THE KIND OF PEOPLE WHO TAKE SO MUCH INTEREST IN THE NOBLE GAME OF CRICKET: THEY WOULD NOT MISS IT FOR THE WORLD! PRUSSIAN POT AND FRENCH KETTLE.. In this unhappy event of a war between France and Prussia, we shall of course do all we can to preserve the most perfect neutrality. We certainly feel it. Our sympathies with the one side and the other are, strong as they are, exactly equal. As regards the Prussians we take a warmly admiring interest in the course of aggrandisement which their King and his BISMARCK [have been pursuing of late years, but most chiefly do we applaud its first step-the attack on Denmark, and the forcible annexation therefrom of the two Duchies. The immense number of Danes slain by the Prussian needle-guns commands our approbation only less than our wonder; but what crowns the sentiments with which we regard the spoliation and destruction of the Danes is the piety wherewith the author of those achievements solemnly expressed his thankfulness for having been permitted to accomplish them. One brother once knelt with MRS. FRY in Newgate. The other might have knelt with MRS. COLE. On the other hand, with respect to France, we cannot but feel how much we owe to the French Imperial Government for the improvement which, by the menacing armaments it has kept up now for so many years, it has occasioned us to make in our national defences. But we have higher reasons for sympathy with France than considerations which are merely insular and selfish. The great principles of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality have been professed by France more enthusiastically and more loudly than by any other European nation; and we behold their standing reduction to practice in the occupation of Rome, and the declaration that the chief of Italian cities shall never belong to Italy. The foregoing reasons should satisfy any Prussian and any Frenchman of the perfect impartiality with which Englishmen must contemplate hostilities between their respective nations. PRESENTS OF MIND.-MILL'S Works. A COCKALORUM'S HAPPY THOUGHT. DEAR REDACTEUR, DYNGWELL'S account of the present crisis in continental affairs. He I CAN'T help sending you this. It is my friend CAPTAIN is much interested in the movements of France and Prussia, as it was some time since a happy thought with him to enter the service of either country in order to see some fighting and learn the art of war. read the paper in bed, and says He comes into my room, having, according to his old habit at Aix, "Here's a go! Old Cockalorum LOUIS says he means to hustle 'em a bit, and GLADSTONE got up in the House last night and said he was very much afraid that it was a case of pickles." This he announces perfectly seriously, as if it were a report straight out of Hansard. Hansard made easy. He continues: There's a regiment of French Lancers sent off to the front, wherever that may be; so the gay young Cockalorum, who thought he'd be quite the Spaniard, won't go on the scoop this journey.' I suggest that Prince What's-his-name (being the pleasantest form of pronouncing the Prussian Cockalorum's title) will be in a peculiarly awkward position. "Yes," says the Captain, meditatively, with his glass well in his eye, "I think he'll find himself rather in a cart." I think, perhaps, that from time to time it would be rather a happy thought to send you CAPTAIN DYNGWELL'S opinion on things in general and anything in particular. Yours, H. T. Rather Too Much of a Good Thing. MRS. MALAPROP, when visiting the South Kensington Museum on one of the hottest days of this hot month, thought it rather an unseasonable proposal that she should be asked to go into the "Grill" Room. MRS. M. abstains from arduous spirits during the warm weather. FRANCE. "PRAY STAND BACK, MADAM. YOU MEAN WELL; BUT THIS IS AN OLD FAMILY QUARREL, AND WE MUST FIGHT IT OUT!" PRECAUTION TAKEN BY HALVES. CCORDING to the report of "At this stage the Court was Why? What had the jury done? Wherefore were they thus subjected to a most disgusting imprisonment? Of necessity, by a good old usage of English law. If they were not thus shut up, they would, of course, be liable to be intimidated or bribed; and it is certain that they would perjure themselves for fear, or favour, or the sake of gain, and ill and untruly try, and a false verdict give, in contrariety to the evidence for or against the prisoner, and according to the side whereon they were influenced by corruption or terror, as the case might be. telescopic eye-every leaf on the tree, every page in the book of nature; the nests and notes of birds; the dissolute habits of the self-satisfied bee, the careless prodigality of the over-praised ant; the parishes to which different beetles belong; the shape and colour of the cloud hanging over your neighbour. Come back refreshed and renovated, like a silk which has been cleaned, and sit down to your meal, however homely, with a thankful heart, a vigorous appetite, a sound digestion, and a bottle of the far-famed and world-renowned Nottinghamshire Sauce, to be had of every respectable grocer, chemist, and Italian warehouseman in the United Kingdom."-WHITE of Selborne. "How changed the scene from that dear day c TRUTHFUL TALES. CRABBE. Such being incontestably the corruptibility and cowardliness of British jurymen, it is fearful to think what an amount of injustice must be done, and perjury committed, in delivering untrue verdicts, by juries empanelled on cases of mere misdemeanour or civil action. Because in these they have not to be locked up, although they are DR. NEWTON, the healing medium" from America (U.S.) proquite as likely, and as open, to be bought or dastardised as they are in fesses to cure diseases partly by mesmerism, and partly by means of cases of felony. Happily, it does not often happen that a nobleman has to be tried spirits-disembodied, not alcoholic. Hence the spiritualist newspapers by his peers like LORD FERRERS, or the late EARL OF CARDIGAN. The have been devoting much of their space to the publication of his alleged latter got off, though he notoriously had shot his man; and everybody cures, of which here is one :— would naturally have supposed that he owed his escape to the exemption of noble lords from being locked up, if his trial had lasted over one night. "MRS. BREAKSPEARE, 73, Cromer Street, Gray's Inn Road. Her baby, twelve months old, had curvature of the spine for the last six months. The curvature entirely disappeared in one minute, under the hands of DR. NEWTON." British judges, too, are composed of the same flesh and blood as British jurymen. Their charge generally determines conviction or To confute every gainsayer of spiritual therapeutics, this case only acquittal. My Lords are not less accessible to undue influences than requires confirmation. There can be no mistake about spinal curvagentlemen of the jury. When, the question yet remains to be asked-ture, duly vouched for. If the fact of the curvature of the spine having when will an improvement upon ancient usage by modern legislation, existed antecedently to the child's coming under the hands of DR. as often as a jury must needs be locked up, also lock up the judge? NEWTON, and then having disappeared, so as to have been, ha ha! cured in a minute, were only attested by but one metropolitan hospital surgeon, it is not too much to say that the whole medical profession would believe in the curative powers of DR. NEWTON, and advise the British Public to credit them too. The entire faculty would pin upon DR. NEWTON as undoubting a faith as that which it reposes in rhubarb. As it is, doctors, and sane persons generally, will have their doubts about the cure of MRS. BREAKSPEARE'S baby. But let not spiritualists too hastily call them sceptics. The subjoined statement is one which few, probably, of even the most incredulous of medical men, will be inclined to doubt: THOUGHTS OF GREAT MEN. (Now first Collected.) "LOVE! What a volume in every letter, what a library, in the whole four combined! All nations, languages, dynasties, complexions, and climates prostrate themselves at its cosmopolitan shrine, and spare no expense to please the object of their affections. Men have crossed oceans and Isthmuses of Suez for woman's sake, and come back crossed in love themselves; women have sought one, the beloved, at the world's end, and been parted from him for ever at the end of a fortnight; and men and women and police-constables have smiled and sighed, have toyed and tiffed in that flowery area where the little archer reigns supreme, and Cupid has always arrows on sale, and gone through a sea of trouble and Basinghall Street, because they would marry on an insufficient income and without their parents' consent."ADAM SMITH. "Be kind to nobody, but allow everybody, to be kind to you. Always borrow, never lend. Conceal your own ignorance, but make a point of exposing the ignorance of others. Flatter to the face, abuse behind the back. Earn a sovereign, spend a guinea. Don't go to bed at all, and always get up late. Turn night into day, and your old clothes into money. You can only skate in the winter, you can backslide all the year round. Pay a man off in his own coin, but owe him a grudge. There are three things you should never take-a hint, advice, and a glass of cold water when you are hot. You cannot give youth his latch-key too early. You need not be cruel, but you may back bite. Dissemble: never show your teeth except to your dentist."DR. WATTS. "Exercise is conducive to health, and an agreeable country ramble is the best dinner-pill. Observe all you see in your rural walks with a "On the first morning a lame Irishman came, using a wooden leg, his natural limb projecting out behind him, bent at the knee; with much labour the doctor unstrapped the wooden auxiliary, and sent away the gratified and grateful Hibernian with it on his shoulder." This, now, is a case about which there can be no reasonable question. We have not the slightest difficulty in believing that the incidents of it, as related by an eye-witness, actually occurred. Indeed, we can conceive nothing more likely, under the circumstances, than that a man did limp into the presence of DR. NEWTON with a bent knee and a wooden leg, and walk out of it with the knee straight and the wooden leg on his shoulder; especially an Irishman. Of all men we should think that an Irishman would be the likeliest to exhibit so prodigious an instance of spiritual healing. THE BOOMPJE PAPERS. Of course, when we meet the Great Boompje MAULLIE, afterwards at Antwerp, he exclaims "What! not seen the Belfry! Not seen the Gymnasium! Why, my dear fellows, you've missed the only things you ought to have seen.' But this we set down (subsequently) to Boompje. Before MAULLIE and his hat had appeared, GooсH is horrified at the appearance of MR. JöMP, the Courier. He says he doesn't mind it while travelling, and, when we were at Lille, driving round the town in a fly, with JöMP on the box, in the entr'acte allowed us (by MR. JÖMP's excellent management, who had so contrived our journey that there was no station where we didn't stop a quarter of an hour at least -with nothing whatever to do, and no buffet-"Vell," said the inventive JöMP, "um-um-um-you can valk about.") between the arrival and departure of the trains; but now we are at Ghent, a town, and with a dashing carriage (it certainly is that), and a coachman in livery, with a new cockade, he must protest against JöMP being on the box, unless he has a costume. What sort of dress? we ask. Well, he has seen the sort of thing he means in the Bois, and on a foreign ambassador's, or some foreign swell's, carriage in Hyde Park. He proposes something military. (Boompje.) First proposed dress-Rejected on account of being too much like a French maréchal on the box. Second proposed dress-Rejected on account of its being painful to MR. JÖMP's feelings to appear in a footman's dress. "But it won't be a footman's dress," explains GooсH, "when you get the colours." Thirdly-Gooch recollected a Polish count, whose servant used to appear at Baden in various uniforms. Boompje argument: "Why not be taken for Polish Counts? "The dress of a Chasseur," says GooсH, "would be distingué, and old JöMP wouldn't mind that." Old JöMP does mind it, however; but owns that his present appearance is not all that could be desired. "I would vear anoder hat," he explains, "um-um-um-" and then adds, after carefully thinking it out, "if I 'ad vun." JöMP can't say fairer than this, THE POPEDOM AND THE PEOPLES. THE People everywhere is King; For if they have their monarchs still, Save only by French aid in Rome, Where Priest and King the POPE doth reign, And plots, the rule, supreme at home, Over lost kingdoms to regain. Is Heaven's Vicegerent to prevail, To win the nations back again, It seems to minds of common ken If Rome the science could confute Which, if Rome speak the truth, 's untrue, Then might Rome's faith again take root, And her dominion spread anew. Her priests at heretics might smile; Infallibility, proclaimed, Will but impose upon the flock Whose reason, to submission tamed, No nonsense which they're taught can shock. Not till the POPE has proof to show Again will Europe kiss his toe. Wimbledon Whimsies. On the opening day of the Camp at Wimbledon, according to a contemporary, "LORD GODERICH made six bulls' eyes and a large number of centres." The juvenile reader will perhaps understand that the centres were not sweetmeats, and that the bull's eyes partook rather of the pop than the lolly. evidently. Even the philosophic BAYLE, who died in a house on the Boompje, would have been satisfied with this as logical. GOOCH's opinion is, that MR. JöMP resembles a travelling pedlar with umbrellas to mend. This comes from our having given him our umbrellas and our satchels to carry for us. The shape of his hat probably arises from its having been slept in the greater part of the way, and sat upon during the rest. This is the compromise procured in Ghent at a tailor's. A livery coat, formerly the property of a duchess, but sent back because the family had gone into the deepest mourning. Black, with yellow facings, and black tags to shoulders. High black hat, with gold band: cockade, black and yellow. His (MR. JOMP's) own collars and black tie, also, waistcoat and trousers à discrétion. Sunday at Ghent.-First day of Courier in livery. We attend early masses at various old Churches; driving up in our carriage, and JöMP waiting at the Church doors (Boompje); [GooсH and BUND behaving decorously, and not bringing Boompje principles into play while the people are engaged in their services] and finally, after breakfast, we drive to the Béguinage, the College of Nuns, who live in a little town of their own, take no vows, stay as long or as short as they like, occupy themselves in nursing and teaching, and so forth, and wear a white sort of towel on their heads, which, six hundred of them, one after the other, as they enter Church, unfold and spread, one after another, all in one action, over their heads, and then just drawing down the front to cover their noses, devotionally, retire to their seats. We three, and four others of our sex, are the only men in the Church. We shrink into as small a space as possible, and keep near the door, with the view of retiring noiselessly should there be a sermon. It is admitted on all hands, that, at all events, there is no Boompje here. "The Béguins are not the sort of people to put a Courier into livery," observes the Secretary to GooсH. GOOCH objects to this, that they do wear a livery. This leading to no issue, the conversation drops. GOOCH presently says that up till this moment he had always thought the Béguins were birds. COMMODORE BUND supposes he's thinking of Penguins. GoocH considers it not unlikely. Conversation number two dropped. |