry of quoting puffing verses about Eolus-should have very much irritated the Portuguese against us. As for the Constitution, it is very evident that they did not understand any thing about it.

TICKLER.

And as for the Constitutionalists, a more mean, cowardly, ignorant crew never usurped the functions of government.

NORTH.

The flight from the Vouga has indeed shewn these fellows up in their true colours. There have been few things in history, Tickler, more exquisitely comical than the expedition of the Marquis Palmella and his associates. Forth went these valorous champions from London, with the favourable gales of the applause of the Courier breathed hot upon their backs, to make their appearance, and to conquer.

TICKLER.

The Veni, Vidi, Vici, of Julius Caesar, was to have been revived in their case. Sed quales rediere?

NORTH.

Such a running never was heard of. The very sound of the advance of Don Miguel's army made the fellows take to their heels as rapidly as the frogs and VOL. XXIV. 3 S

mice, in the Batrachomyomachia, scudded into their holes and marshes on the arrival of the crabs. Taipa led the way

« Πρώτος Πηνέλεως Βοιωτιος ηρχε φοβοσο

TICKLER.

But allow me to add, that Peneleus was a good fighter, and did not stir till he was wounded in the shoulder, goow reтgaμμsvos as-until Jupiter, son of Saturn, had shaken his fringed Ægis, and darted his terror-striking bolt among the Greeks. Taipa ran before he saw the glistening of a gun, and the disorder shortly became infectious.

There was not a man among them on that day whom you would not have backed with the long odds against Coates himself.

TICKLER.

And these are the good people with whom the men of England-the old INVICTI-the men who never run-it is for these cravens that our sympathies are sought to be enlisted! We wish they were delivered to the tender mercies of Friar Jean des Entoumeures, that he might inflict summary chastisement upon them with the sacred baton of the Cross.

NORTH.

People in this country, Mr Tickler, who are horribly gulled by the nonsense which is written in newspapers, are sometimes in the habit of calling Don Miguel an usurper, and that too is made a ground why we should go to war with him.

TICKLER.

How he is a usurper I cannot see.

NORTH.

Don Pedro, we shall be told at once, is his elder brother, and therefore, by all the rights of primogeniture, should have succeeded his father. Supposing this all to be as correct as possible, we cannot for the lives of us see how we are appointed conservators general of the due succession of kingdoms all over the world. Just see to what that would lead us at the present moment.

TICKLER.

Why, we should be very busy at war with Russia, because Constantine has been set aside for Nicholas.

NORTH.

We should be active in ousting Bernadotte, and restoring Colonel Gustaf

son.

TICKLER.

King Ferdinand's claim to his throne was not the most correct in the world at the beginning, yet no one that we ever heard of recommended us to attack the great man-milliner to the Virgin Mary on this ground.

NORTH.

What nonsense-what idiocy it is, then, to expect that we are to send out fleets and armies, and to puzzle our consols, simply that we may change the name of Miguel for that of Pedro !

TICKLER.

Of Don Miguel I know nothing-but as he is grossly abused in the Times, it is highly probable that he is a gentleman.

NORTH.

As to the validity of his election, let the Portuguese lawyers look to it. His partizans, in our opinion, make out a good case for him. The fundamental laws of Portugal require that the King must be a Portuguese, and Don Pedro