1832.] [ 275 ] 



THE PETTICOAT PARLIAMENT. 



WE are resolved to have our political dreams as well as our neigh- 

 bours in these visionary times. Every body has his favourite specula- 

 tion on the future fortunes of the constitution ; some there be who see 

 in their mind's eye Cobbett at the helm of affairs, and the chapel of St. 

 Stephen's filled with a rabble of democratic tailors and republican 

 haberdashers : these are persons who take the most melancholic view of 

 the consequences of reform. There be others again of more sanguine 

 fancies, who figure to themselves Justice carrying the Seals, Economy 

 Chancellor of the Exchequer, Wisdom at the head of the Treasury, and 

 Religion in the see of Canterbury : these are the poets of politics ; and 

 sometimes their fren-zy is so fine, that they imagine parliaments, consist- 

 ing exclusively of honest men chimeras that will be realized, what time 

 the house of Brunswick shall be supplanted by the old line of Oberon, 

 and the gryphons and winged horses of the Herald's College exhibited 

 alive in the Zoological Gardens. Others but it is vain to think of 

 enumerating all the dreams and fantasies that flit through the public 

 mind 



" As thick as idle motes in sunny ray ;" 



besides our fair readers are impatient; the title tells them that their 

 bright forms have been hovering before our fancy, and they burn to 

 know by what freak of imagination we came to associate such apparently 

 remote ideas as parliaments and petticoats. 



As we dropped asleep the other evening, while in the act of perusing 

 a speech of the Right Hon. Henry Goulburn upon finance, we dropped 

 at the same time into the strangers' gallery of the House of Commons, 

 where, instead of the bearded and booted senators of the present regime, 

 we saw (to our no small surprise, for we knew the old standing order 

 against the admission of females) a remarkably full house, composed 

 entirely of ladies. They seemed to be of all ages, from three-score and 

 ten to one and twenty ; and a blind man might have fancied himself in 

 the French Chamber of Deputies or the Caledonian Chapel, for all the 

 members were speaking together, and the most loquacious of all seemed 

 to be the speaker herself. This struck us as so bold an innovation, that 

 we expressed our astonishment to a smart young girl behind us (who 

 was reporting for a morning paper called the Moon), and were informed 

 that it had been found impossible to prevail upon any lady to accept the 

 office, even with an increased salary, upon the ancient " lucus-a-non- 

 lucendo" condition of seldom or never opening her lips. It was a long 

 time before any tolerable order was restored, so that there was leisure 

 to get some additional information from the reporter to the Moon res- 

 pecting the great revolution which had evidently taken place. After 

 expressing herself somewhat surprised at our ignorance, she told us that 

 very soon after the accession of the Princess Vittoria, an article appeared 

 in " La Belle Assemblee," in which the incongruity of a monarch in 

 petticoats, and a legislator in breeches, was so ably exposed, that public 

 meetings of the women of England began to be held every-where upon 

 the subject. At first they contented themselves with petitioning parlia- 

 ment, and only claimed an equal right with the other sex to seats in 

 both houses ; but finding their petitions generally neglected, and often 

 treated with the very reverse of gallantry, they began to form Political 

 Unions ; and, animated by the success of the O'Connells and Attwoods, 



