tickle the long ears of the thoughtless. Dearly
as actors love their little gags, proud as they
are of the roars of laughter and thunders of
applause which ensue upon their gags, they
would scarcely venture to print them in the text
of the published play. They have sense enough
to know that they would not stand the test of
calm consideration. But your actor in the
gown and horsehair wig has no such scruple;
he is well aware, on occasions, that much that
he says will be printed next morning in the
newspapers, and yet he is not deterred from
talking the baldest bosh that ever ran from the
blathering tongue of a taproom orator. There
is no clap-trap so offensive, so shallow, so
insulting to the commonest understanding, as that
of some Old Bailey barristers. And yet it
"goes down" in court. We were present the
other day at a trial in which two eminent
counsel vied with each other in their efforts to
produce an impression, both upon the jury and
upon the select audience. They were facetious,
they were pathetic; all their colours, whether
black or rose-tint, were laid on thick, and
they produced the desired effect. The males
applauded, in spite of the usher of the court,
and the females wept. We will not say
what we thought of the speeches at the time;
but on reading them next morning in the papers,
we felt on behalf of the two eminent counsel
most heartily ashamed. Not one sentence of
cogent argument, not one word of common
sense, but a flashy farrago of bully-boy clap-trap!
Gag! Unmitigated vulgar gag!

Is there no clap-trap, no gag, in the pulpit?
Do clergymen never drag in anecdotes, neck and
heels? Do they never make jokes? When the
Puritan divines talked of the braces of faith and
the breeches of righteousness, they relied upon
the interest that would be awakened by breeches
and braces. Their imitators in modern days
strive by similar metaphors to keep their
congregations awake—not to religion, but to the
entertaining powers of the preacher.

The gags in which our legislators indulge
while discussing the imperial affairs of the
nation, are quite as contemptible as any we meet
with in the theatre. And they are of precisely
the same character. It is the pointed personal
retort, the lighting of a match upon an honourable
member's collar, that causes loud cheers;
it is the use of some common-place expression,
or an allusion to some vulgar and familiar
absurdity, that brings down the laughter. One
favourite House of Commons gag, however, is a
Latin quotation. Members always cheer it,
whether they understand it or no—generally
cheer it the more, in proportion as they
understand it the less.

And the art of gagging is well known to the
painter, the sculptor, and the author. In every
exhibition we are attracted by tricks of light
and shade, which are nothing more than gags.
This wonderful marble veil, delicately sculptured
over the face of Innocence? A gag—a mere
trick of the hand, without a breath of soul in it.
Something to catch the eye. In literature,
gagging is perhaps more rampant than in any other
art. It takes every form and shape. It
presents itself in flashy copper gilt metaphors, in
ostentatious quotations from foreign languages,
living and dead, in a common-place-book pretence
of knowledge, and in a hundred other tricks and
devices, which are neither honest nor to the
purpose of the "question."

CHESTERFIELD JUNIOR.

A SON'S ADVICE TO HIS FATHER.

MY DEAR FATHER. Among the novelties
which have grown up of late years—and grown
up very tall, too—are the Great Hotels. These
places of residence, where you are undertaken,
if the phrase may be allowed, on such a large
scale, where everything is done for you, and
all trouble taken off your hands, surely ought
to meet the requirements of a great number of
persons. The advantages of the system seem
at first sight enormous. You pay no rent, you
sign no leases or agreements, you have nothing
to do with taxes, no servants' wages, no
butchers' bills. You have no trouble in
engaging servants, in drilling servants, in getting
rid of servants. If the pipes be frozen in the
course of a hard winter, or if they happen to
burst when the said winter breaks up, they are
no business of yours. The young man does
not call to speak to you about the new kitchen
range, nor does the gas-man wish to see you
in the hall "relative to the state of the meter."

Then, what you want is always to be had.
You want a bottle of soda-water the last thing
at night; you are not told that there happens
to be none in the house. You want a sandwich
in the middle of the day; no uncompromising
servant informs you that "there is no cold
meat in the house." You want a basin of broth,
and you are not obliged to wait till the next
day for it. You want to know where somebody
lives; there is the last Post-Office Directory to
refer to. You want a messenger; he is ready
in the hall. You have a telegram to send off;
here is a form, and in another moment it is
despatched.

For all these advantages you pay one weekly
bill. When you think of the number of bills
to be considered once a week by any ordinary
housekeeper, the file of little red books to be
gone through by some trustworthy person or
other—this seems something more than a small
advantage. A cheque is drawn once a week,
and all is over. Rent, taxes, wages, housekeeping,
are all disposed of in five minutes. If the
cheque in question do sometimes strike one as
rather large, it is but fair to consider how
very much it represents.

There are some people who hold strongly to the
ornamental in life. It is of importance to them
that the dinner should be well served, that the
tablecloth should always be spotless, and the waiting
at table deftly accomplished; and yet their
means are not such as certainly to afford them
these luxuries in an establishment of their own.