The important night at length arrived, and Phoebe was quite delighted at seeing the one fly kept at the Royalty, rattling up and down the one street of Tumberville, and setting down party after party of its gailydressed visiters, and as "the first floor's" carriage, had set her, the giver of the ball, down at the door of the Assembly-rooms, she put on her bonnet and shawl, and walked out to meet the baker, and enjoy the music of the band, whose melodies were wafted into the street through the open windows of the crowded ball-room.

Just as she and her sweetheart, the baker, had taken their station, a smart britchka drew up, and deposited a large party at the vestibule of the rooms. Phoebe saw Kitty Dangerous and the handsome baronet among them, and crying out, "Oh! my-won't there be a row!" rushed across the street, dragging the amazed baker with her.

Miss Longiver had refused to open the ball. "She never danced, for she abominated strong exercise," but sat, with Wilkinson a little en derrière, at the end of the room. upper The M. C. clapped his hands, and away went some fifty couples in the mazes of the first set of quadrilles. In the midst of the evolutions, a sharp, sudden screech was heard, which drowned the noise of the Tumberville band. Every body stood stock still. The band ceased playing. Amidst the dead silence, Miss Longiver was heard to say, or rather shriek, “ Captain Cringer, have you dared to invite those-those-whom, did I not abominate strong language, I should call most inadmissible people?"

Of course all eyes were directed to the inadmissibles. A handsome young man, with the well-known Kitty Dangerous leaning on his arm, and followed by Frederick Somers, his father and mother, and Mrs. Dangerous, walked up to the top of the room, and formed a group before the astonished eyes of every one.

"Allow me, my dear aunt," said Sir Edward, to present you to my first cousin, and your niece, Miss Catherine Dangerous, and to her mamma, in whom you will recognise a sister. Had you not estranged yourself from your family by your talents for making yourself disagreeable, you would have known that of which you are now informed, for the first time, the second marriage of your younger sister in India, to this deserving young lady's father. This, madam, is Mr. Frederick Somers, her affianced husband, and my most intimate friend who deputed me to convey to her the news of his having distinguished himself at collegeand these are his excellent parents."

"Wilkinson, I shall faint-take me out."

"Before you go, aunt," said the baronet, "allow me to present to you-"

"I can't-I won't," screamed Miss Longiver.

"A small packet of letters. The company may have printed copies of them at the door; and now I take my leave, merely adding that your theory of abominating strong language had better be reduced to practice as speedily as possible.'

room.

The inadmissibles made profound bows and curtsies, and left the Miss Longiver pleading indisposition, retired from the room and the little watering-place that very night, taking with her the unwilling Wilkinson, who had not had time to enjoy even a solitary sandwich.

In a few short months, no such person was to be found in Tumberville or "the Old Place," as KITTY DANGEROUS.

ON CONSIDERING ONESELF HORSEWHIPPED!

BY LAMAN BLANCHARD, ESQ.

In the annals of private quarrel, or of quarrel between man and man -which is at least as frequent and distinguishing a feature of the personal history of the human race as war is of the history of all nations in all ages-the phrase "consider yourself horsewhipped" figures as a golden maxim; and it is peculiar to the plain injunction which it contains, that it appears to have been, in every instance, implicitly respected and obeyed. Multitudinous as are the examples of its application, and constantly as they are accumulating, there is not on record a single case of non-submissiveness. The injunction carries obedience with it; the smack of the whip is in the words the instant they become audible; and the person whose ear is tingled by them, instinctively feels horsewhipped.

Let this be a settled point at once, or all the superstructure we may raise will fall to the ground. There is no rational doubt that the words have the whip in them. It is of no use to quote Shakspeare

Oh! who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking of the frosty Caucasus !

Shakspeare puts fine truths into some particular mouth which they well become, and we falsify them by the endeavour to give them a universal application; thus turning his sweet philosophy to sheer folly. Each character of his speaks for itself, and not intentionally for all the world, though this may often happen incidentally. Besides, if unable to protect ourselves from the effects of fire by thinking of frost, that is no proof that we may not feel heat by thinking of fire. And again, if it were such a proof, it would still be no evidence that flesh may not writhe and quiver under the torture, although the whip never touched it, but was only shaken, with a kind of savage playfulness and sportive ferocity, over it with the agonizing malignity that spares.

It is conceded then that the force of imagination may be sufficiently sharp and strong to abolish all distinctions between the threat of punishment and the actual infliction of it. We know that the creature formed of flesh and blood, and neither cast in bronze, nor carved in alabaster, does, when desired to consider himself horsewhipped, consider himself horsewhipped. We know, that it is only necessary for a sensitive mortal compound, strung as he must be with nerves and fibres, to see the lash flourishing about him, in order to feel it smartly laid on; to feel it even across his heart.

But this is not all: for this acute and positive impression is shared by every body. Just as he considers, all mankind considers. One man is of opinion that he has horsewhipped somebody; another man fully believes that he has been horsewhipped; and the whole world is prepared to make depositions of the fact, though nothing of the kind has in reality taken place.

Here then there is an extraordinary agreement, a unanimity quite wonderful, to acknowledge the power of imagination. The hero of the Oct.-VOL. LXXII. NO. CCLXXXVI.

T

lash, having gone through the mock ceremony, stands in the situation of one who has vigorously applied it. The defenceless wight who has never been struck, is in the situation of one who has been disgracefully flagellated; and the public, who have seen nothing, are in the situation of eye-witnesses of the infliction. The whipped man, more especially, is perfectly convinced that he could show you the marks of the lash-his imaginary scars and bruises, rainbow-coloured by a potent fancy; but nobody on earth requires such proofs, or entertains the slightest doubt of the event.

It follows therefore from this; that we are now in a position to inquire whether many other ceremonies equally unsuppressable, and equally unpleasant as flogging, may not in like manner be both recognised and evaded, by the same easy, intelligible, and popular exercise of the imagination. Much that is necessary to be done among the disagreeables of daily life, might thus be quietly supposed to have taken place, to the relief of the parties in the assumed proceeding, and to nobody's injury, so long as nobody discredits the genuineness of the transaction. A convenient assumption is quite as good as a fact; but the assumption must be

unanimous.

Let it once be admitted that a flagellation ought to take place, and nothing can be more delicate, humane, or enlightened, than the policy described in the injunction, "Consider yourself horsewhipped;" the man with a whole skin, believing himself, without the slightest mental reservation, to have been scarified on the spot. It is only necessary to elicit the same enthusiastic and spontaneous concurrence of sentiment in relation to fifty other duties, ceremonies, and circumstances, of constant occurrence in society, that prevails upon this point-to divest our fellowcreatures of half their worst toils, to rid them of half their galling grievances, and thus to lengthen by one half their term of honourable enjoyment in life.

How superior in a thousand instances would be the operation of this imaginative influence, and this unshakeable moral belief, to the clumsy and eccentric laws fashioned by the wisdom of Parliaments. Take a solitary example. How laborious, intricate, and, after all, abortive, is the whole machinery of insolvency laws, compared with the practice which must be put in force were the system adverted to established! What would then be required? Simply what common sense requires:-that the debtor should call upon his creditor, shake a purse over his head or an empty pocket in his face, exclaiming at the same time in the presence of witnesses, "Consider yourself paid!"-the creditor instinctively admitting that he had received the last farthing, and the spectators avouching that they all saw the money put down.

What is supposable of payments by lash, may be as readily understood of payments in cash. In fact, it is but putting the imaginative faculty a little further to the stretch than we do now, extending that implicit belief with which we have already taught ourselves to look upon six inches of flimsy, perishable paper, and to consider we have got indestructible gold.

But this is anticipating. We should rather begin by extending the convenient assumption from the whip to the pistol; and clearly, if it can be admissible with any practical effect, in one case, it is admissible in the other. Thus, although we cannot abolish the evil of duelling, we can

abolish all the most painful, tragic, and unchristian part of the practice at a blow. Imagination might snap its bloodless fingers, instead of hairtriggers, in the face of matter-of-fact. Let it be clearly understood that the unavoidable meeting takes place according to regulations dictated by the nicest honour on both sides; let the parties confront each other with the composure natural to gentlemen and men of courage; and all formalities being adjusted, let one consider that he has a shattered knee-pan, while the other considers that a bullet has lodged in his left clavicle. This is as easy as letter-writing, or levelling horse-pistols after they have actually been loaded.

Those who object that none of us would consider the duellists in such a case to be maimed and wounded, must be prepared to answer how it is, that we all so miraculously agree in the case of the horsewhip that has never been within the thong's length of the shoulders known and acknowledged to be scourged.

So facile is the power of supposition, that it is within every man's ability to suppose a shot through the brain, or to institute, if necessary, an imaginary widow and a bereaved family and thus, the ferocity, the anguish, the demoralizing influences of duelling may be, by a simultaneous action, sudden as magic, effectually suppressed.

If then we can so readily imagine, first, a flaying with the whip, though nobody has been struck; and next, the death of a duellist by pistol-shot, though no pistol has been discharged; what is to prevent us from supposing, and from putting the same degree of trust and confidence in the supposition, that a great battle has been fought between two powerful nations, and that five thousand on either side lie dead on the field! Granting the expediency of hostilities between two countries of the first class-say France and England-because, in an island as insignificant as it is remote, a squabble occurs, which, if it happened in either of the two countries, would have been adjusted by a police-magistrate in a week yet we need not therefore grant the expediency of the actual expenditure of powder and shot, while the great doctrine of imaginary fighting continues to be acted upon in any one case with success. Assume a battle, but have it not. Why, indeed, should war, the most expensive, gigantic, and enduring of all evils, be almost the only one known to states, or adopted as part of their practice, in which there is no particle of fiction; in which that useful and ubiquitous agent, assumption, is totally unemployed!

When a new law is to be passed, or an old one repealed, twenty convenient things are supposed, by the highest, most moral, and most religious heads in the land, that of the keeper of the royal conscience leading them. When a question of diplomacy is to be settled, the fictions always out-number the facts; and each party officially expects the other to imagine a variety of matters which he would scorn to suppose himself; each diplomatist supposing besides, that his adversary little supposes what his real intentions are. If a treaty is to be negotiated, the supposes are as multifarious as the conditions, and imagination is as much taxed as matter-of-fact; the first is relied upon when the advantages are to be proved, while the second regulates the concessions.

On all occasions of state-policy, whether in affairs civil or ecclesiastical -as in every species of diplomatic intercourse between country and country (provided they are highly civilized, and the ministers statesmen

of the first order), the most enormous fictions are those which it is etiquette to use first, and the more flagitious the falsehood the more gracefully and undauntedly is it advanced. The rule is, on either side, to make the desirable appear the true, and when neither of the powers is found practising trickery, it is certain that the arts of deception on both sides are exhausted.

Now while in law there is no assumption too gross and extravagant for adoption-while in statesmanship and diplomacy fictions the most monstrous are held in flattering regard, by people who are miracles of honesty-why is it that all these lawyers, statesmen, and courtiers should combine to exclude the army and navy from such benefits! Why not introduce the grand machinery of pure fiction into the military system, set up the whole art of lying at the War-office, and establish the sham-fight principle at the Horse Guards! As the whole system, save the warsystem with real cannon and fixed bayonets, is clearly between governments and people, as between nation and nation, a system of make-believe, why not, in the name of reason (if the word be still English), extend it to army and navy! How economical would be the fiction here! A single lie-the mere effort, that is to say, of imagining that a brilliant campaign had taken place-would lower taxation. And then what a saving of life, what a treasuring up of brave young blood, what an escape from the stifling, the world-darkening smoke of carnage, would result from it!

Truly, when, under the best laws, we find so many devices of legislation working to crush us, and we are told that they are intended to save us--when we have experience of so many restrictive influences which cripple and bind us down, while we are assured that the true effect of them is to add to our happiness and liberty-and when we are expected to believe this, as many of us do-surely there can be no difficulty at any time in imagining the most splendid and extensive military operations, greatly to the profit and the glory of the nation. The people of this country, though not eminently of an imaginative character-could suppose a Battle of Waterloo any day, if they could but thereby save the war expenses.

Englishmen, we have just remarked, are not distinguished for their imaginative eminence among nations; and yet let it be acknowledged, that there is a sufficient development of that lively, far-looking, and fondly-believing feeling which is nearly allied to it, pervading the country in these days, to justify the highest hopes that the doctrine we are advocating will spread widely and sink deeply into the national mind. The public can already "consider" on many points with considerable aptitude for conversion. They evince the most promising credulity, and afford a prospect that they will ultimately, by sharp practice, become perfectly able to believe whatever is convenient.

The uses of a system likely to bring such blessings upon society can require no argument or eulogy. All, for example, will admit it to be desirable that when men are miserable they should be in a condition to consider themselves comfortable. Now to this happy point millions have already attained. At this moment there are thousands and tens of thousands in many gay places of the land, who are giving striking proofs of their progress towards the highest imagination; who, having been for hours at a polka-party, consider that they have danced the polka-who,