unequivocating Jolter bestows the horse-collar grin on
the entire auditory (including Sir Norman Peverill,
who sups at his club on a rusk and a glass
of Seltzer water), in humorous amusement at the
simplicity of the learned serjeant, who does not
know the meaning of the word "toight."

Not unfrequently Jolter himself appears, as
he expresses it, "toight as a droom," and
contemplates the august tribunal through a dense
haze of beer. He has, in these cases, slipped
away from his legal guides, philosophers, and
friends, and, wearied with vinous and spirituous
luxuries, betaken himself to a rustic orgie of
fourpenny ale in some Westmonasterian beer-shop,
reminding him of his native BÅ“otia, in company
with a sweep, a navigator, and two militia-men.
Sometimes, in these moments of beery abandonment,
he is pounced upon by a wary recruiting-sergeant,
and forthwith enlisted in her Majesty's
Forty-fourth Foot. More than once have
parliamentary agents been compelled to pay "smart
money" for the ransom of Giles Jolter.

By this time the assistant-ostler has become
a public character. He wakes one morning with
a headache, and finds himself famous. "No
more flagrant instance of the innate and
incurable rottenness of our electoral system could
be found, we think, than in the hideous
tergiversation of the witness Jolter, in his evidence
before the committee on the Chumpsford
election petition"—thus commences a leading article
in a daily newspaper, and G. is the hero of the
first paragraph.

Matters, however, may grow serious, and the
communicativeness of Giles may become as
compromising as his reticence is embarrassing. At all
hazards, the assistant-ostler must then be got out
of the way, and his cross-examination is cut short
by his sudden disappearance. He is spirited
away nobody knows whither. Of course the
sitting member, and those eminent and astute
parliamentary agents, Messrs. Weasle, Eylet,
and Hole, are entirely ignorant of his
whereabouts. Quick! a proclamation, two proclamations,
half a dozen proclamations, for the
apprehension of Giles Jolter! It passes comprehension,
but it is still within the range of possibility,
that the passenger in a blue cloak, with a fur
collar, green spectacles, and a sealskin cap, who
took the mail-train from London to Pangbourne
on such a night, was the recalcitrant Giles; nay,
he has been seen, with no disguise at all, but in
his normal fustian and hobnails, astounding the
fisher-girls at Boulogne or Dunkirk with the
horse-collar grin. Then Giles is caught, and makes
his appearance, quaking and blubbering, at the bar
of the House of Commons, where, imagining in
his perturbation that he is in peril for poaching, he
piteously assures their honours worships that he
"niver tooched a rabbit in uns loife." The end
of it is, that after the serjeant-at-arms—to the
ineffable disgust of that courtly and bag-wigged
functionary—has had charge of Giles for a day
or two, he is committed to Newgate under the
Speaker's warrant. And there the governor
doesn't know what to do with him; and after a few
weeks' incarceration, during which the Sunday
papers write about him as a "martyr to
oligarchical tyranny," the session comes to an end,
and the Speaker's warrant, being by this time so
much waste paper, Giles Jolter is discharged.
Perhaps a subscription is opened for him in the
columns of some red-hot journal, and the first
week's list of contributions comprises: "A Foe
to Despotism, 5s.;" "Brutus Britannicus,
2s. 6d.;" "Blood or the Ballot, 1s.;" "One who
hates M.P.s., 9d. (weekly)," and so forth.

But Jolter subsides, and goes back to BÅ“otia
and Chumpsford to tend his cattle, and is no
more heard of. The great tribe of witnesses
must submit to a similar fate. Their fame is
but ephemeral. Their notoriety endures but for
a day. They fade into nothingness and oblivion;
in the great crowd they pass unnoticed; and it
is only when you hang about the law courts and
wear out, wearily, your shoe-leather in the Hall
of the Lost Footsteps, that you single them out
again, and watch their ways, and dive into their
haunts. I never take up the report of a trial
twenty years old, without wondering what has
become of all the witnesses. What a noise they
made in the world, and into what complete
forgetfulness they have drifted! As I lay down my
pen, an Italian organ-grinder in the street
beneath, strikes up "Il balen." Confound those
organ-grinders! Yet, stay, the brown stranger
may be worth studying. Why, goodness,
gracious! the name of his papa may have been
Theodore Majocchi, that witness of witnesses;
and the air ground on the paternal organ, not
"Il balen," but "Non mi ricordo!" His father
may have been a witness against Queen Caroline.

ROUND THE DOME OF ST. PETER.

ROME again! dirty, picturesque, beautiful,
lamentable Rome! the Eternal City that never
fades—Old Rome, to which time gives only
mellowing graces, not disfiguring wrinkles—
queen in the past, though her purple was
often splashed with blood and mire, and queen
in the present, though fettered and discrowned;
with what passionate beating of the heart
strangers first drive through those narrow winding
streets; with what glad yearning of affection
old friends go back to their beloved haunts!
Florence, elegant and æsthetic, rich in mediæval
reminiscences, with every street a poem,
and every house a history; Genoa, proud and
stately, clothing her steeps with marble palaces,
and ruling her world of waters with no meek
sceptre; Venice, dreamy, mournful, and half
dead; Turin, modern, gay, and not a little
flaunting—all are beautiful; but none equal to
the centre of Catholic Christendom, the old
mistress of the world, where the curule chair
and the imperial throne of the Cæsars was a
lower seat than the fisherman's chair, where the
proudest crown of the empire was a humble
wreath compared to the arrogant triplet round
the Christian Father's mitre. Back to beloved
Rome, so full of sin, and sorrow, and evil rule,
and stifled lamentation, so full of beauty and