too painful. For who speaks of
CHEPSTOWE now? Who cares to cumber his bookshelves with the volumes
in which this inflated arm-chair prophet of the tin pots delivered his
shrieking message? His very name has flickered out; and when I spoke
of him the other day, I was asked, by a person of some intelligence,
if I referred to CHEPSTOWE who had just made 166 playing cricket for
the Gentlemen against the Players. Not even the lion and the lizard
keep his courts, and yet JAMSHYD CHEPSTOWE gloried and drank deep in
his day. He blustered through many editions, he bellowed his contempt
at a shrinking world, he outraged conventionality, he swung himself by
the aid of newly-fashioned metres to lofty peaks of poetic daring, and
to-day the dust lies thick upon his books, and his name is confounded
with that of an eminent cricket-player!

My excellent SWAGGER, it was meanly done. If you meant to wipe him out
so swiftly, why did you ever exalt him?

Farewell for a space. I may have to write to you again.

Yours, DIOGENES ROBINSON.

* * * * *

"USED UP."--Lord BRASSEY requested several papers last week to publish
his denial as to having the finest collection of stamps in the world.
His Lordship, it appears, "doesn't take the smallest interest in
foreign stamps." Fortunate for Lord BRASSEY. There are some excellent
people who can't get up any interest, or capital either, at all
without a stamp of some sort. Lord BRASSEY wished it further known,
that he was not a collector of curios, and had no curiosity of any
kind. Lord BRASSEY must be a later edition of _L'Homme Blase_, to whom
the world was round like an indiarubber-ball and "nothing in it."

* * * * *

"IN NUBIBUS."--If the new Sky-signs with which we are threatened,
_viz._, advertisements reflected in the clouds, become the fashion,
the aspect of the heavens by daylight will be as delightful and
artistic as are the walls of our hoardings and Railway-stations.
The anthem of "_The Heavens are Telling_" will have to be adapted
for large towns. Perhaps pictures may be projected on the nebulous
back-ground. If so, some of our best Artists may not object to taking
a good sum, and then having their work "Sky'd."

* * * * *

PHANTASMA-GORE-IA!

_PICTURING THE VARIOUS MODES OF MELODRAMATIC MURDER_. (_BY OUR
"OFF-HIS"-HEAD POET_.)

NO. I.--THE DAGGER MURDER.

[Illustration]

They