NOTES AND EVENTS OF THE MONTH. 399 



clergy ; to bag a covey of English partridges, or of Irish peasants,* 

 when the season permits, would seem to be a sport of exquisite relish 

 to them. How inconsonant with the duties of a minister of the Gos- 

 pel does this appear ! but to doubt its propriety does not, of course, 

 become us of the laity. Such practices must be right, or they would 

 not be countenanced by vigilant diocesans. Why, so engrossed are 

 the minds of some reverend parsons, upon the subject of gunnery, 

 that it was but a month or two since the patent list actually contained 

 the name of one holy gentleman, to whom the king's monopoly had 

 been granted for " certain improvements" in the manufacture of 

 fire-arms ! Only think of a minister of the Protestant religion, en- 

 gaged in the composition of his Sunday's homily to breathe of uni- 

 versal charity and peace, with a mind disturbed by bright crotchets 

 about weapons of murder ; penning a paragraph of Samaritan gen- 

 tleness, and anon sketching mechanical diagrams for the more per- 

 fect destruction of animal life ; trying to save a soul one minute and 

 to destroy a body the next, and in each instance with the greatest 

 possible amount of efficacy ! The notion would be droll, were it not 

 for the shuddering. Is it surprising that scepticism should some- 

 times but, Satan, get thee behind us '. 



CLERICAL DEGREES OF COMPARISON. Dr. Murray, the Catholic 

 Archbishop of Dublin, in a letter repudiating the offensive doctrines 

 contained in Dens's Theology, which " the Exeter Hall mounte- 

 banks" have so industriously laboured to fix upon his concurrence, 

 takes occasion to declare, with reference to a point of date, that he 

 " was not then a bishop, but engaged in the duties of the more me- 

 ritorious office of a working curate /" What will the right reverend 

 the orthodox bench say to this anti-episcopal avowal ? Is a " work- 

 ing curate" a more meritorious member of a church establishment 

 than a bishop ? We may soon expect to hear C. J. London referring 

 to the period of his more meritorious labours, when he was engaged 

 in the translation of .^Eschylus ; or Dr. Phillpotts, to the days of his 

 political pamphleteering. We live in strange times. 



GIN AND BITTERS. A few days'since, a drunken wretch, in petti- 

 coats, called a woman, was brought before the magistrates, and con- 

 victed of breaking three guineas' worth of glass in a gin palace, be- 

 cause the landlord declined to supply her with a surfeit of Bailey 

 and Hodges. It appeared that this species of smashing is a habit of 

 hers. She had repeatedly suffered (?) imprisonment for similar 

 frolics, and, indeed, had but just left jail the day before, fresh from 

 ' completing her time,' for so requiting some other refractory mal- 

 content. The bench ^'sentenced her to another month of it, with an 

 exhortation ; and my lady, in her bitter wrath, forewarned the 

 publican, with a shake of her fair fist, that her first act, upon ' com- 

 ing out' again, would be to pay him off retributively, with a com- 



* Evidently a literal. Pheasants, not peasants, must be meant, though a 

 covey of pheasants is certainly an unfieldlike term. Printer's Devil. 



