102 XOTES OF THE MONTH. 



sixty-two thousand pounds. One hundred and sixty-two thousand 

 pounds enough to buy up all the principos, milords, and magnificos, 

 from the summit of the Albruzzi to the bottom of the Tiber, and one 

 half the whiskered Yahoos of Magdeburg or Don key burg, or any 

 other burg from the Elbe to the Vistula, into the bargain. Ah me ! 

 how changed from that Hayne who returned from race-courses and 

 ball-rooms clad in pea-green, betting thousands that the name of Foote 

 should no longer be a standing joke, as he would walk forthwith to the 

 hymeneal altar, and thence take the fatal leap. Never were such 

 materials for the exuberant imaginations of our fashionable novelists 

 to run riot in. And the fair recipient of his elegant trinkets, too, 

 turned into a countess, with the harmonious trisyllable of Harrington 

 at the end of Maria ! Hayne in a debtor's prison, and his lady-love 

 in a peer's arms. Sic transit gloria mundi ! 



PROVING A NEGATIVE. Our claret-bibbing legislators of the 

 lower house, are determined to make the poor peasantry and labourers 

 of England the most moral population in the universe. The gentle- 

 men who lounge away an evening at Bellamy's, until the moment of 

 their being called to say yes or no, on a subject about which they 

 know nothing, cannot by any possible contortion of ideas, conceive 

 why it is that a man who toils from sunrise to sunset should be 

 desirous of drinking a mug beer, while he can procure a mug of 

 water from a ditch. When a certain French princess heard that her 

 subjects were starving, she expressed her surprise that people should 

 remain hungry when " such nice cakes might be had for a franc-" 

 Our law-makers, with the most unbounded regard for the morality of 

 clodpoles, set their faces altogether against the consumption of beer 

 in rural districts ; but then the profound wisdom with which they 

 frame enactments for that purpose, cannot but extort the admiration 

 even of those who suffer most by this species of philanthropy. It 

 would look tyrannical to prohibit the sale of the poor man's drink in 

 toto, therefore beer shops are not absolutely prohibited ; but then 

 beer must not be drank in those premises with the landlord's consent. 

 The application of this is marvellously edifying : a man goes into 

 one of those humble dispensaries of refreshment, and calls for a glass 

 of the only beverage his means will allow him to procure. His host 

 hands it to him, and it is immediately dispatched to irrigate the 

 thirsty sinuosities of his expectant umbles. The landlord stands 

 aghast an outrage against the laws has been perpetrated on the 

 premises fines, and the abstraction of licence, stare the affrighted 

 Boniface in all their appalling horrors. An emetic, or the stomach 

 pump, is the only process by which to compel the droughty malefac- 

 tor disgorge the henious draught, and this is alike impracticable and 

 distasteful. Here then is an interesting case for the county shallows 

 to exercise their unpaid sagacity upon. A law exists which declares 

 the consumption of beer on the premises to be illegal, but then the 

 landlord did not authorize, by his assent, such consumption. Can 

 the landlord be punished for a crime he did not commit and could 

 not prevent, or is the law to be violated with impunity, because land- 



