There's Belgravia, MISS BRADDON's, a strong preparation, avis aneamca o To get a good sale on a fresh tack has stood. And into the drawings so fiercely they drop, Tom, who has come to grief at College, has been making a clean breast of his pecuniary difficulties. Fond Mother:-"BUT, MY DEAR, YOU HAVE MADE A VERY BAD RETURN FOR ALL YOUR FATHER'S UNREMITTING KINDNESS!" OUR PLAYGOER. the most romantic steward-is a steward. We should have been more d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre. MISS IONE BURKE plays her best scenethe one with MR. SOTHERN-admirably; and MRS. CHIPPENDALE makes a charming materfamilias. We owe a word (in fact, a whole sentence) of praise to MR. O'CONNOR for the really beautiful scenes with which this comedy has been embellished; nothing could be more tasteful or effective. At Drury Lane Rob Roy has been again put forward; we simply mention this revival in order to testify our admiration for M188 FANNY HUDDART's admirable performance of Helen McGregor. This is the only alteration in last year's cast of the drama. Ir anybody wishes to see a supernaturally good young man (in six acts), let him go to the Haymarket Theatre and contemplate MR. SOTHERN in A Hero of Romance, the latest of DR. WESTLAND MARSTON'S comedies. Rarely, if ever, in this wicked world has it been given us to behold such persevering nobility of conduct, combined with such capacity for "sensation headers." In one point only did we find MR. SOTHERN's character deficient. Being steward in a largely populated household, somewhere about Brittany, it was his duty to convince the audience of his proficiency in keeping the accounts of out of her mind nightly in one of the best ballets ever put upon any MISS FINETTE is drawing mobs to the Alhambra, where she capers the establishment and controlling its domestic affairs. To leap grace-stage. FINETTE is very mad-perhaps dreadfully unladylike; but fully from the ruins of a castle without sustaining the slightest injury that her dancing is indecent we have not as yet, begging the LORD is doubtless a very valuable accomplishment; but a steward-even CHAMBERLAIN's pardon, been able to discover. In fact, remembering gratified with MR. SOTHERN's impersonation if we had seen him cast the funereal solemnities of a British quadrille, we look upon FINETTE up the family bills of a few tradesmen, or heard him discuss the merits as an actual relief, and should like to see a few grains of that young of the co-operative system. Of course we lay our dissatisfaction at person's gaiety and verve "adapted from the French." the door of the author, not at that of the actor. DOCTOR MARSTON should have made his hero less acrobatic and more arithmetical; he is much too virtuous to be worth a salary. This extravagantly angelic portraiture of the leading character is the only fault we have to find with the new play. There is great tact, brilliancy, and stage-knowledge in it; and, in spite of its half-dozen acts (which are smuggled in under the names of prologue and tableaux), it is not at all tedious. MR. SOTHERN plays the serious bits of his part with his usual solemnity and vibration of utterance; MR. BUCKSTONE is MR. BUCKSTONE; MR. CHIPPENDALE does as much as can be done with a most ungenial character, and MR. COMPTON delivers his words with unction and effect, though shunted from his ordinary line of business. MISS MADGE ROBERTSON infuses much spirit and grace into her representation of the modernized Beatrice who forms the heroine of Le Roman Volunteer Intelligence. A MEMBER of a crack corps wishing to make as many bull's-eyes as possible in shooting for prizes has adopted the singular practice of drinking nothing but ox-eye-gen water. AN A-KNACKER-EONTIC. Why are the French cooks so successful in dressing horseflesh ?Because they have a knack-er doing it. TWIG HIS LITTLE GAME ?-What a fugitive bankrupt wants.-A good hiding. THE PHYSIOLOGY OF CLOTHES. T SMOKE. HE superficial mind may consider smoke to be inadmissible as an article of wear. But the superficial mind, as has been wisely remarked by a keen observer, is nothing if not superficial. The mind, in short, had better mind its eye if it interferes with our definitions of clothes. If persons can be described as clothing themselves with cursing, there can be no objection to our considering smoke as a cloak. And indeed if language, as a great wit declared, was given us that we might conceal our thoughts, smoke was undoubtedly invented in order to conceal our want of them. Smoke is the lounging-coat of coversation. Given two men shut up together for an hour or so-without smoke they are in a fever of fidgety ceaseless conversation-with pipes they jerk out brief and not utterly foolish remarks between the whiffs. Smoke is the cosmopolitan of the clothes community. It issues from the thick lips of the boor, and curls out from beneath the glossy moustache of the noble. It influences alike Youth and Age, Poverty and Wealth, Wisdom and Beauty-and by Beauty we would of course be understood to mean the Irish apple-woman of Covent Garden. It is not by any means deficient in humour of a practical nature. The I have failed to observe philosopher cannot that the largest cigars 88 a rule choose the smallest men, and the smallest cigars the tallest men. We have even known an instance of cigarettes taking a fancy to a being who was six feet two in his stockings; but it should perhaps be added in explanation that he was also the chosen object of a German flute. Smoke in its solid and material form is of two kinds-pipes or cigars. It has also an abnormal existence in the shape of a compromise known as a cigar-holder, which boasts all the inconveniences of a pipe and none of the advantages of a cigar. It is as a rule the sign of a weak mind. The pipe has a tendency to enthrall and fetter the man it smokes. The author of "Britons never-never-never shall be slaves" was no smoker-at least no smoker of pipes, or he would have hesitated to make that declaration in the face of the drudgery to which Britons submit in colouring a pipe. Now, the cigar-holder is as a rule capable of being coloured, and yet is but a sort of infantile pipe. Let us put the result logically, after the manner of BARBARA, CELARENT, DARII, FRSAPO, MILL, ALDRICH, and other writers on the art. A man who is the slave of a full-grown tyrant is to be pitied. A man who is the slave of a despotic baby is an ass. The man who values his peace of mind as well as his personal comfort will do well to avoid such a pipe. He should decline an introduction even though it were carved with the effigies of all the Kings of England since the conquest. Our artist-himself a smoker, who with the innate modesty of genius has introduced a portrait of his own pipe in the initial to this essay has humanely refrained from depicting the whole of the torture of smoking such a pipe as the above. When the Greek painter desired to express the anguish of Agamemnon at the sacrifice of Iphigenia he concealed the face. When our draughtsman seeks to limn the face of the agonised slave of the meerschaum he leaves it out, and, by our halidome, we rather guess he has the advantage of the Greek gentleman! Pipes, like the Secretaries of Sheffield Trades' Unions, are usually prepared to go any lengths. There are many steps in the scale between the long stem of the churchwarden and almost stemless bowl of the Irish car-driver's dhudheen. The men who belong to these pipes respectively, are very characteristic of the peculiarities of the pipes. The car-driver has an irrepressible admiration for "something short," and likes that something sweet and strong. The pot-house orator, who is the smoker generally selected by the churchwarden, is passionately fond of arguments as long-winded and slender as his pipe. Whenever he removes the red sealing-wax tip from between his solemn lips, some sententious platitude is sure to issue with the cloud of congenial and cognate smoke. "My good friend, MR. JONES, if he will allow me to call him so ;""Our esteemed fellow-townsman, and worthy brother tradesman, MR. BLINKS;" "MR. CODGERS has kindly consented to promote the harmony and conviviality of this auspicious evening, gentlemen;" these are some of the wise saws which he seems to suck in from vacancy through the long white stem, as a baby absorbs ass's milk from a patent bottle. The short clay, or cutty, first mentioned by CICERO, in his speech pro Milone, is a far more active and bandy article than the churchwarden. It generally pitches upon young and busy men as its subjects. The worst thing known against it is its tendency to colour. and, therefore, to become tyrannical and exacting like the meerschaum. philosophical pipe, so far as our researches have carried us, is the brier-root. It is incapable of the despotic desire to colour, and it is sweet and clean, and what is more important, it is to all practical purposes indestructible, whereas the pipes of clay, whether of the superior or inferior class, are fragile, for as the poet has feelingly expressed it: Therefore the man who smokes a cigar-holder is a silly. We couch this concise logical syllogism in the popular method of speech, but our reader must remember that as the greater contains then less, and also because the whole is more than a part (unless they are one or both of the same size), while a point is that which hath no magnitude, and a line is length without breadth; therefore we would be understood to state not that the man smokes the cigar-holder because he is a goose, but that the cigar-holder chooses him because he is silly. Q. E. D. Smoke has, indeed, a tendency to display and make a spectacle of the weakness of man. Hence, in the vernacular to "smoke" any person is to make a butt of him. Thus the youth in the margin who is worn at one end of a large meerschaum is the object of a pity not altogether unacidulated by contempt. A permanent lop-sidedness of his hat, lateral curvature of the spine, and a distortion of the facial muscles are the penal ties paid for the glory of smoking this pipe. We have known pipes like that in the next column,elaborate works of art to which the whole of a man's energies besides both his hands and the right hand corner of his mouth were perforce devoted. "I never had a meerschaum swell To glad me with its fragrant smoke But when it came to colour well It somehow managed to get broke." The really Some clothes are irrepressible, ineradicable, autocratic. Chignons, chimney-pot hats, and crinoline, are garbs that man and womankind have vainly endeavoured to emancipate themselves from. But they are immortal and indestructible. Smoke is equally powerful, and possesses as much tenacity of life. Railway companies have fulminated their bye-laws against it, but every railway station in the kingdom has an odour of departed pipes about it. Ladies set their faces against it, but have begun to learn that to banish the pipe is to exile the THE NATIONAL GALLERY. (Mary Ann Hoggins to Amelia Hodge.) MY DEAR 'MEELY.-This comes hopining to find you as it leave me at preasunt, and why you should keep a-stickin' down in that precious dull place of a Pogely Rugis when there's places as misseses is cryin' their eyes out for to get survents in London is to me nothink but americal. Not but what places here, except where you git into a fam'ly where a footman is kep', is but a lite little better than a black neger, as I always says survice is no inhenrytance, but SAM, he says, "Wait a bit," and w'en his aunt dies as he shall go into a public house if not the general line, which his callin' now is a animal purweya, better known as cat's meat, and a good ready money conexion, with ten lb. in the Post off his Savin's bank. What made me begin about SAMUEL I don't hardly no, 'xcept as it was yesterday my day out and we on that akount met, at least I waited for him at the yousual place as is where I should ha' told you of before; a great building known as the Natural Gallery: and so, as I always says to SAM, a good name too for them as is sitiwated like us. Not but what its tegus a-settin' there on them cane-bottomed forms, as seems somehow not to be made for to give comfort and nothink to look at but a parcel o' picters on the walls, and yet, lor' bless you, the skores as came there to stare at 'em when it's a bright day enuf to see whatever they're about, which I must say as yesterday were one of the loveliest days as even the Natural Gallery itself couldn't look to say dull, and I jest took a glance round as I knew I was ten minits too early for Sam. I was glad as SAM come in when he did, for not seein' no prices put on the picters, I asked a elderly person as was a-lookin' at one, making his double fist into a telescope, as I thought was his playful ways, how much he thought as would be asked for the feller to it, which one on 'em was a portrick of a young woman and the other of a young man, as having a few more things on than a-many as was there, I thought becomin', and what do you think that old party said, but that them picters had cost thousands to the nation, which the Government had bought 'em cheap at that. I looked at him scornful, as haven't been away from the country to be took in like that, and says, "You ought to know better, at your time o' life, to give yourself to such a falsity. As," I says, "I may be country bread, but I've seen a-many better down the City-road as might be had frame and all," I says, "for eleven or twelve shillin's; and I shouldn't mind goin' to thirteen if they'd part 'em, which the young woman is a bold-faced pig, as I wouldn't hang her likeness in no room of mine." "Why," he says, "your in the Natural Gallery, and these pictures is worth millions." "Oh, indeed," I says; "I didn't know as I were a-talking to the proprietor," I says, quite genteel, and makes him a curchy as grand as you please, and so turns on my 'eels, as SAM came up that minnit to know what was up, and I says, "Oh, nothink but a gentleman, or, least ways, a party," I says, "as thinks as he's a-talkin' to a flat," I says, "as is perhaps only natural, when he wants to make me believe as picters worth milliums would be poked away by the Government in a place as the Institute at Pogely Rugis is a pallis to, and a dungeon for darkness, let alone that all the walls is hung higgledy-piggledy, so as nobody can't see nothin' of 'em." I must now conclude, becos I've got no more candle, missis usin' the patent half-hour lights, as goes out sudden and leave you in darkness.Your affectionate MARY ANN HOGGINS. Erratum. IN the Saturday Review of the 14th ult., for "The Girl of the Period" read "The Girl of the Periodical." |