Thrice the brindle cat hath mewed.
HAM.-Who dares do more is none.

Silence that dreadful bell!

Who can allay the hungry edge of appetite

By brave imagination of-all my pretty

chickens and their dam

That bell-not to speak profanely-I

second thee; troop on. FAL. Our breakfast-should be made of sterner stuff;

And damned be he who first cries, "Hold, enough!" [Exeunt.] F. W. H.

Galen were relics of barbarism, yet they still practice at the medical college. Paracelsus, with his infamous calomel, still peoples the graveyards with his legalized poison, while Jenner still inoculates the healthiest of our race with the seeds of death."

Next he pointed out the fact that the modern tendency is to discover the strength of the dose :

customs, extravagant living, and the family physician's prescriptions are fast destroying American morality and American constitutions. Fewer marriages and more divorces produce less virtue and more vice. Our modern marriage service should read thus: Clergyman-Will you take this brownstone front, this carriage and span, these diamonds for thy wedded husband? Yes. [Laughter.] Will you take this unpaid milliner's bill, this high waterfall of foreign hair, these affectation accom

"One step more, and Presnitzism, Scheiferdeckerism, will remove all the scales, and poor, faculty-fooled humanity will be emancipated. Hydro-plishments and feeble constitution for pathy is in the science of health what the steamship, the locomotive, gas-light, and the telegraph are in the science of locomotion and progress. [Applause.] Allopathy is the stagecoach, the canal-boat, the tallow-candle system of advancing backwards. [Laughter.]"

We are led to make the quotations less by way of approval than to append to them a sentence of Cobbett's, who once had a fierce quarrel with Dr. Rush, when he wrote as "Peter Porcupine in Philadelphia. Long after, he still remembered the bleeding propensities of the Philadelphia Sangrado. The old animosity creeps out in the following:

"An American counts the cost of powder and shot. If he is deliberate in every thing else, this habit will hardly forsake him in the art of shooting. When the sentimental flesh-eaters hear the report of his gun, they may begin to pull out their white handkerchiefs, for death follows the pull of the trigger with perhaps even more certainty than it used to follow the lancet of Dr. Rush!"

ONE more excerpt from Mr. Train upon the "organized hypocrisy of society" may be allowable:

"He explained this to mean the inculcated sentiment that crime is not in the act, but in getting found out. 'Take the money out of his pocket,' said Smike, but don't break the law.' 'Don't take that flower,' said the bishop to his daughter in the park, 'the policeman may see you.' 'Don't play marbles there on the sidewalk; it is Sunday; come and play in the back yard.' 'Isn't it Sunday in the back yard, mother?' [Laughter.] French fashions, French

thy wedded wife? [Loud laughter.] Yes. Then what mammon has joined together, let the next man run away with, so that the first divorce court may tear them asunder."

A BOOK Comparatively unknown on this side the water, is the Ingoldsby Legends, which, however, is so popular in England that it has reached its eightyeighth thousand. The Rev. RICHARD HARRIS BARHAM, the author, like almost all of our wits, had more than a fair share of the miseries and disappointments of life. One day he broke his right arm, next a leg was so seriously injured as to leave him lame and in pain ever after. Then his children, whom he loved with exceeding tenderness, died one after another-five little hillocks in the village graveyard before the end of it! Amid all this he wrote the most sparkling of ballads, and the wittiest of serio-comic stories. In society he was celebrated for repartees, although perhaps both Sidney Smith and Luttrell outshone him. His wit was sometimes of the Artemus Ward kind. For instance, when a student at the University, he was accustomed to work very late at night, and lounge about through the day time. This habit made him a frequent absentee at the morning devotions, and when the Principal at Brazenose college called him to account for this delinquency at prayers, he replied:

"The fact is, sir, you are too late for

me."

"Too late!" repeated the astonished don.

"Yes, sir, I cannot sit up till seven o'clock in the morning. I am a man of regular habits, and unless I get to bed

by four or five, at latest, I am really fitistic quotation from the prospectus of for nothing next day." the Quarterly Review for Tennessee, which in 1847 Brownlow projected, while editor of the Jonesborough Whig.

THOSE of our readers who include French in the list of their accomplish

ments-and who does not in these Ex

position days?-may find some amusement in the queer comments of a recent French critic on Hamlet.

Speaking of Hamlet killing Polonius, the writer gives the English and the French translation of the words which accompany the coup-de-grâce: :-"How how! a rat!" (Qu'est-ce que cela? Un rien.) Again, we have given by the critic the following Shakesperean bit with French translation of the meaning and of the dignity of the language:— “Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell! take, thy fortune: Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger." (Adieu, pauvre fou indiscret et téméraire, adieu! . . Subis ton sort! Tu as appris qu'il y a du danger à se trop mêler des affaires d'autrui.)

"We feel competent," said he, "to the task of editing and publishing a work on politics, one on religion, one on science, and another one on any thing you please, all at the same time! Our genius is bounded on the east by the rising sun, on the west by the astronomical imaginations, while the aurora borealis of truth lights up our path by day and night! We could say more about our abilities, and we would do so, but for our great modesty," &c.!

That modesty has been an abiding possession of the tough old Parson!

THE great Exposition appears likely to be a grander affair than was at first anticipated. America, unfortunately, will show poorly. But then, to make amend, "our citizens abroad" are the speis the great stumbling-block, and very cial sensations of Paris. The language funny mistakes are recorded. One New

This does not equal the Gallic writer, who took Macbeth in hand, and praised Shakespeare for his great attention to particulars, instancing in proof his allu-Yorker, who in early life had followed sion to the climate of Scotland in the words, "Hail, hail, all hail!" Grêle, grele, toute grele !

the seas, only stopped a week, and on returning home complained that such a mercenary region he had never beheld before. "Even the little boys are avaAnd even the last is exceeded by that French book dealer, who pretended to dle to call their country, the Pay (le ricious. They are taught from the craspeak English perfectly, and on the appearance of a John Bull in his shop with pays) and I did have to pay roundly. a couple of books under his arm, said As to the cooking that they crack up significantly: "Very good books, Mon-so-why, if I wanted chicken, they sieur, very good binding. This is bound always brought me pulleys (pullets), and in mutton, Monsieur, and that is bound by Jove, they were the toughest kind of pulleys too!"

in veal!"

FROM French-English to Latin-English is an easy transition and will enable us to give a capital epigram of Luttrell's, not generally known. It is, in fact, an epitaph on a man killed by an omnibus-by no means an uncommon

Occurrence:

"Killed by an omnibus-why not?
So quick a death, a boon is;
Let not his friends lament his lot,
Mors omnibus communis."

PARSON BROWNLOW is a name tolerably familiar to our readers, although likely to call up some very contradictory emotions. As to his politics we will have none of them, either to approve or to disapprove. But perhaps no one will object to our giving a very character

How eagerly the merchants pick the pockets of our compatriots is neatly illustrated by Le Figaro, which presents the following sketch as an appropriate subject for a vaudeville, that might be entitled The Stranger," after the famous German drama. The performance may be in three, or five, or seven acts, according to the fecundity of the writer or the patience of the audience; but the gist of the plot should be as follows:

The scene represents a stranger. In the rear of the stage is a traveling blanket; at the right a bandbox, valises, bags with rolls, cold chickens, and all the essentials for a railroad journey.

In the first act the stranger is discov-| called, we think, the Red Doctor, will ered walking about alone, and seeming initiate our readers into the mysteries to regret his native land. Suddenly start out from both sides at once some men with their faces muffled in comforters. (It is spring-time, but it is also Paris.)

"It is he! It is the stranger!" And they precipitate themselves upon the defenseless man.

"Gentlemen," he faintly observes, "take what you please, but spare my life. I see that I was told the truth when I heard that Paris was a city filled with robbers."

"We are not robbers, but tradespeople, which is not necessarily the same thing. You are a stranger. For two months we have been ruining ourselves in waiting for you, and now you must reimburse us. I am going to measure you for a pair of pantaloons."

"And I for a flannel waistcoat."
"And I for a pair of boots."
"But gentlemen-"

"Not a word, or you are a dead man. The street is deserted, your cries will not be heard. We have our yardsticks about us. You had better submit quietly and reasonably."

The stranger submits. But, as his tormentors finally draw off, he sends after them the following remark:

"I think, my fine fellows, you have been well taken in. I am a stranger, it is true, only I am a simple pifferaro from Naples, who has come to Paris to sing in the streets during the Exhibition !"

of this beneficent institution. An attempt, by-the-by, was recently made in New York to introduce the business in America; but of the success attending the effort we know nothing. At Chicago a few weeks since a fresh phase in this science was developed. The facts came out at the police court, where three young men had been arraigned on the charge of being "drunk and disorderly." The officer swore that he had known them by sight over a year, and that they had no visible means of support. They were always well dressed, however. Mr. Fred. Edwards spoke: "These two gentlemen and myself are the firm of Edwards & Griffin. I regret that I can not tell you our business. We will be sent to the Bridewell if I don't? Very well, sir, your curiosity shall be gratified. We are proposers. By that I mean we propose to young ladies and help to get them married. We are benefactors. When we see a young lady who is not, and never has been, engaged, one of us says to her 'We will get you married for $-, payable after marriage.' Of course she says yes. For the time being, that one of us is considered as engaged to her. We trumpet the fact abroad. Whenever the other two of us meet a young man who is not engaged, we say:

6

What a lucky dog Griffin is; he has won Miss X.' And we praise her. We encourage the young man to go in and cut Griffin out, for the fun of the thing. ONE of the novelties of modern civil- Being a fool, like most young men, he ization is the matrimonial agency. In does it. He proposes to Miss X., Paris it is a recognized business. The knowing that slie is engaged to Griffin, miserable single, can find their "fate" and hardly expecting that she will acthrough this system with marvelous cept him. But she always does. And rapidity. May and June, January and he can never cut loose from her. He May, are brought together by the hu- must marry her or be tried for breach mane managers of this singular voca- of promise. I myself have been ention, and in a very little space the pre-gaged twenty-five times during the last liminaries are completed. If you want year. We are doing so well that we money and have a title, if you desire think of hiring a clerk to do part of beauty and can show a tantalizing the work for us. I should not have bank account, these amiable go-be- told you this but for your atrocious tweens simplify every thing, and secure threat about Bridewell. But, as we you every thing. A complete descrip- have given false names, it does not tion of the machinery would trench on make much difference. I trust that our space, but a translation of a French the reporters will say nothing about novel published in Philadelphia, and it."

"Oh! ah! yes!" slowly, as one idea after another strikes him. "What does FITZ HERBERT pretend to be down your way?"

66

Says his father is a banker."

contractors."

CHICAGO is certainly celebrated for the eccentricity of its inhabitants, and the wonderful penchant for the horrible which displays itself in the formation of the city. Besides, it is the great Western point d'appui for gen "A banker! Good," laughed the teel scoundrelism. Here is an illustra- other. "That's so; he is a sand banker tive story which follows quite naturally-draws sand by the day for our road upon what we have just recorded: Clarence Fitz Herbert went to St. "Ah! 'bliged to you," said the quesLouis on a matrimonial speculation, so tioner; "pretty good; sand banker is exquisitely got up, and such a master he?" in the art of spending other people's money, that he soon had the entrée of the best (?) society. Before long he found himself the accepted suitor of an ex-grocer's daughter, of reputed wealth. Accepted, that is, with papa's consent the dutiful Clarence could not dispense with that; he had no idea of supporting a wife by his own manly exertions. The blushing lover presented his credentials to Mr. Hodges in

person.

"Humph!" grumbled the shrewd man of money, surveying the dainty figure of his would-be-son-in-law with the air of a man who knew the precise value of such commodities. "Ah! so my gal thinks she-she fancies you?"

"Well-aw-she has done me theaw-that honor, sir."

"And what is your business?" "Ah? I am from Chicago, sir." "Exactly; what's your business in Chicago, eh?"

"Me fawther is a distinguished banker, sir; I-aw-think you'll find myaw-references all right;" stroking his oakum-colored moustache with a grand

A few days after, Mr. CLARENCE finds Miss ALLIE not at home, Mr. HODGES not at home, "nobody ter home, sir," is the servant girl's answer, in a provokingly knowing and saucy manner.

And so ended the ambitious annals of C. F. HERBERT, Esq.

PROBABLY this young gentleman, who aimed so high and fell so low, could give a great many seemingly sound reasons for not attempting to marry for love alone. It is quite common now-a-days for the sterner sex of bachelor condition to pretend that marriage is not possible unless a dower goes with it. The accompanying novel multiplication table affords material for rumination to this gentry:

Twice two "smashes" buys a box of hair pins.

Twice three "cobblers" buys tuck and side combs.

Twice four "lagers" buys a pair of gloves (female).

Twice five "juleps" buys a pair of hoopskirts.

Twice six "punches" buys a Valenciennes collar (female).

Twice seven "ales" buys a pair of shoes (female).

Twice eight "toddies" buys a calico dress with cloth enough for a basque and pantalets (female).

Twice nine bitters" buys a summer bonnet, and leaves a trifle toward the veil and trimmings.

Twice ten "sangarees" buys a pair of stays, machine-stitched, with patent eyelets and embroidered beautifully down the neck.

Twice eleven "slings" buy a collar and undersleeves, and leaves a balance toward the fringe.

Twice twelve "brandy straights" are in for one balmoral, two pair of long