sucking the poison from a wound in his arm; Bruce, during a retreat before the English, protecting a woman borne in a litter, and checking the pursuers; Philippa interceding for the lives of the citizens of Calais; Edward the Black Prince entering London by the side of King John of France; the marriage of Henry V. at Troyes, with the Princess Katherine of France; Elizabeth at Tilbury; Blake at Tunis; Marlborough at Blenheim; the death of Wolfe; the death of Abercrombie; Lord Cornwallis receiving the sons of Tippoo as hostages; Trafalgar, the Death of Nelson; and Waterloo; and the meeting of Wellington and Blucher. The Queen's Robing Room is also unfinished. The exploits of King Arthur are there to be celebrated by means of a series of frescoes, already in progress by Mr. Dyce, who is regularly engaged by the Commissioners for some years to come, at a considerable salary.

The Norman Porch, so called from the intention that exists to illustrate in its frescoes the Norman history of England, and to place there statues of the kings of the Norman line, differs most refreshingly from every other architectural feature of the pile, without, of course, ceasing to harmonise with them. A clustered pillar in the centre, forms-by its expanding ramifications-the general roof into a series of roofs, each having in its centre a circular opening to the sky for the admission of light. There is a fine picturesque architectural effect obtained by looking through the arched depths of the porch on the right, across to the Guard Room and its lobby beyond. These last-named places are also unfinished. In the Guard Room there is to be painted in fresco Young Talbot defending his father in battle, and Isabella Douglas barring the door with her arm to protect James I. of Scotland: a very suggestive picture in such a locality. St. Edward the Martyr, slain by the Danes, will be the subject of the fresco in the lobby.

The Royal Staircase is designed in a style of chaste, pure magnificence. It possesses no ornaments except the windows and slender shafts and mouldings that ascend the walls, and run over the roof, but these are sufficient. One does not desire to stop there. On entering the pile one needs a moment's pause after the spectacle of the Grand Victoria Tower, and the almost unrivalled arches beneath, before we again rouse all our latent powers to the due enjoyment and appreciation of the scenes that await us in the edifice. And now we descend once more, both in the body and in the spirit, to the level of the soil and of the daily bustle of the world without; not, however, without a grateful acknowledgment of the high skill and unremitting labours that have afforded us personally so much gratification and instruction, and which have given to the Parliament of the British people a home worthy of it.

Let us chronicle briefly, and in the simplest language, a few of the names whom posterity will not think underserving of honour and permanent remembrance: Charles Barry, architect; John Thomas, sculptor; Welby Pugin, the carved woodwork; Ballantyne and Allan, of Edinburgh, the stained glass; Hardman, of Birmingham, the metal work; and the firm of Minton, of Staffordshire, the encaustic tiles. The cost of the whole, up to the present time, has been £1,200,000; the estimated cost, when finished, amounts to £2,000,000. Startling sums to talk of, and be taxed for; but if there be one edifice in the kingdom on which we should be lavish of our means, there can be no question but that it is this.

It may not be out of place if we add a very brief and consequently imperfect notice of the origin of Parliaments :

The name-Parliament-is obviously derived from the French Parlément; a word first used, it is said, in Frauce, in the reign of Louis VII., in the twelfth century, and

which first occurs in our statutes in 1272; but Sir Edward Coke says it was used in England so early as the period of the Confessor. As to the institution, it is commonly derived from the Saxon Witena-gemote, or meeting of wise men. How far this view is strictly correct, it is now impossible to discover. The question has excited much controversy, and especially that important part of it-what share the people possessed in the meeting. Authorities of the first order-Coke, Spelman, Camden, and Prynne -all agree that the Commons formed part of these great legislative synods or coun>cils that existed before the Conquest. Sufficient, then, be it to say, that there was developed the germ of our representative system; a germ, however, the growth of which was rudely checked, and appeared for a time almost destroyed, by the Norman Conquest. Then, while the great body of the Anglo-Saxon people were doomed to a state little better than slavery, social and political, the entire soil was parcelled out among the chief military followers of William, some seven hundred in number, who thus became the direct tenants of the crown, and was then further subdivided by the latter into about sixty thousand knight's fees,-that is to say, portions of land large enough to support a knight, and enable him to appear, with horse and arms, properly equipped, whenever the lord required his services. The former class comprised apparently the sole parties who were then entitled to the honour and influence of a share in the business of the great council of the nation; and of these, it was only the barons, the chief prelates, and others specially summoned by the king's letters, who, in conjunction with the king, really exercised any legislative power. The king, indeed, at first, was all in all. For a considerable period after the Conquest, law and legislation seem to have been little more than the record of his will, as expressed (in its more favourable manifestations) in his answers to the petitions presented to him and to his council. That some sort of public opinion, however, even then modified the absolutism of our sovereigns, is clear from many facts; here is one, in connection with the firstknown instance of an English sovereign addressing a legislative assembly in a set speech. Fearing his subjects would be—or possibly knowing they were-discontented at his apparent harshness to his elder brother Robert, and by the heavy taxes he had laid upon them, Henry I. called a general council of the nation, and there explained his conduct so fully and so eloquently to them, that, at the close, his auditors enthusiastically declared they were ready to sacrifice their lives and fortunes in his defence. From kingly explanations to the people must follow in due time occasional kingly submissions to the people; then the development of a system of regulations of their respective rights and powers, still, of course, so much clear gain to the popular influence, which was-nothing, and loss to the royal influence, which had been all; and lastly, the entire legislative supremacy of the real over the merely representative authority; that is to say, of the nation over its chief magistrate. Thus has it been with us. And the instrument with which all this great work has been accomplished is the very simple, prosaic-looking one of-no tax without consent of parliament. Protection against the despotism of the Norman kings was gradually found in the growing institution of parliament, but not before England had passed through many terrible ordeals. Magna Charta began to loom portentously through the gloom upon the astonished eyes of king John; and simultaneously with its appearance, we find also dark intimations of the advent of the power that could alone make that instrument of any value. In the Great Charter granted by John, in 1215, he. promises to summon all archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons, personally, and all other tenants in chief under the crown, by the sheriffs and bailiffs, to meet at a certain place, with fifty days' notice, to assess aids and scutages, when necessary; in other words, to determine the taxes that were to be levied upon the people. Here, evidently,

were the rudiments of our Houses of Lords and Commons, and rudiments merely: for the elements of representation were the same in both cases-the land-owners of the country-simply divided into the greater and the lesser. But the era was now approaching when a new and vast element was to be introduced in favour of the people— the representation of Trade, Commerce, and Industry, and when the conflicting principles supported respectively by the king and his adherents on the one side, and by the people led by the parliament on the other, were to try the last issue. Constantly postponed and constantly renewed from the day of the signing of the Great Charter, the mortal struggle was at last precipitated by the arbitrary and faithless character of Henry III., whose long reign was as conspicuous for his violation, at every opportunity, of all those principles of government that were held sacred in the popular heart, as for his unprincipled and treacherous renewals of his oath to observe the Charter, when the popular pressure was too great for him. At that time rose in awful majesty before him and the people, the man of all men who has the best claim to be considered the true founder of the modern representative system of England,—Simon de Montfort. After the battle of Lewes, when Henry fell into De Montfort's power, and when, if the charges made against the great earl by his enemies had been true, he would have been busy in devising means for consolidating his personal power, what he did do was this-he summoned by his chancellor, Nicholas de Ely, two knights for each shire, two citizens for each city, two burgesses for each borough. Scarcely had he promulgated this grand scheme of reform, when he fell at Evesham, amid the tears of the people, and was canonized in their hearts and in their poetry as a saint and martyr. How is it we do not see De Montfort's name among the list of personages who are to have statues in the new houses? Edward is to be there, and his other illustrious victim and "traitor"-Wallace; why not De Montfort?

The reign of Edward I. is the great epoch from which may be dated many of the more important features of our parliamentary system. The general objects of parliament were most felicitously expressed in the writs issued by Edward :-" It is a most equitable rule that what concerns all should be approved by all; and common danger repelled by united efforts." Following this enunciation of the general theory of parlament, we find the particular-and grand-essential of its practice also boldly avowed by the parliament, and frankly acknowledged by the king in the council of 1296; when, on the 1st of August, it was enacted, "that no tax should be levied without the consent of the knights, citizens, and burgesses in parliament." So De Montfart's great plan was realised; the citizens and burgesses maintained, under Edward I., and ever after, the right to a share in the representation of the country which the great earl had bequeathed to them at the price of his blood.

It is interesting to mark the positions by this time taken up by these several powers. The great Council was still essentially the parliament; but had condescendingly taken advice from time to time from the knightly or free-holding body, and now they admitted to a similar privilege the representatives of the chief industrial places in the ringdom: of course for the same object in both cases, the greater convenience of taxing, under such circumstances, the respective classes represented. That such was the state of things as regards all the three bodies that went to the composition of the parliament, in its more complete aspect, in the time of Edward I., is evident from the writs he issued in the 23rd year of his reign, which directed that the elected citizens and burgesses should have full power to act in behalf of the citizens and burgesses at Arge, separately from the county representatives, for transacting what should be dained by the great Council, &c. But this separation of the two lesser bodies was but a temporary phase of their contemporaneous existence; the tendency of events

speedily led to their amalgamation, and the homely-sounding but grandly suggestive word "Commons," as applied to both knights and citizens, &c., for the first time appears in the records of that great national .neasure of 1327, which closed the infamous carcer of Edward II. We learn from them that it was by the "council and assent" of the Commons, as well as by those of the prelates, barons, &c., that Edward II. was deposed and that Edward III. ascended the throne. Something had been obtained, however, even in that disastrous reign. The parliamentarians of that day, finding that the principles so well set forth by the first Edward, were not bearing fruit under the auspices of the second, but that, on the contrary, to use their own words, "many people be aggrieved by the king's ministers, against right, in respect to which grievance no one can recover without a common parliament;" there was then added to the Great Charter, the following important law, "We do order that the king shall hold a parliament once a year, or twice if need be." The use made of this new privilege shows its estimated value: during the following reign, that of Edward III., nearly fifty parliaments were held at Westminster.

The comparative number of the knightly and civic representatives, during the reign of Edward III., will surprise many of our readers; there were only 74 of the former to 282 of the latter. An unmistakable evidence of the declension of the one class, and of the corresponding rise of the other, that had within a century or two taken place. It was only fitting that the English language should be spoken in what was now become an English parliament, and so that improvement marked the reign of the third Edward. The carliest record of any parliamentary procceding in English, occurs in that monarch's thirty-sixth year of rule. The roll of the year is found in French as usual, but it expressly states that the cause of summoning was declared (en Englois) in English. From this time all the proceedings were carried on in the native tongue, with the exception of the giving the royal assent to bills," although," says Lord Campbell with covert satire, "the entry of some of those proceedings in the reign of Queen Victoria is still in Norman-French."

Another improvement, dating from the reign of Edward III., was the cessation of the migratory habits of parliament. Before that time they were held wherever the sovereign found it most convenient to himself to be at the time, so that they were as often held out of as in London; but since then the occasions have been few when any other place than the existing one was chosen. A question has been often debatedWhen did the separation of the parliament into two Houses take place? There is one event that we think may be taken as really simultaneous with the recognition of their existence as an independent-and in that sense separate body,—the election of a Speaker, which took place for the first time, so far as we know, in the year 1377. Certainly from that period we find the Commons exercising an important, and, on the whole, an increasing influence on the destinies of the country. We must not attempt to enter into the subsequent history of Parliament. Such periods as that of the Civil War, such events as those of the attempted abolition of the House of Lords by the Commons, the visit of Charles I. in the hope of arresting the five members who had offended him, the famous dissolution by Cromwell, &c., are, we think, best left in their own stern simplicity. Our object has been to describe the House of Parliament-not its history.

The House of Lords, when Parliament is not sitting, may be seen by visitors, on obtaining a ticket, which is given free of charge, from the Lord Chamberlain's office. During the sitting, it is only shown on Saturdays; but when occupied in the hearing of Appeal Cases, the House is open to the public.