102 Notes of the Month on [JAN. 



si on of the laws of aldermanic nature, second the solicitation, aided 

 moreover by Mr. Perceval's powers of persuasion, we think there is little 

 chance of the Bishops being prevailed upon to sanction an ordinance 

 that would inevitably be fatal to their own comforts for at least four- 

 and-twenty hours. If by any chance, however, they should conceive a 

 temporary fondness for fasting, and determine upon giving their appe- 

 tites a holiday, it can make but very little difference to the nation. The 

 fast is already a general one. All that is wanted is, a particular fast, 

 exclusively for aristocratic abstinence. If the Lords choose to go with- 

 out their dinners for a day, a resolution which, at all events would be 

 very acceptable to their cooks and butlers, we can of course have no 

 objection to it. Or if they should think fit to extend the fasting-period 

 to a fortnight, our gratitude would be in proportion. Hunger would 

 sharpen their legislative ideas amazingly ; and a fourteen days' appetite 

 would tend to give them a much clearer insight into the state of the 

 country, than any penetration to be derived from a daily indulgence in 

 turbot and truffles. 



BURKINGS AT BOSTON. Burking, like the cholera, will no doubt 

 make the tour of the globe. The new world is at all events determined 

 not to be behind the old, either in its attacks or its antidotes ; in the last 

 particular it has surpassed us as the following story, which, coming, 

 we believe, from a Boston paper, is of course to be credited, will abun- 

 dantly testify. 



It appears that burking has been for some time flourishing in the 

 back settlements, and has excited alarm from one end of the continent 

 to the other. On its first breaking out in Boston, a " Burking- Antidote 

 and Pitch- Plaster Abolition Society" was formed, the members of which 

 paraded the streets at night, not like Demosthenes, with pebbles, but 

 with detonating balls in their mouths. As was anticipated, an attack 

 was in due time made upon one of them ; and the result was, as may 

 also be anticipated, that at the moment the plaster was applied to the 

 mouth of the member, with the force requisite for its adherence in any 

 case to say nothing of the extra force necessary to be employed, in 

 order to stop effectually the mouth of a Bostonian an explosion took 

 place, that prevented the perpetrator from carrying his unpleasant de- 

 sign into complete effect, not simply by throwing him backwards at the 

 first shock which was the utmost that the scientific men in Boston had 

 calculated upon but by hurling him to a distance quite impossible to 

 calculate, as he had not been heard of up to the hour when the first 

 edition went to press. However, the paragraph, we are assured, con- 

 cludes by stating, that the editor had stopped the press to say, that the 

 body of the delinquent had just been picked up, in a sadly mutilated 

 state at New York. 



We regret the discovery of this important fact in science, inasmuch as 

 it will, as a matter of course, be acted upon in England ; and will thus 

 shut out all hopes of Mr. Hunt's mouth being stopped for the next 

 quarter of a century. 



PAGANINI AND THE SURGEONS. Exhibitions of pleasure are not a 

 hundredth part so attractive, in the eyes of an enlighted community, as 

 exhibitions of pain. The dramatic theatres, in spite of lions on the 

 stage, and lures in the lobbies, can scarcely muster audiences above half 



