154 Notes of the Month on [ APRIL, 



empires pressing upon us, with the aspect of affairs in Greece robbing 

 our pillows of sleep, and complaints of the robbery of thirteen houses at 

 Peckham in one week, making us tremble for the fame of our dearly 

 beloved Peel police ? We must abandon the " noble Lord in the blue 

 ribbon" to those minor biographers, who perplex mankind with the crush- 

 ings of quartos into duodecimos, and give us the Life of a Conqueror, 

 or the thousand years of a dynasty, for five shillings. 



One of the newspapers charges Kenny, the dramatist, with having 

 succeeded to other reversions of old radical Holcroft, besides his wife. 



" A well-known dramatist is at his old tricks again. Some time since, 

 an opera was represented as a new one which turned out to have been 

 acted forty years ago. Lately he has presented a farce to the same 

 manager, which cannot be original, as there is something very like it to 

 be found in a comedy written by the first husband of the playwright's 

 lady. The comedy we allude to is The Road to Ruin." 



To this charge we demur on several grounds. In the first place, 

 unless a dramatist of the present day makes oath before a magistrate, that 

 his play is not plunder from begining to end, we have a right to pre- 

 sume that not a syllable of it is his own. In the next, if Kenny can 

 produce a good comedy, farce, or interlude, out of all the works, played, 

 or portfolied, of old Holcroft, we look upon him as doing more than any 

 man of common sense ever expected ; or any man on earth, but himself, 

 could do. And, thirdly, if his play resembles any play that we have 

 seen for the last half dozen years, it has every claim to the title of the 

 Road to Ruin a title which, we sincerely propose, shall in future super- 

 sede the moral sentences of all kinds that used to stare upon us from the 

 top of the stage ; and though Veluti in Speculum, might be the proper 

 motto for the King's Theatre during the epicene reign of the late soprano, 

 we yet proclaim, that the " Road to Ruin" is, for all time to come, the 

 true and only motto for all theatres minor and major, and all places of 

 public entertainment whatever ; always excepting the chapel of St. Ste- 

 phen at Westminster, where the motto shall be limited to the "Con- 

 tested Election" Committee Rooms. 



We had not heard any thing of our friends of the State-Paper Office 

 for the last month, but we knew that they could not be idle. And now 

 the light breaks in upon the wondering world. 



" The State-Paper Office. The treasures of the State-paper Office, 

 from which the industry of Mr. Lemon has drawn so much to interest 

 the present age and all posterity, have long been exposed to destruction, 

 being kept in a common dwelling-house, which house, by the way, was 

 likely to fall. It is at length decided that a new State- Paper Office shall 

 be built ; the plans of Mr. Soane have been approved, and, under the 

 superintendence of that admirable architect, the building will shortly 

 be commenced." The house is to cost 23,000 ! 



Why, in the name of all that is spider- woven and moth-eathen, are we 

 not to let the course of nature, always wise, be fulfilled, and the old 

 house fall upon the old papers ? The dead never buried their dead in a 

 more appropriate sarcophagus. If the State- Paper Office have ever pro- 

 duced from the utmost profundity of its cobwebs, any thing better than 

 scraps of scraps, illegible nonsense, or the most useless waste paper with 

 which office clerk ever wiped his pen, we will be " a soused gurnet." 



