legislators who try to trim up the constitution. They won’t do anything to annoy the middle classes at first; they begin therefore with some act or regulation about pot-houses, street-vagabonds, or some living nuisance. Straightway the nuisances protest with bellowings, menaces, perhaps with a breaking of windows, and indiscriminate pelting of suspected respectability. I a nuisance? says one of them. You are another. Don’t you order me off your doorstep when you come home to your dinner, and give me into custody for asking an alms? Don’t you pull up the window when I have called a cab for you, and touched my hat? Don’t you walk safe and daintily over my crossings free of expense? Don’t you speak to me as if I were your slave? Don’t you—confound you—ain’t you a nuisance, rather, yourself? And so the vagabonds protest against any extra police regulation, or attempt to legislate away their special offences. And they are right. They are right in striving against the multiplication of social and sumptuary laws. They are the useful house-dogs which indeed wake us sometimes by their barking, and will bite the master himself if provoked enough, but which certainly keep intruders off, and check the itching fingers which would meddle with our personal rights and possessions. The mob may be disagreeable enough—rude, rank, unreasonable; but it will safely prevent any attempts to drill and trim us up by punctilious legislators or officials. Hands off!—let us be. I button my pocket, feel that my watch is safe, and am much obliged to Demos, who is kind enough to do the dirty work of my citizenship for me.
VICISSITUDES OF FAMILIES.
There are “ups” as well as “downs” among the many changes which years are silently working in the families of England. The grandfather of the present owner of Leigh Court in Somersetshire, Sir William Miles, came to Bristol from Herefordshire, a poor boy with but a few shillings in his pocket: within the last few years a barber in Canterbury and a barber at the West End of London have seen their sons raised respectively to the dignities of Lord Chief Justice and Lord High Chancellor of England: and many other instances of the same kind might be adduced. But perhaps the good fortune which has attended on the Denisons in their “rise and progress” to opulence and title has seldom or never been surpassed. The father of the late Mr. William Joseph Denison of Denbies, the wealthy banker, whose daughter married the late Marquis of Conyngham, the especial favourite of George IV., and whose grandson wore the coronet of Lord Londesborough, was the son of very poor parents in Leeds. He travelled up to town as a youth with one of the ten-horse carriers’ waggons then in fashion, sometimes riding, and at other times trudging along by the side of the horses, and buoyed up by the hope (in which he was scarcely disappointed) that he would find the streets of London paved with gold. His son died something more than a mere millionaire.
Another Denison, who prospered in his day, was the father of the Speaker of Her Majesty’s faithful Commons, now and by virtue of his office “the first Commoner” in the land. His father, John Wilkinson, was a dyer, at Leeds, who changed his name—whether with or without leave and licence from Royalty, we do not know—to Denison, on the death of his maternal uncle, a cloth merchant of Leeds, who had risen from the ranks, and carried on a most successful trade with Portugal. He increased his prosperity by two fortunate marriages, by the former of which he became father-in-law of one Speaker, Sir Charles Manners Sutton, and by the second the father of another Speaker, the present Mr. John E. Denison. He became Lord of the Manor of Ossington, and sat in Parliament for many years; and had he lived a few years longer, he would have seen one of his sons married to the daughter of a ducal house, and chosen Speaker of the House of Commons; another, Bishop of Salisbury; a third, Governor-General of Australia; and three others first-class men at Oxford, Fellows of their Colleges, and high up in the learned professions. Another member of the same family, somewhat older than any of the above-mentioned gentlemen, also the son of very poor parents at Leeds, accumulated a fortune in the law, and rose to be Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. He married an heiress: and his widow left her own and her husband’s property to a great niece, who married a member of the wealthy family of Beckett, on condition of his assuming the name of Denison, and became the mother of Mr. Edmund Beckett Denison, whose name is so familiar to our readers as the inventor of the Great Clock and Bell at Westminster. It should be added, that even to the present day the name of Denison is nearly as common about Leeds as Smith in London, or Jones in Wales, or Campbell in Scotland, though it is rarely met with in other parts of Her Majesty’s dominions.
TWILIGHT DREAMS.
Mistress Edith, in the twilight,
From her crimson-cushion’d chair
In the oriel window gazeth
With a pensive, listless air,
Over lawn and over terrace,
With the tints of sunset dyed—
Over park and over meadow,
All her own those acres wide.
Dame Rebecca, staid duenna,
Knits and nods, and nods and knits:
Master Arnold, patient limner,
At his easel thoughtful sits,
Altering here, and there retouching
Mistress Edith’s pictured face—
Heedless, in his deep abstraction,
How night draweth on apace.
Now he sighs and drops the palette—
Art indeed can do no more;
Now farewell this sweetest labour!
Master Arnold’s task is o’er.
Sighs he then again so deeply,
Mistress Edith looks around,
Dame Rebecca knits no longer,
Sunk in slumber too profound.
