terests and in his heart had a certain mournful pity for the despair in the old woman's terrible face.

us.

"But I expect you to choose," she said, wildly; "things have come to that. It must be him or me-him or me; there's no midway between I am your old mother, your poor old mother, that would pluck my heart out of my breast to give it you. I've survived them all, and done without them all, and lived for your sake. And he is a young man that was taken with your pretty face-say it was your pretty face say the best that can be said. If you were like death-if you lost all your beauty and your pretty ways-if you were ugly and ailing and miserable, it would be all the same to me; I would love you all the more-all the more; and he -he would never look at you again. That's nature. I require you to choose. It must be him or me!"

As she stood listening, a change came over Pamela's face. Her first appeal to her mother had been full of emotion, but of a gentle, hopeful, almost superficial kind. She had taken tears to her aid and pleading looks, and believed in their success now as always. But as Mrs Preston spoke, Pamela's little innocent soul was shaken as by an earthquake. She woke up and opened her eyes, and found that she was in a world new to her --a world no longer of prayers and tears, and sweet_yielding, and tender affection. It was not tender affection she had to do with now; it was fierce love, desperate and ruthless, ready to tear her asunder. Her tears dried up, her pretty cheeks grew pale as death, she looked from one to the other with a wild look of wonder, asking if it was true. When her mother's voice ceased, it seemed to Pamela that the world stood still for the moment, and everything in heaven and earth held its breath.

She

looked at Jack; he stood motionless, with his face clouded over, and made no answer to her pitiful appeal. She looked at Mrs Preston, and saw her mother's eager face hollow and excited, her eyes blazing, her cheeks burning with a strange hectic heat. For one moment she stood irresolute. Then she made one tottering step to her mother's side, and turned round and looked at her lover. Once more she clasped her hands, though she had no longer any hope in pleading. "I must stay here," she said, with a long-drawn sobbing sigh-"I must stay here, if I should die."

They stood thus and looked at each other for one of those moments which is as long as an age. The mother would have taken her child to her arms, but Pamela would not. "Not now, not now!" she said, putting back the embrace. Jack, for his part, stood and watched with an intensity of perception he had never exercised before-all power of speech seemed to have been taken from him. The struggle had ascended into a higher region of passion than he knew of. He turned and went to the door, with the intention, so far as he had any intention, of retiring for the moment from the contest. Then he came back again. Whatever the pressure on him might be, he could not leave Pamela so.

"Look here," he said, abruptly; "I am going away. But if you think I accept this as a choice or decision, you are much mistaken. You force her to give in to you, and then you think I am to accept it! I'll do no such thing. She could not say anything else, or do anything else but all the same, she is mine. You can't touch that, do what you like. Pamela, darling, don't lose heart; it's only for a little while."

He did not stop to listen to what her mother said; he turned at once and went out, unconsciously,

in his excitement, thrusting Mrs Swayne out of his way, who was in the passage. He went off up the

avenue at a stretch without ever drawing breath. A hundred wild thoughts rose in his mind; her mother! what was her mother to him? He was ready to vow with Hamlet, that twenty thousand mothers could not have filled up his sum of love; and yet he was not blaming his Pamela. She could not have done otherwise. Why had he never been told? why had not he known that this downfall was hanging over him? Why had he been such a fool as to give in at all to the sweet temptation? Now, of course, when things had come this length, he would as soon have cut his own throat as given Pamela up. And what with love and rage, and the sudden calamity, and the gradual exasperation, he was beside himself, and did not well know what he was about. He was almost too much absorbed in his own affairs to be able to understand Sara, who came to him as he entered the house, and drew him aside into the dining-room to speak to him. Sara was pale enough to justify her pretext of headache, but otherwise she was full of energy and spirit, and met the emergency with a courageous heart.

"We must face it out as well as we can, Jack," she said, with her eyes shining out large and full from her white face. "We must keep up before all these people. They must not be able to go away and say that something went terribly wrong at Brownlows. We must keep it up to the last."

66 Pshaw! what does it matter what they think or what they say?" said Jack, sitting down with a sigh of weariness. As for Sara, who was not tired, nor had any personal complication to bow her down, she blazed up at his indifference.

"It matters everything!" she cried. "We may not be a county family any more, nor fine people,

Why shouldn't you forsake him?" said Jack, with a momentary growl; "and why should he be doubtful of me?"

But he did not wait for any answer. He took the decanter of sherry from the sideboard, and swallowed he did not know how much; and then he went off to the library to seek out his father. There was a certain stealthiness about the house-a feeling that the people belonging to it were having interviews in corners, that they were consulting each other, making solemn decisions, and that their guests were much in the way. Though Sara rushed away immediately to the room where her friends were, after waylaying her brother, her appearance did not alter the strong sense everybody had of the state of affairs. The very servants slunk out of Jack's way, and stood aside in corners to watch him going into the library. He called the footman out of his hiding-place as he passed, and swore at him for an impertinent fool. The man had been doing nothing that was impertinent, and yet he did not feel that there was injustice in the accusation. Something very serious had happened, and the consciousness of it had gone all through the house.

Mr Brownlow was sitting in the library doing nothing. That, at

least, was his visible aspect. With in himself he had been calculating and reckoning up till his wearied brain whirled with the effort. He sat leaning his arms on the table and his head in his hands. By this time his powers of thought had failed him. He sat looking on, as it were, and saw the castle of his prosperity crumbling down into dust before him. Everything he had ever aimed at seemed to drop from him. He had no longer anything to conceal; but he knew that he had stood at the bar before his children, and had been pardoned but not justified. They would stand by him, but they did not approve him; and they had seen the veil of his heart lifted, and had looked in and found darker things there than he himself had ever been conscious of. He was so absorbed in this painful maze of thought that he did not even look up when Jack came in. Of course Jack would come; he knew that. Jack was ruined; they were all ruined. All for the advantage of a miserable woman who would get no comfort out of her inheritance, whose very life was hanging on a thread. It seemed hard to him that Providence, which

had always been so kind to him, should permit it. When his son came in and drew a chair to the other side of the table he roused himself. "Is it you, Jack?" he said; "I am so tired that I fear I am stupid. I was very hard driven last night."

66

Yes," said Jack, with a little shudder; and Mr Brownlow looked at him, and their eyes met, and they knew what each had meant. It was a hard moment for the father who had been mad, and had come to his senses again, but yet did not know what horrible suspicion it was under which for a moment he had lain.

"I was hard driven," he repeated, pathetically-" very hard put to it. I had been standing out for a long time, and then in a moment I broke down-that is how it was. But I shall be able to talk it all over with you-by-and-by."

"That was what I came for, sir," said Jack. "We must know what we are to do."

And then Mr Brownlow put down his supporting hands from his head, and steadied himself in a wearied wondering way. Jack for the moment had the authority on his side.

Ir her Majesty's present Ministers contrive to keep their places, and to carry on successfully the affairs of the empire, they will certainly not be much indebted for their triumph to the support which they receive from the great bulk of the periodical press of this country. Looking to what goes on in London alone, we find that, with a few exceptions, all the morning and evening newspapers are more or less hostile to the Government. Some, like the 'Star,' the Telegraph,' and the 'Daily News,' make no secret of the motives which stir them. They reverse the well-known axiom, and go in, undisguisedly, not for measures, but for men. Others

take a line which, though perhaps more dignified, is at least as damaging, and is meant to be so. They alternate praise with censure; taking care that the latter shall always be large and unmeasured the former, in every instance, modified by gibes and sneers, or by warnings which are quite as significant. The same may be said of the weekly press, and of the magazines and reviews which, month by month and quarter by quarter, come out to amuse and instruct the great British public. Whenever politics are discussed in these, it is for the most part in a spirit of the merest partisanship, which, if it cannot find fault with the results of actual legislation, is angry because legislation has not been directed by other men. It is in the midst, therefore, of a very hurricane of sarcasm and querulous abuse, that they who are now at the helm of State steer their course; and that they should have been able to steer it thus far, not only without suffering shipwreck, but with the prospect, growing every day brighter, of reaching in due time a haven of rest, tells not more

for the judgment and skill with which they have framed their measures, than for the good sense of the people of England. The English people are sometimes gullible, often credulous, and always reluctant to part from old friends; but they will not allow themselves to be either written or spoken out of respect for those who have given them measures which they believe to be good, and given them freely. But this is not all.

They who believe that the English people speakthrough the pressin other words, that the newspapers are more the expression of an educated public opinion, than vehicles made use of with a view to create a public opinion in this countryaltogether mistake the real state of the case.

There is but one newspaper in existence which so much as affects to go upon the principle of setting its sails to meet the coming breeze, and even that, ably conducted and cleverly writ ten as we admit it to be, sometimes falls into the most egregious mistakes. To what particular newspaper we here allude, it is scarcely necessary to say it bears the elucidation of its character on the title which the proprietors have chosen for it. All the rest are either the creations of parties and factions, got up to serve a political purpose, and under engagements to serve no other; or they are mere mercantile speculations, launched and generally kept going at a heavy expense, and ending at length, if they do not come to grief for lack of funds, in making the fortunes of the bold men who started them. The Star,' the 'Daily News,' the 'Beehive,' belong in a marked manner to the former category. Mr Bright has the credit of directing the politics of the first; the second was supported by, we believe, the late Mr Cobden; the

now.

Trades-unions have called the third into being, and make it speak their sentiments. The 'Telegraph' is a fair specimen of the latter order of journals. We give its spirited proprietor credit for looking comparatively little to the political teaching of his journal, and a very great deal to the substantial results of such teaching; which, we rejoice to understand, more than realise his most sanguine anticipations. But here comes another element into our discussion. The bulk of the newspapers are Liberal, and the 'Telegraph,' not the least successful of them all, was a year ago even more decidedly Liberal than it is What does this indicate except that the opinions of the English people are deeply imbued with Liberalism?- otherwise speculators, such as we assume the spirited proprietor of the 'Telegraph' to be, would not allow their journals to teach Liberalism. It is not exactly so. The English people, with all their faults and they have their faults as well as their virtues -are, au fond, an eminently loyal people. They reverence the Crown; they love the present bearer of that symbol of majesty, and the more so that she has suffered. They are therefore prone to support the Queen's Ministers, whoever they may be, except when misled by demagogues or maddened by physical distress. Let it not be forgotten that if, in the days of Lord Castlereagh, we had our Manchester massacre and the campaign of Bonnymuir, there was the not less formidable rising in South Wales and the attack upon Newport under the régime of Lord John Russell. Neither the Manchester massacre, however, nor the siege of Newport, afforded any proof that, either in 1817 or 1844, the heart of the nation was unsound. They were nothing more than local disturbances brought about by bad men, who spoke to the passions of ignorant mobs, and persuaded them to rise

against laws which were represented to them as being oppressive. The disturbances were put down, the leaders in them punished, and the country at large betook itself to its old habits, as if nothing of the sort had ever occurred. The loyalty of the people was not shaken for a moment; and hence those newspapers continued to command by far the widest circulation which supported the Government of the Crown for the time being, and taught in their columns what the Crown's Ministers inculcated, or were understood to inculcate, in their speeches.

·

6

Between 1800 and 1830 the tone of the public press in this country was almost universally Tory. No doubt the Edinburgh Review' flourished in that interval, and commanded a considerable circulation. So did the Scotsman' in Edinburgh; so did the 'Morning Chronicle,' and, for a part of the time at least, the Examiner,' in London. But the influence of these and such as these on public opinion was comparatively little felt. Their circulation never came within the line of fair comparison with that of the Quarterly Review,' Blackwood's Magazine, or the least read of the many newspapers which supported the Government. And this is the more remarkable that, throughout the thirty years of which we are speaking, while Tory statesmen were with one brief interval in power, not a single editor of a newspaper, nor a single writer for any other of the periodicals which advocated Tory principles, received at the hands of the Tory Government which they supported any mark of favour whatever. Able men, being Tories, worked their own way to eminence in their professions. A Tory Government could not avoid promoting promoting distinguished. Tory lawyers to posts of dignity. Sir John Stoddart became Attorney-General for the island of Malta. So, likewise, John Wilson became a Professor in the