It is only in a huge overgrown city that such cases could possibly occur. SIR THOMAS MORE. The extent of a metropolis ought to produce no such consequences. Whatever be the size of a bee-hive or an ant-hill, the same perfect order is observed in it. MONTESINOS. That is because bees and ants act under the guidance of unerring instinct. SIR THOMAS MORE. As if instinct were a superior faculty to reason! But the statesman, as well as the sluggard, may be told to "go to the ant and the bee, consider their ways and be wise!" It is for reason to observe and profit by the examples which instinct affords it. MONTESINOS. A country modelled upon Apiarian laws. would be a strange Utopia! the bowstring would be used there as unmercifully as it is in the Seraglio,..to say nothing of the summary mode of bringing down the population to the means of subsistence. But this is straying from the subject. The consequences of defective order are indeed frightful, whether we regard the physical or the moral evils which are produced. SIR THOMAS MORE. And not less frightful when the political evils are contemplated! To the dangers of an oppressive and iniquitous order, such for example as exists where negro slavery is established, you are fully awake in England: but to those of defective order among yourselves, though they are precisely of the same nature, you are blind. And yet you have spirits among you who are labouring day and night to stir up a bellum servile, an insurrection like that of Wat Tyler, of the Jacquerie, and of the peasants in Germany. There is no provocation for this, as there was in all those dreadful convulsions of society: but there are misery and ignorance and desperate wickedness to work upon, which the want of order has produced. Think for a moment what London,..nay, what the whole kingdom would be, were your Catilines to succeed in exciting as general an insurrection as that which was raised by one madman in your own childhood! Imagine the infatuated and infuriated wretches, whom not Spitalfields, St. Giles's, and Pimlico alone, but all the lanes and alleys and cellars of the metropolis would pour out;.. a frightful population, whose multitudes, when gathered together, might almost exceed belief! The streets of London would appear to teem with them, like the land of Egypt with its plague of frogs: and the lava floods from a volcano would be less destructive than the hordes whom your great cities and manufacturing districts would vomit forth! MONTESINOS. Such an insane rebellion would speedily be crushed. SIR THOMAS MORE. Perhaps so. But three days were enough for the fire of London. And be assured this would not pass away without leaving in your records a memorial as durable and more dreadful! MONTESINOS. Is such an event to be apprehended? SIR THOMAS MORE. Its possibility at least ought always to be borne in mind. The French Revolution appeared much less possible when the Assembly of Notables was convoked; and the people of France were much less prepared for the career of horrors into which they were presently hurried. 116 COLLOQUY VI. WALLA CRAG.-OWEN OF LANARK. Ir is no wonder that foreigners, who form their notions of England from what they see in its metropolis, should give such dismal descriptions of an English November; a month when, according to the received opinion of continental writers, suicide comes as regularly in season with us as geese at Michaelmas, and green pease in June. Nothing indeed can be more cheerless and comfortless than a common November day in that huge overgrown city; the streets covered with that sort of thick greasy dirt, on which you are in danger of slipping at every step, and the sky concealed from sight by a dense, damp, oppressive, dusky atmosphere, composed of Essex fog and London smoke. But in the country November presents a very different aspect: there its soft, calm weather has a charm of its own; a stillness and serenity unlike any other season, and scarcely less delightful than the most genial days of Spring. The pleasure which it imparts is rather different in kind than inferior in degree: it accords as finely with the feelings of declining life as the bursting foliage and opening flowers of May with the elastic spirits of youth and hope. But a fine day affects children alike at all seasons as it does the barometer. They live in the present, seldom saddened with any retrospective thoughts, and troubled with no foresight. Three or four days of dull sunless weather had been succeeded by a delicious morning. My young ones were clamorous for a morning's excursion. The glass had risen to a little above change, but their spirits had mounted to the point of settled fair. All things, indeed, animate and inanimate, seemed to partake of the exhilarating influence. The blackbirds, who lose so little of their shyness even where they are most secure, made their appearance on the green, where the worms had thrown up little circles of mould during the night. The smaller birds were twittering, hopping from spray to spray, and pluming themselves; and as the temperature had given them a vernal sense of joy, there was something of a vernal cheerfulness in their song. The very flies |