162 NOTKS OF THE MONTH. 



not, thev will forthwith take : namely, to apply to the legislature for 

 compensation. If their occupation, like that of Othello, be gone, what 

 matters it to them, in point of fact, whether it he by an act of the legis- 

 lature, or by the ingenuity of some of their fellow subjects. Their right 

 to compensation is, in either case, as undoubted as that of the Town 

 Clerks of the corporations. We understand, that the Duke of Cumber- 

 land and Colonel Sibthorpe intend henceforth to shave by means of the 

 Axyrite ; as their only objections to the process before had their origin 

 in an unconquerable aversion to the application of soap or water to the 

 lower parts of their physiognomies. It is also said, that, as a mark of their 

 admiration of the great genius of the inventor, they mean to use all 

 their influence with their Tory friends to procure a government pension 

 of 5001. a year for him, when they return to ofl[ice. The ingenious 

 inventor of the Axyrite, who is a zealous Conservative, also holds out 

 hopes, we understand, of being able to discover, in three or four weeks, 

 a similar instrument by which he will not only be able to eject Lord 

 Melbourne and his mendacious colleagues from office, but by which he 

 can secure to the Tories the reins of government till the crack of doom. 

 The name of the latter instrument has not yet transpired. 



Miraculous Escapjc. — A morning paper, in describing an explosion 

 which took place a few days since in a house in the New Cattle Market 

 at Islington, states, " that two persons were blown through the roof, but 

 happily escaped uninjured." Lucky dogs that they were ! The escape 

 was certainly a miraculous one, but that is no reason why the truth of 

 the " penny-a-liner's" statement should be doubted. This class of 

 literati are in the habit of seeing and hearing of hair-breadth escapes, 

 and other marvellous occurrences, which never meet the eye or ear of 

 any body else. We have no doubt that Baron Munchausen was a 

 " penny-a-liner," for no one not a member of the fraternity could ever 

 have undergone such wonderful vicissitudes, or witnessed such marvel- 

 lous incidents, as those with which his celebrated pages teem. There 

 exists no more rational ground for doubting that these two individuals 

 alluded to were blown through the roof of the house by the explosion, 

 and escaped uninjured, than there is for questioning the veracity of the 

 venerable Baron's statement, when he states that on one occasion, when 

 he had ascended a tree, it was torn up by the roots in a storm, and after 

 beino- whirled for many hours in the air, and travelling a distance of three 

 hundred miles, returned to the same spot, and struck its roots again 

 in the earth, he remaining all the while quite comfortably ensconced 

 amidst its ample foliage. We have, we repeat, 'no more right to doubt 

 the truth of the first statement than we have to question the veracity of 

 the second. We might have added, that the story of the two men being 

 fired through the roof, just as if discharged from the barrel of a gun, 

 without receiving the slightest injury, further perhaps than a momentary 

 fright, is every whit as true as that other adventure, narrated by the 

 aforesaid Baron, — namely, that when on one occasion making a long 

 voyage, some huge fish swallowed the ship, a three-decker, with her 

 largest mast one hundred feet high, and that the unfortunate ship, with 

 all on board, remained in the belly of the said fish three months, when 

 the " finny animal," on being suddenly seized with sickness, one morn- 

 ing, discharged himself of a commodity which must have been very 



