444 Notet of the Month on APRIL, 



closing the reading-room on Saturdays. He was perfectly right ; there 

 are many persons who from their situation in public offices, and similar 

 establishments, cannot go to the reading-room, except on Saturdays. 

 Besides, why should one day in every week be lost to the student, or fifty 

 week-days out of the three hundred in the year ? Yet this is not all. 

 The reading-room has a long vacation, as if it were a court for attorneys 

 and clients, with three or four little vacations, the whole amounting to 

 nearly three months in the twelve. Why should this be ? Nothing can 

 be less laborious than the duty of attendance. It merely requires half- 

 a-dozen porters to take down the books and hand them to the readers, 

 and a librarian to sit in a snug carpeted room, and by a good fire, 

 reading, scribbling, or asleep, as it may happen to please him. The 

 library is for national use, and it is extremely useful, and even essential 

 to inquiries into almost every subject of literature. Yet for nearly three 

 months every year, it is as much lost to the public as if it never existed. 

 The officers are not to blame : they of course are glad to have as many 

 holidays as they can. There is no possible reason why the reading-room 

 should not be open every day in the year, except Sundays, Good Friday, 

 Christmas Day, and perhaps one or two other solemn days of the 

 church. Nor is there any reason for a vacation at all. The librarians 

 might easily succeed each other, and keep the library open without any 

 kind of unsuitable restraint on their own comforts or leisure. But 

 whatever may be their inconvenience they are paid amply for their duty, 

 and the public must not be inconvenienced, which it now is, in a very 

 serious degree. 



The newspapers will not let Horace Twiss die in peace. His unlucky 

 speech on " the lower orders and the small attorneys/' has roused a nest 

 of hornets about this learned gentleman's proceedings, which might 

 irritate a more pacific philosopher. They have attacked him for going 

 to the Chancellor's levee, and made the insidious excuse of his doing it 

 under suspicion of friendship : 



"The presence of the Duke of Wellington and Mr. Horace Twiss at the 

 Lord Chancellor's levee, last Saturday evening, has excited much observation 

 during the week in the circle of politicians. The honourable member for 

 Newport, although he has manifested much bitterness against the Chancellor 

 for the share he is supposed to have in an important measure, now pending, is 

 still his lordship's quondam friend." 



Others have charged him with looking to some of the good things 

 which are to replace the Bankrupt Commissions, it being an understood 

 affair, that no change of this kind is ever to occur, without leaving a 

 succedaneum, to the full as costly, and a little more comfortable for the 

 new claimants. One of the papers presumes that he and the duke have 

 determined to make common cause with the whigs, and discover that 

 they have been in the wrong in their politics, and particularly in their loss 

 of place. 



Of these circumstances the aggrieved party has taken notice in a regu- 

 lar speech : 



" On Mr. Hodges presenting some reform petitions, Mr. Horace Twiss rose 

 to contradict the reports that had gone abroad, that he had spoken disparagingly 

 of the middle classes, to which he considered himself to belong. He said, ' of 

 the middle classes I never spoke at all the phrase ' middle classes' never 

 passed my lips. It was to the predominance of a body far below the middle class 



