But the likeness has been too often remarked to need dwelling upon. Not so two little exceptions to the likeness; namely the occasional selection of a patriarch from their body; and the massacre of every man John of them once a year! Yet of these we must not lose sight, if we are to take example of beepolicy. A lover, then, or ex-officio husband, is occasionally taken out of their number, and becomes Prince of Denmark to the Queen Anne of the hive, but only for an incredibly short period, and for the sole purpose of keeping alive the nation; for her Majesty is a princess of a very virtuous turn of mind, a pure Utilitarian, though on a throne; and apparently has the greatest indifference, if not contempt, afterwards, and at all other times, for this singular court-officer and his peers. Nay, there is not only reason to believe, that like the fine lady in Congreve,

"She stares upon the strange man's face
Like one she ne'er had known,"

but some are of opinion, that the poor lord never recovers it! He dies at the end of a few days, out of sheer insignificance, though perhaps the father of no less than twelve thousand children in the space of two months! It is not safe for him to have known such exaltation, as was sometimes the case with the lovers of goddesses. How the aristocracy in general feel, on occasion of their brother's death, we have no means of judging; but we fancy them not a little alarmed, and desirous of waiving the perilous honor. And yet they appear to exist and to be nu merous, solely in order to eat and drink, and furnish this rare quota of utility; for which the community are so little grateful, that once a year they hunt the whole body to death, and kill them with their stings. Drones, be it observed, have no stings; they do not carry swords, as the gentry once did in Europe, when it was a mark of their rank. Those, strange to tell! are the ornaments of the bee working-classes. It is thought, in Hivedom, that they only are entitled to have weapons, who create property.

But we have not yet got half through the wonders which are to modify human conduct by the example of this wise, indus

trious, and monarchy-loving people. Marvellous changes must be effected, before we have any general pretension to resemble them, always excepting in the aristocratic particular. For instance, the aristocrats of the hive, however unmasculine in their ordinary mode of life, are the only males. The working. classes, like the sovereign, are all females! How are we to manage this? We must convert, by one sudden metamorphosis, the whole body of our agricultural and manufacturing population into women! Mrs. Cobbett must displace her husband, and tell us all about Indian corn. There must be not a man in Nottingham, except the Duke of Newcastle; and he trembling, lest the Queen should send for him. The tailors, bakers, carpenters, gardeners, &c., must all be Mrs. Tailors and Mrs. Bakers. The very name of John Smith must go out. The directory must be Amazonian. This Commonalty of women must also be, at one and the same time, the operatives, the soldiers, the virgins, and the legislators of the country! They must make all we want, fight all our enemies, and even get up a Queen for us, when necessary; for the sovereigns of the hive are often of singular origin, being manufactured! literally "made to order," and that, too, by dint of their eating! They are fed and stuffed into royalty! The receipt is, to take any ordinary female bee in its infancy, put it into a royal cradle or cell, and feed it with a certain kind of jelly; upon which its shape alters into that of sovereignty, and her Majesty issues forth, royal by the grace of stomach. This is no fable, as the reader may see on consulting any good history of bees. In general, several Queen-bees are made at a time, in case of accidents; but each, on emerging from her department, seeks to destroy the other, and one only remains living in one hive. The others depart at the head of colonies like Dido.

To sum up, then, the condition of human society, were it to be remodelled after the example of the bee, let us conclude with drawing a picture of the state of our beloved country, so modified. Imprimis, all our working people would be females, wearing swords, never marrying, and occasionally making

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 re finement stopped short his perceptions, and degraded his philosophy 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.