[ 694 ] [JUNE, 



NOTES OF THE MONTH ON AFFAIRS IN GENERAL. 



THE state of His Majesty's health still excites the strongest anxiety. 

 The bulletins have alternately raised and depressed the public hopes, 

 until their language seems to have lost every thing in the shape of public 

 confidence. Last week, the effect of an operation seemed to have given 

 the King considerable ease. But later reports speak of the original 

 symptoms returning. The mere length of the illness, now upwards of a 

 month, is alarming. His Majesty's strength of constitution was always 

 remarkable. But time, confinement, and pain, are formidable trials. We 

 still hope the best ; for we desire to see no change upon the throne. But 

 why is not Sir Astley Cooper, the most skilful surgeon in the empire, 

 called in ? We believe that the King is the only sufferer in England who 

 would not be glad of the assistance of that very able individual. 



We wish that some philanthropist a little more, honest than Mr. Hume 

 and a little less prosing than Mr. Goulburn would make a memoir on the 

 number of people annually drowned in the metropolis and its environs 

 by the Commissioners of Woods and Forests. Not that we charge little 

 Lord Lowther with any direct activity in this wholesale havoc, nor 

 believe that a man of his pleasantry would wish to stop any other man's 

 jest by cold affusion in a canal. But if the maxim quifacit per alium 

 facit per se is good law, little Lord Lowther is the culprit as much as 

 if he stood and plunged the unwitting into any of the hundred and one 

 contrivances for drowning, which he suffers to exist in full convenience 

 and in the face of day. 



A young man employed by the commissioners for watering Hyde 

 Park was nearly drowned a few days ago, in the Serpentine River, 

 the horse having got out of his depth while he was giving it some water. 

 It was found impossible to save the horse, which was valued at forty 

 guineas. 



This is the very tenderest case on the subject. And no doubt the 

 lamentation at the office would be that the scales of fate were not 

 changed, and that the horse was the substitute for the man. But there 

 is actually so singular a neglect of life in those matters, that we shall be 

 doing Lord Lowther and his well-paid board a kindness in reminding 

 them that the Serpentine River does not exhibit the most trivial preven- 

 tion to any one's running headlong into twenty-fathom water ; whether 

 the individual be blind, or a child, or an idiot, or drunk, or benighted. 

 A great thoroughfare from Oxford-street to Knightsbridge runs along 

 the edge of a slope, down which if a man tumbles, and a mere trip of the 

 feet will do it, he has no alternative but to roll until he rests at the 

 bottom of the river, when he will probably roll no more. To scramble 

 up against the side wall is out of the question. There is nothing more 

 for him, but to lie quiet and wait the coroner's inquest to be held after 

 he first fishing party on the river. 



The reservoir in the Green Park is in precisely the same condition. 

 The banks are walls ten feet high, as smooth as the chisel can make them. 

 The bed provided for the patient is a slope of forty-five degrees, begin- 

 ning with seven feet of spring water, and ending in a central channel of ' 

 twenty feet of slough. There a slip is as certain a quietus as if the 

 individual had slipped off the temporary stage in sight of St. Sepulchre's. 



The chief mortality of the park ponds is, we will admit, reserved for 



