342 The Penny Magazine. 



No. I. Charing Cross; Beer; Van Diemen's Land ; the Zoological Gar- 

 dens; Des Cartes; Harvey; sundry scraps (many of them forgotten, and 

 none original) ; Poland. Take the concluding sentence of the last : — 

 "■ In the summer the heat is very great, the forests obstructing the free cir- 

 culation of air." That short sentence is a constellation of falsehoods : 

 false as regards the forests of Poland ; false as to the general effect of 

 forests ; and betrays equally utter ignorance of the facts of geography and 

 of physics. 



No. 2. Pompeii; Van Diemen's Land (hyaenas and cats falsely said to 

 be natives of it) ; Scraps of the " Entertaining ; " twaddle about a la- 

 bourer's house. 



No. 3. Somerset House ; Scraps from the Colonial Office, from an 

 American Newspaper, from Locke, from a dead compilation by the pub- 

 lisher, and from others; but none of any use, or affording any amusement. 



No. 4. Sugar (the Entertaining) ; Population (Parliamentary Papers) ; 

 Deaf and Dumb (their other journal); Rooks (the Entertaining) ; the 

 Week (anybody) ; Walks, and the Essayists (nobody). 



No. 5. Tea (the Entertaining) ; American Almanac ; a Burgess ; Po- 

 verty ; Price of Corn ; an Australian Scribbler. 



Supplement. London Bridge ; Travels in Africa ; Scrap from Captain 

 Hall ; Transit of Mercury ; Home Colonies, by Rowland Hill, esquire and 

 schoolmaster, a committee-man. On the last of these there are some ob- 

 servations, which are really amusing; but we fear they will be lost upon 

 the penny readers. In substance they are these : — There are, say, 

 100 labourers in a parish, all well employed and well paid; but admit one 

 new-comer, and the whole are ruined. It comes thus : — The new man 

 underbids one of the old, and turns him out ; he turns out the second ; the 

 second the third ; and so on, till Hob 99 works for the same wages as the 

 new man, and Hob 100 is out of work. He comes as a new man, and the 

 whole are again reduced ; and so on, ad infinitum. 



That piece of ratiocination must be their own ; for, silly as some of the 

 books of" single men " are, there are none that can come up to that : still 

 it contains the essence of all their feeling and all their philosophy. They 

 never suppose that there can be any affection between master and man, or 

 between one labourer and another; and, by the theory, there is no inven- 

 tion. Necessity, the once all-prolific dame, is barren ; and every additional 

 man is additional misery. Need we wonder that there is neither inform- 

 ation nor amusement in what emanates from such a quarter ? 



Why should it go clown to posterity that the Lord Chancellor of Eng- 

 land, and fifty-nine mighty men, and forty societies, had to leave their public 

 duties in order that eight senseless and heartless pages should be published 

 every week ; and to save every man from perishing for " lack of know- 

 ledge," — knowledge that the mightiest mountain of promise has brought 

 forth the smallest mouse of performance ? If our monuments are to shame 

 Grub Street, in mercy to the great ones of the nation let us have the 

 shame of making them upon our own heads! 



Is it possible that all or any of the men whose names stand surety, in 

 drab, upon the cover of the " sixpenn'orth," had any part or lot in the 

 matter? Heaven forefend ! If our judges, our senators, our D.D.'s, our 

 F.R.S.'s, nay, even our esquires, were to be guilty of any thing so ludi- 

 crously absurd as that which we have analysed, why 



" The girdling flood had changed to a strait jacket, 

 And all the isle gone mad." 



In justice, or in mercy, to the committee of sixty, and the twoscore of 

 provincial branches, we must acquit them of the actual sin of this piece of 

 paste-and-scissors work. Then, how came their names on the cover ? 



