queens. They would grapple with their work in a prodigious manner, and make a great noise. Secondly, our aristocracy would be all males, never working, never marrying (except when sent for), always eating or sleeping, and annually having their throats cut. The bee massacre takes place in July, when accordingly all our nobility and gentry would be out of town, with a vengeance! The women would draw their swords, and hunt and stab them all about the west end, till Brompton and Bayswater would be choked with. slain. Thirdly, her Majesty the Queen would either succeed to a quiet throne, or, if manufactured, would have to eat a prodi gious quantity of jelly in her infancy: and so after growing into proper sovereign condition, would issue forth, and begin her reign either with killing her royal sisters, or leading forth a colony to America or New South Wales. She would then take to husband some noble lord for the space of one calendar hour, and dismissing him to his dulness, proceed to lie in of 12,000 little royal highnesses in the course of the eight following weeks, with others too numerous to mention; all which princely generation, with little exception, would forthwith give up their title, and divide themselves into lords or working-women, as it happened; and so the story would go round to the end of the chapter, bustling, working, and massacreing. And here ends. the sage example of the Monarchy of the Bees. We must observe, nevertheless, before we conclude, that however ill and tragical the example of the bees may look for human imitation, we are not to suppose that the fact is anything like so melancholy to themselves. Perhaps it is no evil at all, or only so for the moment. The drones, it is true, seem to have no fancy for being massacred; but we have no reason to suppose that they, or any of the rest concerned in this extraordinary instinct, are aware of the matter beforehand; and the same is to be said of the combats between the Queen Bees-they seem to be the result of an irresistible impulse, brought about by the sudden pressure of a necessity. Bees appear to be very happy during far the greater portion of their existence. A modern writer, of whom it is to be lamented that a certain want of refinement stopped short his perceptions, and degraded his philoso phy from the finally expedient into what was fugitively so, has a passage on this point, as agreeable as what he is speaking of. "A bee among the flowers in spring," says Dr. Paley, "is one of the cheerfullest objects that can be looked upon. Its life appears to be all enjoyment, so busy and so pleased." THE COMPANION. "The first quality in a Companion is Truth." SIR W. TEMPLE. CHAPTER I. An Earth upon Heaven. SOMEBODY, a little while ago, wrote an excellent article in the New Monthly Magazine on "Persons one would wish to have known." He should write another on "Persons one could wish to have dined with." There is Rabelais, and Horace, and the Mermaid roysters, and Charles Cotton, and Andrew Marvell, and Sir Richard Steele, cum multis aliis: and for the colloquial, if not the festive part, Swift and Pope, and Dr. Johnson, and Burke, and Horne Tooke. What a pity one cannot dine with them all round! People are accused of having earthly notions of heaven. As it is difficult to have any other, we may be pardoned for thinking that we could spend a very pretty thousand years in dining and getting acquainted with all the good fellows on record; and having got used to them, we think we could go very well on, and be content to wait some other thousands for a higher beatitude. Oh, to wear out one of the celestial lives of a triple century's duration, and exquisitely to grow old, in reciprocating dinners and teas with the immortals of old books! |