220 Notes of the Month on [FEB. 



or his deputy, as well for its heating as its beating capabilities making 

 the ushers red-hot, if need be, and correcting the refractory branches of 

 the rising generation without the least trouble to the present inflictors. 

 As the boys are now subjected to the additional penalty of purchasing their 

 own rods, they must under the new system become responsible to the coal- 

 merchant of the college, in proportion to the extent of their punishment. 

 The " graduated scale " in this new steam-flogging apparatus, we con- 

 fess provokes a little scepticism j and we should really like to know the 

 various quantities of hot- water required for the correction of those 

 school-boy-enormities, which we ourselves once practised with so much 

 pleasure and so little impunity. If one quart would award punishment 

 for the crime of " fagging " a junior boy to death, or kicking him eleven 

 times round a room two hundred and fifty feet long, how much would 

 be required for him who should omit to cap to the head usher, or whose 

 parents had forgotten to send the periodical basket of game ? It would 

 need a nice calculation to deal with the minor offences of way-laying 

 servant-maids, driving cattle far a-field, setting dogs at lame itinerants, 

 and breaking the windows of democratic pastry-cooks that have the im- 

 pertinence to ask for their money. 



Would it be possible to render such a machine of any practical use in 

 that political Eton College, the House of Lords ? If by means of steam, 

 flagellation could be bestowed in proportion to the folly exhibited, Lord 

 Londonderry would, in one single month, find his coal-mines in some 

 danger of exhaustion. 



BLACK AND WHITE. One of the greatest evils that can happen to 

 humanity is to be " put into black and white" against one's will. You 

 happen to make confession of some infirmity or to be critical upon a 

 a friend, in the strictest confidence and the account is served up to 

 you in print the next morning with your coffee. Happily, the days of 

 Swift and Pope are past : we are no longer in danger of standing in a 

 poetical pillory, or of creeping to immortality in a couplet. Epigram 

 has had its elegy. But prose is at work : paragraphs are let loose upon 

 us with the fangs of panthers, and jokes go off at us at every corner, like 

 spring-guns. There is no getting at the news, without seeing that 

 Hook or Rogers has said something smart at our expense. And the 

 best of these jokes is, that nobody inserts them : they drop from the 

 stars, and the very printer cannot guess how. We are held down, like 

 Gulliver, by a thousand little cords, and are assured that it is merely a 

 gossamer's web. To figure in paragraphs in this way, is to get into 

 " black and white," as effectually as the heroine of a comic engraving 

 that we have seen, who is placed between a chimney-sweep and a miller. 

 You come in collision with scandal, in the first place, and are, of course, 

 darkened all over ; when, in order to shew that black is not " so black," 

 but that white is <( very white" indeed, up comes some good-natured 

 friend of an opposite colour, and covers you with his floury defence. 

 Your situation is then supremely enviable. 



ANTI-MUSTACHIO DECREE. When sentence of shaving was passed 

 the other day upon the mustachios of our military exquisites, a panic 

 ensued quite equal to any demonstration of horror that could be expected, 

 if Mr. Hume were to succeed some night in stopping the army-estimates, 

 and in abolishing half-pay altogether. But, of course, these ringleted 



