NOTES OF THE MONTH. 91 



with which he appropriately closed his discourse. We are weary of 

 conjecturing what could possibly have possessed sundry speaker's 

 last session to have descanted so flippantly on the virtues of the 

 ". voluntary system." Surely it would, if tried, lack so persuasive a 

 stimulant to spiritual exertion as lawyer's letters most titillating of 

 incentives to orthodoxy. Knowing the proness of mortality to neglect 

 the business of hereafter., we cannot sufficiently eulogize the dispatches 

 of these legal missives, which invariably arouse the most dormant 

 proprietors of haycocks or honeycombs to a sense of the blessings of 

 legalized Christianity as at present established. 



AMENITIES OF THE PIIESS. If such things as " Academies of 

 Compliments " were published in Adam Smith's time, we apprehend 

 that the great economist would have seen reason to qualify his dicta 

 on supply and demand. Politeness seems to progress in our times 

 much after the Irishman's definition of a crab's advance, " back- 

 wards," though the facilities of attaining gentility, as the phrase is, 

 are so numerous, that the wonder is why we are not all "Mirrors of 

 Fashion." An arbiter eleganliarum of a Dublin meeting a short time 

 since is reported to have thus exquisitely embodied the delicate 

 intentions of his auditory : 



" Resolved, that these ungracious strumpets, the Times and Morning 

 Herald, have forfeited the respect arid confidence of reformers by their 

 treacherous dealing- in this crisis of Reform ; that Irishmen discountenance 

 the propagation of such subtle stabs at union among reformers as are 

 made daily by the Peel journals ; that Henry Lord Brougham and Vaux 

 is not lowered in our estimation by the vile unmeasured abuse of the 

 Times and its mangy tail !" 



This affords certain quidnuncs at home materials for cachinnatory 

 antics at the expense of the Milesians, but we find one of the British 

 lights of the age indulge in such amiable badinage as the following, 

 in reply to a corresponding endearment from its " cotemporary :" 



" This journal is a literary polecat; when pursued by an opponent whose 

 facts or whose reasonings it cannot answer or refute, it endeavours to 

 cover its retreat from the contest by copious discharges of filth and 

 abuse !" 



It appears that these doings of the " polecat " were matters, as 

 well they might be, of much, marvel and amazement ; but here is 

 the interesting mystery agreeably solved : 



" Some men cry rogue and rascal from a garret. Our cotemporary 

 raises the same cry from a ' snug domestic apartment' five feet by five. 

 There, doubtless, he composes the articles that excite the disgust, as well 

 as the astonishment of the public, and which carry with them the odour of 

 the congenial atmosphere in which they are conceived and brought forth 

 Faugh !" 



The sensitiveness to the grossness- of his erring brother exhibited 

 by this amiable commentator, is only equalled by the fastidious dic- 

 tion in which he hints at the enormities of the delinquent. The 

 singularly appropriate interjection at the end of the gentle admoni- 

 tion is positively too indulgent under the circumstances Faugh ! 



