PARLIAMENTARY MASONS.--PARLIAMENTARY PICTURES.

Was there ever anything so lucky that the strike of the masons should have
happened at this identical juncture! Parliament is prorogued. Now,
deducting Sir Robert Peel, physician, with his train of apothecaries and
pestle-and-mortar apprentices, who, until February next, are to sit
cross-legged and try to think, there are at least six hundred and thirty
unemployed members of the House of Commons, turned upon the world with
nothing, poor fellows! but grouse before them. Some, to be sure, may pick
their teeth, in the Gardens of the Tuileries--some may even now venture to
exercise their favourite elbow at Baden-Baden,--but with every possible
and probable exception, there will yet be hundreds of unemployed
law-makers, to whom time will be a heavy porter's burden.

We have a plan which, for its originality, should draw down upon us the
gratitude of the nation. It is no other than this: to make all Members of
Parliament, for once in their lives at least, useful. The masons, hired to
build the new temples of Parliament, have struck. The hard-handed
ingrates,--let them go! We propose that, during the prorogation at least,
Members of Parliament, should, like beavers, build their own Houses. In a
word, every member elected to a seat in Parliament should be compelled,
like Robinson Crusoe, to make his own furniture before he could sit down
upon it.

Have we not a hundred examples of the peculiar fitness of the task, in the
habits of what in our human arrogance we call the lower animals? There is
many a respectable spider who would justly feel himself calumniated by any
comparison between him and any one of twenty Parliamentary lawyers we