our wanderings through London to describe a family of its zoophytes more exclusively peculiar to it than any British family. The Treasury is the centre of their kingdom-the hole of the queen-bee. Few of the statesmen who have presided at the Treasury have been remarkable for anything but their statesmanship and the general high character of British gentlemen. They afford little to gossip about. Godolphin, as we have already heard Mr. Hatton avouch, was "frugal," and esteemed both by his queen and country. Some of his contemporaries told a different tale-but let that pass. Walpole was "a character," in the conversational acceptation of the term. Good-natured, and withal somewhat ponderous, without intellectual tastes, and coarse in his sensuality, yet with a remarkable talent for governing, he held the reins of power with a more tenacious hand than any statesman who has succeeded him, except the second Pitt. He held them firmly, but without apparent effort; whereas Chatham's was an incessant parade of vigour without the strength to keep hold. Apart from mere animal pleasures, governing seems to have been the only employment or pastime for which Walpole had a taste. It was the thing he came into the world to do, and he could, or cared to, do nothing else. When turned out of office by Pulteney he affected to be resigned, but could interest himself in no other pursuit. He yawned and went to sleep in his chair after dinner, fell into a lethargic state for want of exercise, and slept himself into his grave in no time. Lord North resembled Walpole in his goodnature. Indeed, good-nature is a more common feature of the English statesman than any other. Harley was good-natured; Walpole was good-natured; North was good-natured; Fox was good-natured. But North had not Walpole's power. His greatness was the result of accident. He was kept in office by there being no one else capable of taking it from him. Neither had he Walpole's intense passion for governing, and he managed to enjoy life in his own quiet and complacent way after he was turned out of office. Pitt II. had the governing instinct quite as strong as Walpole, but he had inherited something of the despotic temper of his father; and was anxious that his power should be acknowledged as well as felt. "Good-natured" is scarcely applicable to him, yet he was fond of a social carouse in his hours of relaxation. It is doubtful whether Pitt would not have been a greater man had his father drilled him less. The power of language and the power of action are rarely possessed to the same degree by one individual. With Pitt the talent for governing was an instinct, but the power of oratory (and he possessed it too in high perfection) was in a great measure artificial. It had been drilled into him in youth. There was fluency, and the sentential forms of logic; but there was no play of fancy, no imaginative power, properly speaking, no close reasoning. In modern times the parliamentary displays of a minister attract an undue share of attention, and Pitt is consequently judged fully more by his speeches than his actions. This is to do him injustice; for all his father's care and all his own sedulous efforts could not raise his oratory to the height to which native genius, aided by cultivation, carried Burke, Fox, and Windham. Look to his actions, however, and these oratorical rivals seem dwarfed beside him. The boy grasped the helm of state and held it to the last. He was one of Carlyle's born kings. The people's instinct taught them this; and "As waves before A vessel under sail, so man obeyed And fell below his stern." We are not writing a history of England, but describing the buildings of its metropolis, and calling up their associations, or we might easily recount a long bead-roll of unobtrusive great men who have here "done their spiriting gently" or otherwise. For our purpose enough has been said. After all, England's Treasury contrasts strangely with the schoolboy notions of a Treasury that cling to us. Here are no ingots of gold and silver, no stores of jewels, no piled-up substantial wealth. Plainly-dressed men, with about as much small-change as may suffice for the expenses of the day in their pockets, go out and in. Scraps of paper are handed about with large sums written or engraved on them. The abstract idea of money inhabits the empty halls: the power of endowing men with a magnetic power of attracting gold to them after they issue from the doors is there-nothing more. It is like the chests full of sand which the Spanish Jews are said to have received in pawn from the Cid, and to have guarded with scrupulous care, believing they contained the hero's plate and jewels. The chests contained something better than gold-the Cid's "promise to pay;" and the Treasury contains something better still-the collective faith of the British nation, which is not a " repudiating" state. The unseen, remote wealth at the command of this vacant Treasury exceeds what eastern imagination, piled up in the cavern, opened to Aladdin. A British monarch's eye may well gaze on the structure with complacency. And therefore is it appropriately placed where, white-gleaming through the foliage, it is the first object that meets her gaze as she looks from her palace-window in the morning. It is to be hoped that the young scions of royalty are duly impressed with the importance of the wondrous pile which the early lights show to such advantage in the fresh and balmy hours of the young day. The Treasury, as might have been anticipated, occupies a prominent place in political caricatures and lampoons. A series of broadsides which combine both characters, with pictures above and doggerel below, levelled at Walpole, and also at some of his opponents, the year before he was turned out of office, for the most part lay the scene in its neighbourhood. The first, entitled The Protest,' is an allegory of "the Minority" under the protection of Justice, shooting an arrow at Walpole, in his easy chair, defended by the Majority." The dramatis persona are assembled on the esplanade in St. James's Park, and Walpole's armchair is placed right in front of the Treasury, at that time a building of only eight years' standing. The female figures representing "Majority" and “ Minority" in this engraving, remind one of the Laird of M'Nab's order to a sculptor to make him figures of Time and Eternity, to be set up on either side of his gate. "But how am I to represent Eternity, Sir?" "Make him twice as big as Time." Another of the series alluded to is entitled The Nation.' John, the hero of North Britain (Duke of Argyle), seated on the box of a coach and six, urging the horses to mad speed with a huge claymore, driving over all in his way right to the Treasury gate. The Earl of Chesterfield is postilion. In the headlong haste of the driver the coach is upset, and poor Carteret is bawling from the inside, “Let me get out;" while William Pitt I., trundling pamphlets in a wheelbarrow, exclaims, "Zounds, they are over;" and Sandes roars out, "I thought what would come of putting him on the box." Hogarth about the same time introduced the Treasury candidate as “Punch, candidate for Guzzledown," scattering guineas, which he scoops with a ladle out of a full wheelbarrow among the mob. Gilray has immortalised an apparently less, but in reality more, dangerous attack upon the Treasury than that recorded by the anonymous caricaturist of Walpole and the Duke of Argyle. Dundas and Pitt have just got themselves snugly ensconced in the Treasury, and closed the grated door. The forces who have carried the place for them by storm are approaching for their pay. There is the courtier-like editor of the World,' there are bludgeon-men, newsmen with their tin trumpets, errand-boys, and grim grenadiers and highland soldiers in their kilts, all thronging forward with bills to be discharged. The place, it is clear, has not yet been made tenable, though it is necessary that a belief in its being impregnable should prevail; for the new premier, with finger on his lips, is whispering through a crevice to the gentlemen that it is desired they will have the goodness to come to "the back door." It would occupy too much space to recount all the devices by which metaphor and allegory have attempted to represent the Treasury and its influence. Now it is a well from which fatigue-parties of soldiers with suction-hose are pumping up guineas-now it is a deposit bank from which a premier abstracts money to enable a queen to make up a private purse (sack, rather) in order that she may tolerate him in office. There is something so substantial about the Treasury that squeezing it in to otherwise empty words and pointless pictures they at once acquire a meaning. It is a very god-send to the unhappy political limners and scribblers who are scarce of ideas. It is, like Falstaff, the cause of wit in the witless. Everybody may be conceived to have a feeling of some kind towards the Treasury: he may be a statesman who wishes to have it well replenished; he may be a tax-payer who thinks too much of his substance is drained into that reservoir; or he may be a pensioner, or would-be pensioner, anxious to have it tapped. The mere name of "Treasury" is sure to excite in some way or other; and the wits and witlings know this so well that they have rung the changes on it till it has become as monotonous and commonplace as any triplebob major. From the wit of Charles II.'s time, who advertised a Treasury to let, to Tom Brown the younger's hue and cry after the sinking-fund which had been lost, or stolen, or had "fallen through a chink in the Treasury floor," every rhymester and copper-plate scratcher among them has had "a gird at it." 'Tis time the venerable institution or building were left to repose, for whatever of wit there may originally have been in the allusion, and there never was very much, has been rubbed off like the thin coat of plating from a bad shilling. Sarcasm has a short life, love is undying. The affection of the devotees of the Treasury-of a Treasury-of any Treasury, will long outlive all jokes at it. "Le vrai Amphytrion est l'Amphytrion où l'on dine." No, it is the Amphitryon who pays for the dinner. The military chest is the cement of an army, the Treasury is the cement of a government. Towards it, the eyes of all connected, however remotely, with the holders of power, are devoutly and incessantly turned. The maimed soldier or sailor; the widow and orphans of the warrior or civilian expended out in his country's cause; the highest officers of state; the metropolitan policeman; and many whose claims upon the dividends of this great bank are much more equivocal, all think of it, and dream of it with affection. Esto perpetua is their prayer; they could kiss the very lime that roughcasts the building. It is a serious subject for them: the Society for the Suppression of Vice, they think, ought to have restricted its efforts to putting down all newspaper squibs and caricatures against the Treasury. That is too sacred a subject for a joke. They speak of the Queen and constitution, but they think of the Treasury— "Their dream of life From morn till night Dr. Johnson never passed a church without taking off his hat, and Cavaliero Roger Wildrake, though he rarely crossed the threshold of one, duly observed the same ceremony. There are people who take off the hats of their hearts whenever they pass the Treasury, and, as in the other case, this act of homage is not confined to those who have the entrée. Perhaps those who have little chance of being admitted within the sanctuary are most fervent in their devotion, as poor Dick Whittington, before he left his native village and discovered that mud not gold covered the streets of London, entertained a more intense veneration for it than the veriest Cockney born within sound of Bow bells. The very monomaniacs (who threaten, if they go on to increase as they have done of late, to outnumber some of the less numerous sects of longer standing-as, for example, their moral antipodes, the Quakers) feel in their disjointed intellects the amiable awfulness of the Treasury. How else can we account for McNaughten's taking up his position on its steps? THE weather often exhibits strange freaks, giving us, for instance, as till very lately, winter when summer was to be expected according to the almanacks, and taking unhandsome advantage of the good-nature of those who duly chronicle in the newspapers the quantity of rain that has fallen within the past week, by depriving them of their usual vacation; its habits of preventing youthful holidays, and lowering the temperature of fervid political meetings, must also be acknowledged; but, after all, like other maligned powers, it is not so bad as it is described; it evidently has its sympathies and forethoughts;-see what a day it has given us for this the second of the three annual horticultural exhibitions at Chiswick-a day consummately clear and beautiful and temperate, and with just so much brilliancy as to make quivering leaves sparkle, transform every little pond by the roadside into a sheet of silver, bring forth flower-girls and flowerbaskets as a kind of natural spontaneous production,-make omnibus and stage drivers not merely amiable but poetical. Who is it says the fashionable and the aristocratic cannot condescend to be punctual, or to be seen doing anything in haste, or to be ever caught interested? he or they had certainly never been at a Chiswick flower-show. Here is this long seat, beneath the awning that covers the entrance lane leading to the gates, filled with ladies and gentlemen half an VOL. V. X |