A LEFT-HANDED COMPLIMENT.
"Back again, Doctor? I've been so much better since you went away!"
Mr. Rudyard Kipling has written another Barrack-room Ballad (see Pall Mall Gazette of Thursday last). It is called The Men that fought at Minden, and is perhaps the most coarse and unattractive specimen of verse that this great young man has put forth yet—a jumble of words without a trace of swing or music. All this Tommy Atkins business, with its "Rookies" and its "Johnny Raws," and its affectation of intimate knowledge of the common soldier's inmost feelings, is about played out, and the interest in it is not likely to be revived by such jargon as The Men that fought at Minden. Besides, didn't Lord George Sackville fight(?) at Minden?
Explained at last.—The (Zoo-) logical excuse given for the boa-constrictor when he swallowed his companion, was that "he only wanted a snack for luncheon." It had been hinted that he found "the other one" such a "boa" at meal times that he was determined to put him down. But this is not the fact.