Notes of the Month. 553 



improving the navigation of the Shannon or forwarding the completion of the 

 Plymouth Breakwater, exposes us to a tempest of North Tweed invective 

 against extravagance. But yet who so animated in the race as a Scotchman, 

 if a sinecure be the goal ? Scotch thriftiness, however, disappears before the 

 ennobling ambition of recording the glories of the hero of Dunkirk. The 

 Highlanders may descend to the lowest depths of penury, but his Royal High- 

 ness shall balloon it to the acme of Scotch enthusiasm and a granite pillar. 

 It's enough to make one sick to see the people who let Burns starve, thus 

 shamelessly caricaturing themselves in seeking to do honour to a man whose 

 friends, if he had any, should assiduously seek to enshroud his memory in 

 the mists of obscurity. Of all fools your cunning ones are the most egre- 

 gious, as they certainly are the most nauseating. 



SOMETHING INCONGRUOUS. The " Morning- Post " was at one time an 

 infallible authority touching the much-mooted point of the texture of Lady 

 A.'s pocket handkerchief, or the number of individual straight and curled 

 hairs in the Marquis of B.'s sinister moustache. It was oracular respecting 

 the gentility of eating lollipops in the morning, or sneezing before a certain 

 hour in the afternoon ; learned in the etiquette of the tea-table, and profound 

 in the manipulation of muffins. Politics were in these days pronounced 

 /vulgar, and the "Post" was great. Its opinion relative to " Almack's" and 

 i-the " Opera" was looked up to with deference, and justly so, for its com- 

 petency to decide upon such matters was indisputable. But since it has 

 taken to the discussion of serious pursuits it has degenerated into the merest 

 twaddler, and is now the butt of butlers and ridicule of the servants' hall. The 

 most deplorable part of the business however is, that with its modern inanity, 

 shallowness, and vapid fooleries, it mixes all its quondam airs of assumption 

 and disdain of the commonalty that used to distinguish it when it really knew 

 something of what it prated about. Of all its nonsensical exhibitions, how- 

 ever, that have lately come within our knowledge, what it calls its musical 

 critiques are the most astounding, more particularly those relative to the 

 debut of the new singer Albertazzi. We should analyze one of those amusing 

 morceaux, if space permitted ; but we find a sledge-hammer notice in a 

 weekly paper that, for its truth and applicability, will serve instead. 



" We have seen the critiques on ' Albertazzi ' in the ' Morning-Post," 

 and more deplorable perpetrations in the way of ignorant presumption, bad 

 English and utter nonsense, we have never met. The musical notices in the 

 ' Post' were once respectably done, indeed more so, on the whole, than in any 

 of the other daily papers ; but lately they seem to be composed with a view 

 to show how a blockhead may chatter the gibberish of a professor without 

 being able to distinguish a flageolet from a kettle-drum, or the soprano of 

 Grisi from the grunt of a two-year-old porker. No wonder the aristocracy 

 despise plebeians, when, in their own fashionable organ they find this stul- 

 tified donkey prating about a subject with which he is as conversant as a 

 grampus is with metaphysics, or the Duke of Buckingham with the Cachucha 

 Dance." 



CHARACTERISTIC. A Tory journal reviewed Dr. Millingen's " Curiosities 

 of Medical Experience" a short time since as the production of one Dr. Mull-" 

 igan. The " Standard," in ridiculing a great anti-church-rate meeting held in 

 Hanley, the principal town in the Staffordshire Potteries, speaks of the locality 

 in true Vandal ignorance, as Hunley ; and our recollection is plethoric of nu- 

 merous similar instances on the part of the Conservatives. This is at least 

 characteristic. They would turn reformers, forsooth, and nice emendators 

 they would prove. Why, it is evident from the veriest trifles that when they 

 attempt anything in the way of improvement they invariably " make a mull 

 of it." 



We see an advertisement in a northern paper headed "Coquetdale Agricul- 

 tural Society ;" no doubt one of those associations whose sole object is to keep 



