AN UNAPPRECIATED CRICHTON.

JONES has a party to night

But there's no invitation for me to it.

People are cutting me quite;

I shall pay a few visits and see to it.

True, I've a thousand a year,

And am reckoned the pink of propriety;

As to good-looking, look here!

Yet I never get on in Society.

"Tis not as though I were shy,

Or unmannered, or not introducible, Lower bred fellows than I

Have triumphantly gone through the crucible. Many get polished in time

At the cost of a little anxiety;

What's my particular crime

That I never get on in Society?

Dance? Well, I think I may say

I'm as graceful a partner as anyone :

Sir, I could caper away

To a whistle-though simply a penny one. Sing?--I could give you a list

Of enormous extent and variety. Play? Let me show you my wrist; Yet I never get on in Society.

Hearing me talk is a treat,

When I take a discourse philosophic up During the tea, or repeat

Little anecdotes over my coffee-cup.

If you've a passion for puns

I could feed you on them to satiety

New and original ones;

Yet I never get on in Society.

Two or three glasses of wine

Give a spur to good-humour and merriment;

So that, wherever I dine,

I attempt the delightful experiment.

Not that I drink till I lapse

From the paths of the strictest sobriety;

Still, now and then-why, perhaps-

Yet I never get on in Society!

OUR BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY.

BY MOST OF OUR EMINENT AUTHORS.

ABD-EL KADER (Sidi-el-Hadji Ouled-Mahiddin). By CAPTAIN M-YNE R-D. Born in the early part of 1807, in the neighbourhood of Mascara. Valley of Oran, from my boyhood I have known thee well! Come, reader, let us seat ourselves on the snow-clad summit of the mighty Atlas. On every side of us are mountain peaks; in front, the tolerably fertile valley; in the dim distance, the waters of the blue Mediterranean. Overhead soars the aigle (or eagle). Safe on our cloudy pinnacle, and liberally provided with fire-arms, we defy thee, thon tyrant of the air. Ha, ha, thou ravenous bird of prey! Long resisted the armée Française (French army). Was captured in 1847. Imprisoned in France. Fair valley of the Seine, I know thee well! See; yonder goes the humble ouvrier (workman) to the cabaret (publichouse). He quaffs the vin ordinaire (ordinary wine). What a fool he must be! Released by Louis NAPOLEON in 1852. Resides at Damascus, or somewhere else in Asia. Valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, I know thee well! Away, away! ABERCROMBY, SIR RALPH. BY MR. J-MES H-NNAY. Born in 1738, a cadet of an ancient and honourable Scottish house, at Tullibodie, in | Clackmannan. Received a liberal education; ingenuas didicisse fideliter, eh, BRADLAUGH, my boy? Served against France during the ascendancy of the first NAPOLEON-Who fed the revolutionary mob with blood, as you would offer a churl a black pudding. SIR RALPH naturally resisted him, as became an honourable Conservative gentleman. Let us at least give our dads their due-not your dad, POTTER, my son! Let us be fair to them all, following the Ciceronian advice, "Neminem lædere, et suum cuique tribuere." (De Officiis.) Jolly old M. T. C. In 1801 received sailing orders for the Mediterranean. The fine old Caledonian cock was in his sixty-fourth year when, after quaffing his final tumbler with much punctuality, he fought his last battle, and thrashed the Frenchman in the classic neighbourhood of Alexandria. Arms (after the fashion of "canting heraldry")-"A bear," regardant, a quartern loaf, crumby-"crombie," Scotée. Was buried at Malta, where Fitz-Cad of the Teapot (gunboat), as he swills cheap champagne and chaffers with the Jews under the walls of the Castle of

St. Elmo, thinks no more of the grand old Scottish gentleman than of the mail-clad knights of the Order of St. John.

AINSWORTH, WILLIAM HARRISON. BY MR. W-LLIAM H-RRISON A-NSWORTH. Born at Manchester, in February, 1805. Spent most of his early life, after once riding to York, in examining the Tower of London, Windsor Castle, Old St. James', Old St. Paul's, Ovingdean Grange, and other ancient buildings. Spent most of his later life in writing the most delightful fictions of the day. His descriptions of furniture are particularly excellent.

ALISON, SIR ARCHIBALD. BY SIR ARCH-BALD AL-SON. Many volumes will be required in the following endeavour to trace, with the greatest possible succinctness, the career of an historian whose works will be remembered as soon as those of MACAULAY, CARLYLE, and FROUDE shall be forgotten. At his birth, in 1792, Europe was just in the throes of the French Revolution, in eighteen volumes, of which an abridgement has been published for the use of schools; nor would it be possible to understand the principles that have chiefly influenced his career, without a curt summary of the Act of 1826, which, at the time when SIR ALISON was still in the prime of manly vigour, interdicted the further issue of one-pound notes. To a brief analysis of this ill-judged measure, the next three thousand pages will be devoted, and it will then be easy for us [No, it won't!-ED.]

BROWNING, ROBERT. BY MR. R-BERT BR-WNING. Not where grey lichens crumble on the wall, Or lizards through the twisted grass-roots crawl, Eyes quickly glancing when their sight perceives Insects swift fluttering through serrated leaves, Glaucous in colour as the weeds that lie In rocky basins by the ebb left dry Was MR. BROWNING born! Old nurses tell How the boy first saw light at Camberwell, And stretched his arms, impatient, to the sun. Of many poems that he wrote, the one Least understood and cared for by the herd Was hight "Sordello." Critics, with absurd Indifference to merit, swore that it Was unintelligible, every bit. He let them rail; RABBI BEN EZRA wrote:-"Star-blossoms, earth-mocked, twinkle." Do you note ? Hence, for the moral of his verse, confess, Incomprehensible its loftiness. So, there's my fable ended; for the rest, Blue-flowering borage, nitrous, is the best.

SONG FOR MUSIC.

I HEARD your voice at early dawn,
When soft the breeze was blowing,
And night's dark curtains were withdrawn
By Phoebus' fingers glowing-

'Twas you, I know, cried "Milk below". And then I heard you going.

I hailed your voice, so sweet to me
It has my pleasure's sum in it.
Until adown the street, you see,
Your voice comes, all is dumb in it;
For I await my milk at eight,
Because I then take rum in it.

Very Extraordinary.

A LITTLE while since, RENE LARTIQUE, a celebrated gourmand of Paris, who spent a third of his life at dinner, died of a fit of indigestion. The Paris correspondent of one of our contemporaries describes him in the strongest terms:

"His dress was most wretched-his shoes broken, his trousers torn, his paletot without any lining and patched, his waiste at without buttons, his hat red rusty from old age, and the whole surmounted by a dirty white beard.""

It is a pity that so great a curiosity could not have been prevailed realized enough to supply him with dinner all day long, by exhibiting on to survive until the Exhibition. We doubt not he might have himself to those who would pay to see a man with a dirty white beard growing on the top of his hat.

Hey-Day!

THE organ of Liberal Constitutionalism or Constitutional Liberalism (you pay your money for your journal and may take your choice-one term means just as much, and as little, as the other) is ably written and well conducted. It works the particular oracle of its party with tact, and its criticisms and its literary department generally are good. It can also appreciate a joke. But when it did us the honour to adopt in its leader on Tuesday, the 2nd of April, our joke about MR. MILL and the Rat-catcher's Daughter Franchise, from our issue of the previous Wednesday, we should have better appreciated the honour if the quotation had been acknowledged.

REFLECTION.-By a Teetotaller.

MODESTY is like a sober flower-it takes no more than its due.

MEN WE MEET.

BY THE COMIC PHYSIOGNOMIST.

[

WIGS AND WHISKERS.

HE C. P. has by implication pledged himself, as it were, to provide each chapter of his work with something in the shape of an epigrammatic heading. "Wigs and Whiskers" is short and alliterative, and so far it fulfils the conditions which such a heading demands. But the C. P. is bound to admit that as it stands it does not quite convey an accurate idea of the matters of which he intends to treat in this chapter. For "Wigs," read natural heads of hair; and for "Whiskers," read the hair that grows on the faces of men, whether that hair be allowed to grow in its native free

dom, or whether it be trimmed into the shape of whiskers, or moustache, or imperial, or beard, or all, or any of these. And the C. P. has often had occasion to remark that many gentlemen of higher consideration than himself, who have acquired a reputation for epigram, continually find themselves under the necessity of supplementing their definitions with a dozen lines of explanation whenever they employ them as the texts upon which they found their discourses. Epigram is an intellectual short-hand which is tolerably easy to write, but extremely difficult to understand when once

written.

There lies before the C. P. a volume which contains the crude notions on the subject of Physiognomy, which he gave to the world a few years since, and to which he has more than once had occasion to refer in contemptuous terms. In that volume, the curious reader may light upon a page which is devoted to the consideration of the very matters which form the subject of the present chapter. It will supply the curious reader with an interesting study, if he takes the trouble to compare the incoherent expressions of the C. P.'s then immature ideas on the subject with the sounder offspring of his ripened intellect, embodied in the chapter which he is now engaged in writing.

The C. P. proposes now, as he proposed then, to take a hairless man as the basis of his remarks. But the philosopher's increased experience in the study of Mankind has taught him to take a much wider view of the subject of hair and beard than

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assume, as he assumed in 1863, that the gentleman in the blanket is a popular for actor, who is going to "make up nine different characters. To accomplish this, he has whiskers, moustachios, beards, and imperials of several varieties, together with the costumes necessary to his purpose. The C. P. does not propose to dilate upon the characteristics of his various disguises. He has sketched them in the margin, and, after a few words of introduction, he proposes to allow them to tell their own tales.

decent mechanic. It is difficult to say why He begins, say, with No. 1, who is a the decent mechanic prefers to shave his cheeks and his upper lip, and to allow the hair to grow around and beneath his chin as it pleases, just as it is difficult to trace the origin of any class custom so accurately as to be able to assign a reason for it.

No. 2 is, say, a Cabinet Minister. The difference between the appearance of the Cabinet Minister and the decent mechanic is entirely due to such causes as every actor has at his command. The C. P. has taken the same bare head for both subjects, and the difference between them is attributable entirely to wig, whiskers, and costume.

he did on the twelfth day of December, eighteen hundred and sixtythree. It has taught him that the hair and beard, although they modify the human countenance to an astonishing degree, must not be taken by themselves alone. They must be taken in connection with the general dress, figure, and physical bearing of their wearers, which are affected by the same influences as those which affect the disposition of the hair upon the head and face. There is a certain form of whisker which is associated only with a particularly prim style of dress; a certain form of beard which is always to be found in company with a loose and slovenly costume, and so forth. Show the C. P. a man's face. and he will tell you how he is dressed. He may be wrong in matters of unimportant detail, but his general impression as to the man's dress will be correct. Influenced by these considerations, he has not only taken a hairless man as his propositus, but he has taken a man who is not only hairless but unclothed. He has wrapped him, for propriety's sake, in a blanket, and stuck him into the initial T to this chapter, because he is the text upon which the philosopher's discourse is to turn. The C. P. will

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No. 3 is, perhaps, a getter up of public companies. The same head but with the showy hair, active, mobile eyebrow, and flashy whisker of an ad captantum orator.

No. 4 is a Linesman. His whiskers and moustache are trimmed to order. He has very little option in the matter. His hair is necessarily kept short, and he is obliged to keep his chin free from beard. Shave him, strip him, and wrap him in a blanket, and he is our friend in the initial.

No. 5 is a Civil Engineer, or, perhaps a Contractor. His full, rough beard is usually associated with rough, loose clothes, and a rough, untidy hat. He has a great deal too much upon his mind to allow of his wasting a minute for the consideration of so unimportant a matter as his personal appearance. Anything that is big and loose, and will allow him plenty of room to move about in, will do for him.

No. 6 is an artist, and belongs to a peculiar type of semi-fashionable artist which affects a French or Italian exterior. It is difficult to understand how any Englishman, who has ever seen a Frenchman, could possibly wish to dress like one; but the C. P. accepts the fact as he finds it. Artists, singers, and acrobats are the only people, as far as his observation

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