F course as everybody Kensington clique, and is to be held in the Botanical Gardens! There's only one thing more needed to ensure its success, and that is that MR. PALGRAVE, who compiled the notorious handbook of the Exhibition of '62, should be employed to do the catalogue and write the lives-he'd do it with such taste and judgment. I DON'T often prophesy, but I look confidently for the time when the Anti-Game Law people will erect a statue to SIR BALDWIN LEIGHTON. His statute for turning the rural police into gamekeepers has done what all their years of agitation have failed to do. It has shaken the Game Laws, and I think now there is some hope of their being revised to good purpose. LORD PALMERSTON is dead. He died within two days of his eightyfirst birthday. It is hardly two months since I saw him cantering down Piccadilly on his famous old white horse. His vigour and spirits seem to have supported him to the last. His death is a loss not only to his party, but to the country, which he made to be respected and feared in foreign lands, where the name of England was once a byword. He was a genuine Englishman and he himself could wish no nobler epitaph than that. As I write these lines the last mas there are Ast-photographic portrait taken of him, by MESSRS. WALKER, of Margaretley's, the St. James's, street, lies before me. It is an excellent likeness. and the Princess's. And for those who like anything that's good, whether new or old, there are the MR. STODARE has produced a new puzzle-the Sphynx-and a most perplexing one it is. If it is a human head where is the body?-and if it isn't why, it is a triumph of mechanism. MR. STODARE is an adept at sleight of hand, but if he takes my advice he will curtail the ventriloquial part of his entertainment, and discontinue the sale of a very catchpenny book of tricks. He can succeed without these, for he is the neatest conjuror I have seen since HERMANN. THERE's a new toy called Pharaoh's serpent, which is all the rage just now. It consists of a small cone, about the size of a large pastile, covered with tinfoil. On lighting the apex a writhing and seemingly endless coil, something like a pale puff adder, pours from it. The toy has two advantages: it is a very amusing surprise, and as it is of a poisonous nature you can, if you are an old bachelor and hate children, take them to your friends' houses and make a clean sweep of their growing families, by allowing the youngsters to inhale the fumes or put the serpents in their mouths. I HAVE had forwarded to me some doggrel on the Freemasons, for quoting a few lines of which I trust that honourable body will pardon me "Weep, brother Masons, weep, weep for your sins. The party guilty of this execrable trash describes himself as "M.A., MR. HAZLITT'S NOVEL. A MACARONIC. THERE's a book written It isn't a fit 'un For drawing-room storey. And one or two morey, Pro tristi auctore, And "Trash" adds Corrector. "I'll get it," says Lector. "If you were wiser Try a man, But never belie a man, GAM-GEE-WO! A COMMISSION has very properly been appointed to inquire into what penny-a-liners still call the Rinderpest; but the list of its members that has been published in our serious contemporaries is inaccurate. We have great pleasure in presenting our readers with A COWRECT LIST OF THE COWMISSIONERS. There! I AM Sorry to see that the National Portrait Exhibition suggested by LORD DERBY has been allowed to fall into the hands of the South twice? BISHOP COWLENSO. THE RIGHT HONOURABLE W. COWPER, M.P. MISS BURDETT COWTTS. SIR EDWARD LYTTON BULLWER, M.P. MR. HORSEMAN, M.P. MR. WILKIE COWLINS. ARCHBISHOP COWLEN, of Dublin. DR. COWMING. MR. PETER COWNINGHAM. MR. J. D. CoWLERIDGE, M.P. MR. HENRY COWLE, C.B. MR. GEORGE COWRUIKSHANK. Will you be good enough to pronounce the last name A GENTLE LIFE; OR, LEAVES FROM THE DIARY OF A "GUSHER.” January 1.-Another glorious year dawns on me. Oh, I mean to be so happy! I love everything and everybody. What a fairylike place the world is to be sure! I grow fonder of my fellow-creatures every day. The mere fact of being alive almost maddens me with unutterable rapture. It appears like an intoxicating dream. I adore mankind and beastkind; for they are beautiful and good. Why should I tread upon a worm? Ah, my dear brothers and sisters of both hemispheres, let us all be very tender and very generous to each other. Let us extend our sympathies to the solar system, shall we? February 1.-To-day I have been grieved-very deeply grievedby a sad spectacle of human infirmity. I was walking down Fleetstreet-ah, my darling old burly lexicographer, you also loved the spot!-when I beheld a couple of boys disputing. Yes; there was the effulgent orb of day looking down upon them, and yet they quarrelled. One of them, I hear, had spoken slightingly of the other; for a bystander assured me, on his oath, that the word "fool" had been made use of. How it made my heart ache to see one of those innocents raise his clenched hand and strike the other upon the nose. This is no fable for I saw the blood! Ah, me! Why cannot we love and cherish one another? March 1.-I received a letter from the obliging creature who makes clothes for me. Poor soul, he is in want of money. I have scolded him for not writing to me earlier; and I trust that the bank-notes I forwarded may be of service to him. I felt a pang at parting with so much; but why should my fellow creatures be unhappy? No doubt somebody will give me money when I want it! That will be very soon. April 1.-There is much harmless mirth to-day at the expense of the confiding and simple-minded. But I cannot bear to hear the name of "fool" applied, even in jest, to such a glorious creature as man. What is a fool? I never saw one. We must overlook the failings of our neighbours, or the world will cease to be a perfect paradise. May 1.-The flowers are going to blossom. Dear, delicious flowers! I confess that I never look at a daisy without crying. But how sweet it is to cry now and then! When I was a baby I cried constantly, and they gave me sugar-plums. How kind and generous people always are to those in distress! June 1.-My landlord-as delightful a being as ever drew the breath of life-tells me that I owe him nearly two years' rent. How time flies in this happy world of ours! Poor fellow! it made me weep to see him so disappointed. If I were a rich man nobody should be in want. Still I do not think he was justified in threatening to deprive me of liberty. Are we not inhabitants of the same lovely universe? Does not the same sun shine on us both? But no; surely he would never be so ill-natured and cross as to lock me up!" He loves me too much for that! * October 1.-Confound it, I shall have to go through the court. What an infernal nuisance! To think of that old humbug, THREADNEEDLE, having the impudence to talk about an "instalment." As if I hadn't enough to bother me without a miserable tailor's bill. But I don't care, after all, if I can only scrape tin enough together to go down and see the mill between JERRY CONK and the CHICKEN. By the way, I wish I could get one of those brutal managers to look at my burlesque. I'm sure it's just the sort of thing to suit the Olympic. They seem to go in for elegance there! That good-looking chap I met at SLOMAN'S when I was locked up for the rent said that burlesques were all the rage. Ah, we had some jolly nights in Cursitor-street. What an ass I was before I went to old SLOMAN'S. November 1.-By Jove, another late night. How I pitched into A 299 when he told me that three o'clock a.m. wasn't the proper time to go about howling comic songs. Ha, this is what I call "seeing life," with a vengeance! I wonder whether IKEY means to do that bill for me-the old, sixty-per-cent. ruffian. I can soon make it all right when something turns up. By jingo, this head of mine spins round like a teetotum; I must have one more bottle of Seltzer, or else I shan't be able to go anywhere to-night, and I suppose we shall find something to do in the way of a lark. December 1.-That muff of a doctor says that if I'm not more careful he won't answer for the consequences. Nonsense; I don't believe in doctors, nor in anybody else. Why, I've been ill three weeks, and not a soul comes to see me. Where's HARRY, I wonder, the ungrateful hound-I lent him a sovereign before I was laid up. Bother this cough, I wish I could get rid of it. Well, I can't write any more now. I shall give up keeping a diary as soon as this miserable year comes to an end. Thank goodness, there's not much more of it to come! WHY is CHANG the laziest man in the world ?-Because, on account of his height, he lies the longest in bed. PALMERSTON. Ост. 18 тн, 1865. A CHIEFTAIN dead! Let discord cease: Our leader, who so gaily marched before us, From whom our strength was drawn; Yet will we chant no melancholy dirges- Peace now! To-morrow's care no longer urges He is dead; In the fulness When the dim of his time, the close of day, October lights in mist and rain How friends loved him!-and none hated, not e'en those For the arrows of his wit, if they were keen, Of the venom of a sneer, begot of spleen. Dealing blows, and taking blows, with open smile And the downcast of the nations knew the fame Sighing, looked to him for liberty. And he Set them free When he knew that he could strike the one great blowFree them so, Not rivet more the fetters of their woe. Fade, failing year, in fog and gloom, But when an angry rabble cried, His noble qualities review; Go search the world from end to end- TURPIN TYNE has been asked to a conversazione. As he has no dress suit, little BADGER and long KAMMLE lend him a rig between them. This is the result! BAITING FOR FLAT-FISH. WE find the following in the advertising columns of a highly respectable daily cotemporary : ONE THOUSAND POUNDS per Annum for ONE POUND.-Any persons who may be desirous of becoming possessed of the above-named annual income are requested to make an immediate application, enclosing a stamped directed envelope, to, &c. It is perhaps cruel of us to withhold the name of the advertiser from our readers, thus depriving them of the chance of comfortably settling down in life upon an income not by any means to be sneezed at. But we must uphold our rule of not allowing our columns to be made traps for the unwary We must needs content ourselves with the remark that if every person "who may be desirous of becoming possessed of" this very snug little competency will only send his or her sovereign to the advertiser, the said advertiser will certainly have no cause to regret the capital expended in type and printing. The same number of the same paper has an announcement of a certain "Donnybrook Bazaar," which appears to be a species of lottery, with a charge for tickets (entitling the holders to a chance in the drawing), at the low sum of sixpence! In this lottery the principal prize, we are informed, is "A grand cottage" (not piano, but dwellinghouse), "with six rooms, suitably finished for a respectable family, situated on Dalkey-hill; lease for ever, and rent free. Hundreds of other valuable prizes also. Including an Irish jaunting car, DUKE OF LEINSTER pattern, with horse and harness." Again our inexorable rule prevents our stating where tickets are to be applied for, but to any one investing current coin of the realm to the amount of sixpence sterling, in the hopes of obtaining either the freehold cottage, or the Irish jaunting car, DUKE of LEINSTER pattern, &c., we can only wish success. To speak more plainly, we most sincerely "wish he may get it." REMARK CAUSED BY THE HIGH PRICE OF PROVISIONS.-"When shall we three meat again?" I KNOW that my love wears a chignon behind, I know that her eyebrows are pencilled with art, Yes, what if her locks are hooked on by her maid? And though for her bloom MADAME RACHEL be paid, I feel that her cheeks are a chain; Then let her soft contours be nothing but pads, If her heart and affections are free, Interesting Anecdote. (AFTER THE FASHION OF THE OLD JEST BOOKS.) A CERTAIN witty fellow, in company with a writer of his acquaintance, passed by a hoarding whereon was displayed one of the Astley's posters.* "So!" quoth the literary man, "The Child of the Sun! That's PHAETON of course." "Nay," said the wag, pointing to the adapter's name, "not a Phaeton-a BROUGHAM." WHEN is a steamboat like a witness in a trial?-When it is bound to a-pier. No offence intended to the Wild Steed of the Desert. |