ir Peter Laurie, for a Bill of Fare of the various viands demolished
at the Lord Mayors' Dinners for the last ten years--also, for an account
of certain experiments made to ascertain the contents of the Board of
Aldermen at City Feasts, by the application of a new regulating-belt,
called the Gastronometer--

_A German Silver Medal and a Gravy Spoon._

* * * * *

PUNCH'S REVIEW.

THE MEMOIRS OF MADAME LAFFARGE.

The title, I think, will strike. The fashion, you know, now, is to
do away with old prejudices, and to rescue certain characters from
the illiberal odium with which custom has marked them. Thus we
have a generous Israelite, an amiable cynic, and so on. Now, Sir,
I call my play--_The Humane Footpad_.--SYLVESTER DAGGERWOOD.

Some four or five seasons since, the eccentric Buckstone produced a
three-act farce, which, by dint of its after title--_The School for
Sympathy_--and of much highly comic woe, exhibited in the acting of Farren
and Nisbett, was presented to uproariously-affected audiences during some
score nights. The hinge of the mirth was made to turn upon the
irresistible drollery of one man's running away with another man's wife,
and the outrageous fun of the consequent suicide of the injured husband;
the _bons mots_ being most tragically humorous, and the aphorisms of the
several characters facetiously concatenative of the nouns contained in the
leading name of the piece--"_Love_ and _Murder_."

Now this was a magnificent idea--one of those brilliant efforts which
cannot but tend to lift the theatre in the estimation of every man of
delicacy and education. A new source of attraction was at once
discovered,--a vast fund of available fuel was suddenly found to recruit
the cinerulent embers of the drama withal. It became evident that, after
Joe Miller, the ordinary of Newgate was the funniest dog in the world.
Manslaughter, arson, and the more practical jokes in the Calendar, were
already familiar to the stage; it was a refinement of the Haymarket
authors to introduce those livelier sallies of wit--crim. con. and
felo-de-se. The "immense coalitions" of all manner of crimes and vices in
the subsequent "highway school"--the gradual development of every
unnatural tendency in the youthful Jack Sheppard (another immor-t-al work
by the author of the afore-lauded comedy)--the celebration, by a classic
chaunt, of his reaching the pinnacle of depravity;