Ominous.—Lord R. Churchill is to address a meeting of Unionists at Sunderland. Hardly strikes one as quite a suitable spot for that purpose, Sunderland being rather suggestive of the Separatist policy that Lord Randolph and his friends are so strongly opposed to. The Home Rulers would have chosen Cumberland as more appropriate.
DRURY LANE WITH PLEASURE.
My Dear Mr. Punch,
Pleasure Parties.
It was only what might have been expected that a large audience should assemble in the National Theatre to see the new piece by Messrs. Paul Merritt and Augustus Harris. The very title was inviting, and when to that title were added scenes in Oxford, Monte Carlo, Nice and Gloucestershire, who could refuse the invitation? Certainly not I. So I accepted, with pleasure, and was present at the initial performance. I refreshed my recollection of college life at Oxford where men certainly were not quite as serious as Mr. Jack Lovell, in the long since of the "fifties." I could not help regretting that the Oxford of thirty years ago had not the unconventional Mr. Nicholls amongst the Undergraduates. Had he been there at the period to which I refer, I undoubtedly should have sought the honour of his acquaintance, but on the condition that he did not introduce me to the aforesaid Jack Lovell, who on matriculating at Drury Lane was about as lively as a mute at a funeral. I was not at all surprised to find him rather out of sorts. Frankly, Mr. Jack Lovell in Pleasure is not a nice young man. He reads for the Church and gets plucked, as indeed he should, as he seems to have employed the time that he ought to have occupied in hard reading, in behaving in the most disgraceful manner to Miss Jessie Newland, otherwise the ever charming Miss Alma Murray. Very properly refused a family living, he succeeds to a peerage, and immediately publishes the story of his betrothed and refuses to marry her.
