The Young Lord turns his looks towards Westminster. He will practise the law. He looks into the courts: what clouds of wigs! How many hands yet innocent of briefs! Yea, every seat is filled with candidates for fees, and there is no abiding-place for the Young Lord.

What, then, is to become of our young, our most interesting subject? Are all the avenues to fame and profit closed against him ; or, at least, are they so beset by suitors that it is to lose all distinction to mingle among them? What, then, is left for our Young Lord?

The reader is to be admonished that we would present society in its inevitable advancement. We do not picture the present Young Lord in this utter state of destitution; we do not assert this to be his case in 1839, but assuredly as his certain perplexing condition as the world wears on; as abuses, that is, privileges hitherto assured to him are amended, swept away by the spirit of the times. "Young ravens must be fed :" Young Lords must be nourished; and when all the thousand tails whereupon Young Lords exist are cut off by the fell shears of utility, either they must displace their brethren, the happy firstborn enjoying all the milk of primogeniture from their feeding-places, insisting on an equal share of goods, or they must descend a step in the social scale, and ruffle it with the vulgar.

But the Young Lord will not so condescend. He has still the pride of birth of ancestry; is still linked with the representative of his family; still has reflected upon him the barren lustre of his line. What, then, is to be the condition of the younger sons of pride and rank? What, in the social revolution, silently but steadily approaching,-what course is left to them? We see hope-yes, we descry land.

New Zealand-world of promise and of beauty!-rises upon the destitute. The Young Lord has still an outlet from crowded England-from the multitude amidst whom he is undistinguished, to a land where he may wax great and strong by the exercise of those very energies which he may not, from pride and prejudice, put forth at home. The position we have taken may, to the unreflecting -to those who see in the social state of the present day the type of that to come-appear Utopian, foolish; insulting to the illustrious persons to whom the argument applies. And yet the very progress of things indicates the issue. Saint Giles has sent forth his emigrants, and, in due season, so will Saint James.

The ship may not yet be built; nay, the acorns from which the timbers shall be grown, not yet in the earth; but the prophet sees

her dropping down the Thames, and sees aboard her freight of younger sons.

"The vanes sit steady

Upon the abbey towers. The silver lightnings

Of the evening star, spite of the city's smoke,
Tell that the north-wind reigns in the upper air.
Mark, too, that flock of fleecy-winged clouds,
Sailing athwart St. Margaret's!"

In the meantime, the Young Lord is the nursling of fortune. What knows he of the wants, the strugglings, the sympathies of life? It is ten to one that almost the whole purpose of his education is to render him indifferent to the great interests of humanity, inculcating within him a polished selfishness that reduces the whole world to his immediate circle; that makes him look upon all without that magic ring as nought. At college he takes honours as a matter of course, whilst the plebeian labours for them. Even in academic groves, he becomes fortified in those prejudices which separate him from the great mass of his fellow-men. Whilst ostensibly giving ear to "divine philosophy," he is the frequent scholar of riot and misrule. Bigotry finds him her aptest pupil; a ready soldier for her hoary rights; the panting follower of her low behests. In her cause he can wield a cudgel, and out-bellow Stentor: for her beloved sake he blows a catcall, and knocks down his man. Do you doubt this, reader? To Oxford, then, or Cambridge: go, and be converted.

The Young Lord of our day, has, it must be owned, changed from his predecessor of fifty years ago. He is not the same hero of fortune, who, with impunity, might cane his footman, and kick his creditor. He is, by public opinion, put upon his good behaviour; and so, generally conforms to all the decencies. There are, to be

sure, exceptions; but we will not dwell upon them. There was a time when the Young Lord could take shelter from personal insignificance in his title: the nobleman could, as Sheridan has expressed it, "hide his head in a coronet; now it affords no concealment ; but, on the contrary, is a mark, drawing the thoughts of men to test the value of the possessor.

The Young Lord must march with the times, or must be content to be left behind with the stragglers. This is the more incumbent on him as the old resources of his predecessors become every day less; more urgent, when every day serves to shew the different destinies of lords who, like Brougham's pigs, are-lords born to teats, and lords born to tails.

He is your only performer that requires not many entreatics for a song

for he will chant, without asking, to a street cur or a parish post.

Hoon

THE BALLAD-SINGER.

BY DOUGLAS JERROLD.

THE public ear has become dainty, fastidious, hypercritical; hence, the Ballad-Singer languishes and dies. Only now and then, his pipings are to be heard. Sometimes, like a solitary hermit frog, he croaks in a gutter; at long intervals he saws the air" with his foggy, jagged voice; and, on rare occasions, is to be found at nights in a melancholy, genteel street, warbling like a woodlark to the melting bosoms of congregated housemaids. Yes; your Ballad-Singer is now become a shy bird: the national minstrel-the street troubadour-the minnesinger of the alley-the follower of the gay seance in London highways and by-ways, is fast disappearing from the scene; his strains speedily to become, like the falsetto of Homer, a matter of doubtful history. The London Ballad-Singer has fallen a victim to the arts of the Italian: he has been killed by breathings from the South, ground to death by barrel-organs from Lucca and Pisa, and Bologna la Grassa. To him, Di tanti palpiti has been a scirocco; Non piu andrai, a most pestilent and withering air. Like the ruffian of a melo-drama, he has "died to music," the music of his enemies. Mozart, Rossini-yes, and Weber,- signed his deathwarrant, and their thousand vassals have duly executed it.

With the fall of Napoleon, declined the English Ballad-Singer. During the war, it was his peculiar province to vend halfpenny historical abridgments of his country's glory; recommending the short poetic chronicle by some familiar household air, that fixed it in the memory of the purchaser, who thus easily got hatred of the French by heart, with a new assurance of his own invulnerability. No battle was fought, no vessel taken or sunk, that the triumph was not published, proclaimed in the national gazette of our BalladSinger. It was his harsh, cracked, blatant voice that growled, squeaked, shouted forth the glorious truth, and made big the patriotic hearts of his humble and admiring listeners. If he were not the clear silver trump of Fame, he was at least her tin horn. It was he who bellowed music into news, which, made to jingle, was thus, even to