The following lines from the "Comedy of Errors" are not mal-à-propos to this case.

Duke (Mr. Serjeant Adams)-Why, what an intricate impeach is this!

I think you all have drunk of Circe's cup. (Qy. sherry cobbler?)
You say he dined at home; the goldsmith here

"Affirms" that saying.

Dromio of Ephesus (witness for prosecution)—Sir, he dined with her there, at the "Porcupine."

The

We are no favourers of moneyed respectability. nature of the man is the same, and money-getting does not embellish. His own wealth pays many a rogue to be honest because it is not worth his while to be otherwise; whilst many a needy man with good impulses is driven by necessity to crime. In the present moneyed era, the fluctuation of fortune, which is the result of mercantile gambling and still more of the diseased state of the currency, has destroyed the old character of the British merchant. But a man of wealth is not likely to commit himself for a bagatelle. The real genius of accumulation does not steal oranges. It would not pay to do so.

We have just read an account of the arrest of an individual (Mr. Rufus Greene) at Mobile, Secretary to an Insurance office in that town, charged with being defaulter to the amount of half the capital of the company. Mr. Greene was an Elder of the Presbyterian Church, a member of the Common Council of the City Government, and occupied the most distinguished and most honourable position in an eminent Fraternity of his State! No man ever stood higher in public estimation, or enjoyed to a greater extent the confidence of his fellow"We passed it by," says an American paper, "yesterday, because we had not the heart to speak of it." Probably this man would have scorned a small theft, and showed

men.

himself implacable as judge or juror in a case of duckstealing. Yet these frauds, committed by this paragon of talent, usefulness, and mercantile honour, were as deliberate as the swindling transactions of Captain Routledge, who committed suicide the other day in Newgate. Verily, we live in strange times. Mr. Goldsmid may be consoled at the unjust aspersion temporarily cast upon his character when he remembers that a great monarch—the late Louis Philippe-was taxed with a mean attempt to swindle his creditors by a great contemporary journal, eager to anticipate proof and clamorous after condemnation.

WISEMAN'S LECTURE.

A MONSTROUS ASSERTION.

Dr. PUDENTIANA of the Moslem Chair, by courtesy Cardinal Wiseman, has delivered himself of the following notable compliment to the kingdom of the heretic Queen Victoria, in the course of a Papal lecture, which offers its feeble but bigoted conventionality in remarkable contrast to the glorious denunciations of the fearless Father Gavazzi. Wiseman dares to say :

"It has pleased God to keep a germ still alive in this country, which prevented us from being, like Sodom and Gomorrah, utterly destroyed."

All we can say is this-that should Providence reserve such a fate for any city a second time, in order to manifest his signal wrath against crime, it is more likely to occur from the blossoming of what Wiseman is pleased to call a germ, in the shape of monastic or priestly extension in a country, than from the absence of it. We are forcibly

reminded of some lines in a "Satire," from which we have already quoted, which it is certainly fair to give on the other side of the question. They are as follow:

"Here he took snuff-On Rome I could talk myself blind,

For a sweeter spot where on this earth will you find?
And he touchingly spoke of two cities, their fate-
'Ah !' he sigh'd, 'that was business, no such luck of late;
But I fancy sometimes to see Rome grandly burning,
With a lot of queer English folk petrified turning."

JOHN BULL AND THE POPE'S BULL.

HOW THE "MIRROR OF THE TIME" HAS CAUSED SOME FUN.

WITH regard to the supposed Bull, published by the Morning Herald, from Queen Victoria to the Pope, appointing twelve Anglican Protestant titular Bishops in the Papal States, we rather imagine that the germ of this story will be found in the MIRROR OF THE TIME of January 15th, in an article entitled "Free-Trade and Reciprocity with the Roman States," which not only suggests this amusing remedy, but actually sketches the various bishoprics of Civita Vecchia, Aquapendente, &c., &c. Since the serious enunciations of some of our contemporaries are so farcical, we cannot be surprised at our humorous proposition being taken as matter of fact, and growing into a formal communication from an eminent dignitary of the Church abroad. But in the present age it is difficult to separate jest from earnest, and truth from fiction; whilst assertion possesses a laxity which is at once the result of the easy currency given to thought, and of the unchivalric spirit of the age, which latter leads us almost to the bold assertion that "Truth is a

barbarous production, which properly belongs only to the few and is so diluted by civilization and population that it finally lives in imagination alone, drawing upon antiquity for its nuclei and facts."

FEBRUARY, 1851.

FACT, FICTION, AND FIGURES.

THE Morning Post informs us that Frenchmen are actually selling flour by retail from vessels moored in the Thames. This is a pretty illustration of the truth of the assertions of Free-traders, who have declared that corn could not be imported at less than 50s. a quarter, considering that English wheat now ranges from 36s. to 39s.* When Cobden seized upon the fallacy of another man to puff himself and it into notoriety, by the bold and voluble exercise of ingenuity and utterance of common-place, called in modern parlance a "speech," he adopted this mode of settling every difficulty by such bare-faced assertions as the one before us. This quack-hawking of State measures stops at nothing. The Dulcamara of Free-trade does not hesitate to suit the pill to the disease and the disease to the pill, and the patient to both or either. An inquiry or a doubt is met by the pshaw of contemptuous certainty. "Wheat cannot be imported at 50s." "I am assured by a merchant;" or, "I hold in my hand a paper;" or, a correspondent from Stettin writes"-such phrases as these clench the matter. Such is the injustice done to fact, fate, and England.

FEBRUARY, 1851.

The reader must observe the dates of these writings.

PATRONISING AIRS OF COBDEN AND BRIGHT.

Ir is painfully amusing to observe the manner in which these gentlemen address towns, and corporations, and societies, with the air of visitors of schools or West Indian. planters making the round of their own negro seminaries. The Admiral of a Port cannot be grander in his approbation or disapproval of a ship's company's manœuvres,

"I shall come here again to see how this town progresses," is the dictum; or, "I have my eye upon you;" or, "it is really creditable, and I have much pleasure;" or, "I am positively gratified with your exertions." Why, a King could not give himself more airs than one of these cotton egotists who thus condescends to patronize the deluded people of England.

THE POPE AND THE NATIONAL DEBT.

FATHER GAVAZZI denounces the Pope inter alia for delivering up to Jew-brokers the resources of nations yet unborn. The whole development of the Pitt policy of greedy borrowing, which has created our debt and funding system, admits of a similar brief and forcible description.

MEN NOT MEASURES.

HOW LORD JOHNNY PROPOSES TO CATCH EELS WITH A CROOKED PIN.

THE English nation is plainly being "made a fool of." The measure of Lord John Russell shows a very small man