ia30.] Affairs in General 455 



The " Milton discovery," magnified as it was through both ends of the 

 trump of fame, has turned out an absurdity, and has long since sunk 

 into the waste paper of which it was made. The Elizabethan letters, 

 and the two or three other trifles that from year to year were squibbed 

 before the public eye, to remind it that there was so meritorious an 

 establishment as the State- Paper Office in existence, have all gone out, 

 and now we are to have a New Building, to remind us that the officers 

 of this inimitable national establishment ought to have suites of new 

 apartments therein. Verily, this is a building age. Let the people cry 

 out against the intolerable burthens that are crushing the dwellers in 

 the drawing-room into the parlour, as old Home Tooke once said, and 

 the dwellers of the parlour into the kitchen ; they are answered by a 

 supercilious declaration from head-quarters, that the last imaginable 

 retrenchment has been made. But let the most gewgaw fancy be set in 

 a ferment to discover some new means of extravagance, it has only to 

 be a building fancy, to find itself welcomed with the fraternal embrace of 

 the high and mighty. Five hundred thousand pounds have been already 

 flung away in turning old Buckingham house, a decent and comfortable 

 old brick house, into new Buckingham palace, a ridiculous, uncomforta- 

 ble, and unkingly plaster of Paris house ; and before its royal tenant 

 will ever lay his head upon his pillow in this plaster of Paris house, it 

 will cost five hundred thousand pounds more. And John Bull will have 

 the double delight of paying, and being laughed at by every stranger 

 between Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope. 



But the architect is the reconciling charm. If we should ever be 

 tempted to be king an office too troublesome for the most outrageous 

 extent of our patriotism the true temptation to us would come in the 

 shape of the unlimited power to march from Windsor at the head of a 

 legion of Irish bricklayers, and knock down, as a propitiation to the 

 offended Pallas Minerva of our isle, every furlong of lath and plaster, 

 Roman cement and mortar marble ! that has ever assailed the public eye 

 under the direction of modern art. If ever a generation of blockhead archi- 

 tects were gifted with supremacy over the public purse, that supremacy is 

 now in the hands of that generation. There may be able architects in 

 embryo ; there may be Wrens and Inigo Joneses hidden in the holes 

 and corners where nature keeps her curiosities; but never was any period 

 of any country more brutified by monstrosities in brick than the reign of 

 his majesty. 



If we were called on to point out the most memorable instances of 

 human absurdity, we should be strongly inclined to select them from the 

 works of the law-makers. 



" By the French law, a father can dispose of but half his property by 

 will, if he leaves but one child ; of one-third, if he leaves two children ; 

 and of one-fourth, if he leaves three or more children behind him." 



The consequences of this precious law are, that a son may be as pro- 

 fligate as he will without regard to his father's displeasure, as he must 

 receive the same portion, be he good or bad that a father will not expend 

 any thing, if he can help it, on the advancement of his son in profes- 

 sional life or otherwise, inasmuch as no allowance will be made for that 

 expenditure in the general distribution of the property that the infirm 

 son, who cannot provide for himself, is put on the same footing with the 

 son who can and that the father is deprived of one of the great motives 



