its weak and doubtful side. Use and monotony might secretly be wearing away the edge of the organs on and through which the corrosion of the inner heart proceeded. And when that point was reached — a callousness which neutralized the further powers of the tormentor-it then became the true policy of such a fiend (as being his one sole unexhausted resource) to inflict death. On the whole, therefore, putting together the facts of the case, it seems to have been resolved that he should die; but previously that he should drink off a final cup of anguish, the bitterest that had yet been offered. The lady herself, again, had she also suffered in sympathy with her martyred husband? That must have been known to a certainty in the outset of the case by him that knew too profoundly on what terms of love they had lived. Possibly to resist indefinitely might have menaced herself with ruin, whilst offering no benefit to her husband. There is besides this dreadful fact, placed ten thousand times on record, that the very goodness of the human heart in such a case ministers fuel to the moral degradation of a female combatant. Any woman, and exactly in proportion to the moral sensibility of her nature, finds it painful to live in the same house with a man not odiously repulsive in manners or in person on terms of eternal hostility. What it was circumstantially that passed, long since has been overtaken and swallowed up by the vast oblivions of time. This only survives- namely, that what Lamia had said gave signal offence in the highest quarter, was not forgotten, and that his death followed eventually. But what was it that he did

say ? That is precisely the question, and the whole question which we have to answer. At present we know, and we do not know, what it was that he said. We find bequeathed to us by history the munificent legacy of two words involving eight letters which in their present form, with submission to certain grandees of classic literature, more particularly to the scoundrel Joe Scaliger (son of the old original ruffian, J. C. Scaliger), mean exactly nothing. These two words must be regarded as the raw material upon which we have to work; and out of these we are required to turn out a rational, but also, be it observed, a memorably caustic saying for Aelius Lamia, under the following five conditions: First, it must allude to his wife, as one that is lost to him irrecoverably; secondly, it must glance at a gloomy tyrant who bars him from rejoining her; thirdly, it must reply to the compliment which had been paid to the sweetness of his own voice; fourthly, it should in strictness contain some allusion calculated not only to irritate, but even to alarm or threaten his jealous and vigilant enemy, else how was it suspi cious? fifthly, doing all these things, it ought also to absorb, as its own main elements, the eight letters contained in the present senseless words— "Heu taceo."

Here is a monstrous quantity of work to throw upon any two words in any possible language. Even Shakspeare's clown,* when challenged to furnish a catholic answer applicable to all conceivable

*See All's Well that Ends Well, Act ii., Scene 2.

occasions, cannot do it in less than nine letters, namely, O lord, sir! I, for my part, satisfied that the existing form of Heu taceo was mere indictable and punishable nonsense, but yet that this nonsense must enter as chief element into the stinging sense of Lamia, gazed for I cannot tell how many weeks (weeks, indeed! say years) at these impregnable letters, viewing them sometimes as a fortress that I was called upon to escalade, sometimes as an anagram that I was called upon to reörganize into the life which it had lost through some dislocation of arrangement. One day I looked at it through a microscope; next day I looked at it from a distance through a telescope. Then I reconnoitred it downwards from the top round of a ladder; then upwards, in partnership with Truth, from the bottom of a well. Finally, the result in which I landed, and which fulfilled all the conditions laid down, was this: Let me premise, however, what at any rate the existing darkness attests, that some disturbance of the text must in some way have arisen, whether from the gnawing of a rat, or the spilling of some obliterating fluid at this point of some unique MS. It is sufficient for us that the vital word has survived. I suppose, therefore, that Lamia had replied to the friend who praised the sweetness of his voice, "Sweet, is it? Ah, would to Heaven it might prove so sweet as to be even Orpheutic!" Ominous in this case would be the word Orpheutic to the ears of Domitian; for every schoolboy knows that this means a wife-revoking voice. Let me remark that there is such a legitimate word as Orpheutaceam;

and in that case the Latin repartee of Lamia would stand thus: Suavem diristi? Quam vellem et Orpheu taceam. But, perhaps, reader, you fail to recognize in this form our old friend Heu taceo. But here he is to a certainty, in spite of the rat; and in a different form of letters the compositor will show him up to you, as vellem et Orp [HEU TACEAM]. Here, then, shines out at once, (1) Eurydice the lovely wife; (2) detained by the gloomy tyrant Pluto; (3) who, however, is forced into surrendering her to her husband, whose voice (the sweetest ever known) drew stocks and stones to follow him, and finally his wife; (4) the word Orpheutic involves, therefore, an alarming threat, showing that the hope of recovering the lady still survived; (5) we now find involved, in the restoration all the eight, or perhaps nine, letters of the erroneous (and for so long a time unintelligible) form.

CHINA.

[1857.]

PRELIMINARY NOTE.

WHAT is the justifying purpose of this pamphlet 1 at this moment? Its purpose is to diffuse amongst those of the middle classes, whose daily occupations leave them small leisure for direct personal inquiries, some sufficient materials for appreciating the justice of our British pretensions and attitude in our coming war with China. It is a question frequently raised amongst public journalists, whether we British are entitled to that exalted distinction which sometimes we claim for ourselves, and which sometimes is claimed on our behalf, by neutral observers, in the national practice of morality. There is no call in this place for so large a discussion; but, most undoubtedly, in one feature of so grand a distinction, in one reasonable presumption for inferring a profounder national conscientiousness, as diffused among the British people, stands upon record, in the pages of history, this memorable fact, that always at the opening (and at intervals throughout the progress) of any war, there has been much and angry discussion amongst us British as to the equity of its origin, and the moral reasonableness of its objects. Whereas, on the Continent, no man ever heard of a question being raised, or a faction being embattled, upon any demur (great or small) as to the moral grounds of a war. To be able to face the trials of a war-that was its justification; and to win victories -that was its ratification for the conscience.

The dispute at Shanghai, in 1848, equally as regards the origin

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