Mr. Brown. "OH! YOU'RE SURE NOW YOU KNOW THE GENTLEMAN of one of the oldest and most Mrs. Grimes. "HI KNOWS 'IM RIGHT ENOUGH. popular actors of the Comédie WY, I DOES ALL 'Is Française may be summed up in two words, GOT: gone." details as to the time in which they were designed, but we should THE Daily Graphic of February 1, commenting on the time-con- From the "Magazine of Art." The Directors of the Aquarium are to be congratulated on their new departure, which takes the form of a highly exciting and sportsmanlike contest between those two well-known entertainers Professor HERR KOMER and Señor HARDLI DUDDI in their great poster-painting exhibition. This consists of a trial of strength and endurance, the challenger, Señor DUDDI, having given out that he will beat Professor KOMER's previous record in time and area combined by one hour and a hundred square yards. As the public are well aware, the latter performer's sensational achievement, "Miss Letty Lind,' stands at present unbeaten as an artistic poster, having far eclipsed his "All Beautiful in Naked Purity," which attracted such attention on the Royal Academy hoardings last year. As to time, his LIND tour de force (shown at the Society of Portrait Painters at the New Gallery last autumn) was painted in one continuous whirl or sitting of fifty hours duration, and would have taken even longer, had not the accomplished danseuse fainted from exhaustion. (It is understood, by the way, that Miss LIND has issued a challenge that she will pirouette against the world, including Lord YARMOUTH and Little TICH.) As the Aquarium contest will not be concluded until after we go to press, we cannot give the result, but at the time of writing, after three days' painting without cessation, Mr. KOMER had covered a hundred yards of advertisement hoarding. Both were going well and strong, the only people showing signs of exhaustion being the umpires and spectators. From the "Sporting Times." What will our dear friends of the Anti-Sporting League say to this? Here's yet another form of iniquity, the Poet Stakes at the Aquarium! We looked in last night at that classic abode, and found them all hard at it in the Bijou Theatre. We soon made a pretty book, and only regret we hadn't entered BALLYHOOLY and Doss CHIDERDOSS. A black-haired colt was making the pace with what he called "beautiful prose music," quite as good as any we turn out in our first page. But the backers rather fancied a Chestnut Pegasus, who was going well within his stride with his "Odes and Poems.' There were one or two other dark horses in the field, that we put down for a place. That worthy and veteran sportsman, and cutest of tipsters, G. ALLEN, wielded the flag, and got his little lot off, as we were told, with only ten false starts. We left at the tittyseventh hour, when the leaders had completed two hundred and twenty laps of very blank verse and other paces, it being a go-asyou-please contest. A sonnet divided the first and second, and there was an epigram and a half between the second and the third. Señor DUDDI has hitherto made his mark with presentments of As it promised to be a long-winded affair, and rather too noisy for ultra-chic young ladies, which have certainly taken up a great deal our refined and delicate constitutions, we retired early. We give of space, and fulfilled their purpose as eye-openers. We have noth odds, however, on another page. 1 ESSENCE OF PARLIAMENT. EXTRACTED FROM THE DIARY OF TOBY, M.P. Tuesday, February 5.-House filled once more with bustle of new Session. Lobby crowded. Corridors, long silent, burst into bustling life. "Seems to me," says JEMMY LOWTHER, looking on with his juvenile-veteran air, "that the happiest day in a member's life is the first of a Session, if indeed the cup of his joy isn't fuller on the day of prorogation." For some the jubilation of the hour is toned down by saddened thought. There is one step that will never more be heard in the lobby, one familiar face seen here no more, one voice, wont to sway the passions of the House, that now is still. LYCIDAS is dead, not quite ere his prime, but in what, had fate been kinder, should have been the fulness of his rich gifts. The House knew GRANDOLPH, as he presented himself to its notice from various points of view. First, an unknown new Member, rising from bench immediately behind Ministers, a situation which, deliberately chosen, seemed to observant Whips to indicate pleasurable prospect of docility. Next, whilst his Party was still in office, he popped up from front bench below gangway, and pricked at ponderous hide of SCLATER-BOOTH, pink of respectability, sublimation of countygentry Toryism. Then, with sudden brilliancy and sustained force, he rose on the firmament below the gang way in Opposition, tilting almost single-handed at the panoplied host, a majority over a hundred strong, that seemed to make Mr. G.'s second Administration invulnerable. For a moment in a famous night in June he was seen standing jubilant on his seat at the corner of the bench, waving his hat, shouting himself hoarse with cries of victory. From this elevation he sprang lightly on to the Treasury Bench, and astonished Members who, with him. had heard the chimes at midnight and after, by the quiet dignity of his manner, his unerring tact, bis unfailing skill of manage ment. Never since the time Prince Hal, boon companion of Falstaff, became King Henry the Fifth, has there been seen such transformation. Never was such a sudden scholar made; Never came reformation in a flood, With such a heady currance, scouring faults; Nor never Hydra-headed wilfulness Prevalent hilarity suggests care of crowded passenger ship, having been in imminent danger of shipwreck, suddenly steams into comparatively placid seas. "If," says WILFRID LAWSON, an authority on Church matters, "it were customary to commence the Session by singing a hymn Í know what SQUIRE OF MALWOOD would give out. It's the one beginning And are we still alive And see each other's face? Thought it was to be all over before Christmas; Cabinet broken up; everybody retiring; Parliament dissolved; demoralised Party finally smashed up at polls; the other side left to settle who was to be who in best of all Governments. Instead of which,' as the Judge said, here we are in for a long Session, with, as usual, more work on hand than could be done in two." D "So you haven't resigned after all?" I remarked, getting up on a chair to have a chat with the SQUIRE OF MALWOOD. "Et tu, TOBY!" he cried. "I thought better of your intelligence. I welcome re-opening of Session for one thing. Obliged to be in my place every night. Whilst House is sitting people will see I haven't resigned. That should-don't know that it will -check to certain extent what at Derby I ventured distantly to allude to as mendacious inventions. I have, as you know, had a somewhat troublesome time during recess. Rarely got up in morning but found by newspapers I had resigned overnight. Seldom I went to bed without conviction derived from glancing over evening papers that I had upset the Ministerial coach-I, the mildest mannered man that ever sat in Cabinet Council. Daresay you remember incident in almost equally troubled career of LOUIS THE SIXTEENTH. When he was brought back to Paris and lodged in Tuileries after his flight to Varennes, the sans-culottes, Messieurs et Madames, could not sleep in their beds at night from apprehension that king had again escaped. They used to make up little fmily parties, stroll down to Tuileries, mass themselves before the King's bedroom window, and call upon LOUIS CAPET to show himself. The King therenpon got out of bed, put on red Cap of Liberty and showed himself at the window. Mes enfants,' he said, 'you see I am here.' Très bien,' said Monsieur, Madame, et le Bébé, and trudged back content to the Faubourg St. Antoine. Now that was all very well for a King. But you know, TOBY, it can't be expected of me in so-called holiday times to be constantly attending knocks at the front door, or even getting up in the dead of night, showing myself at the window, and saying, My good newspaper friends, I have not resigned.'" Business done.-Just commenced. "MR. R-S-B-RY'S" DREAM. Mr. R-s-b-ry. "Hullo! Where's the House of Lords?" So soon did lose his seat, and all at once, The succeeding Session had a fresh surprise. It found our GBANDOLPH, self-reduced to the ranks, caressing his moustache on the corner seat behind the Treasury Bench. After a while he wearied of the invidious position, and went off to the races, to Norway a-fishing, to South Africa to observe the ways of lions from precarious proximity. But his heart was, after all, at Westminster. He came back broken in health, undaunted in spirit. Nothing pluckier, nothing more pathetic seen in the House than his long stubborn fight against the paralysis that crept over him even as he stood at the table and tried to weave again the magic spell by which he once held the House. He died as he lived, fighting, keeping Death at arm's length for a full month after the highest authorities had said it was a mistake to be such an unconscionably long time in dying. The House of Commons will know GRANDOLPH no more. But it will never forget one who will through all time rank among the most brilliant of its sons. ་་ "THE PORTRAIT OF NOBODY."-When the signature "OUTIS" first appeared to a pamphlet or an article, people wondered "who 'tis ?" and "'ow 'tis he knows all about it?" The signature appearing again to an article in The New Review, No. 69, suggests that though the author has an anti-scriptural objection to a single-eyed individual, perhaps 'OUTIS simply indicates a person who, with the majority of us, detests an egotist. Only one would hardly gather this explanation of the assumption of this classic and poetic signature from the style of the article. NOT A GILT-EDGED SECURITY.-The investment of Wei-hai Something decidedly hysterical about jubilation of the hour. wei. |