Business done.—Irish Constabulary Vote in Committee of Supply; opening of cheerful week for Prince ARTHUR.
"COMING IN THEIR THOUSANDS."
The announcement that a Thousand Nurses would be received at Marlborough House last Saturday, naturally attracted a large number of the Guards and Household troops, who were off duty, to the vicinity of St. James's Park and Pall Mall. The excitement among the military somewhat abated when it was ascertained that the Prince and Princess were receiving the "first working subscribers" to the National Pension Fund for Nurses. The Prince made one of his best speeches, and the Princess smiled her best smiles. The Comptroller of the Weather for the Royal Household had given special orders for sunshine, or a good imitation of it from one till three, so umbrellas were not needed; thus symbolically showing that the day of "Gamps" was over, and that a new era of superior nursing was now an established fact. If such a state of affairs had continued as was portrayed in Martin Chuzzlewit, their Royal Highnesses might have been receiving the last thousand Sarah Gamps and Betsy Prigs, and addressing them in a very different strain.
DRAMATIC NOTES.—ALEXANDER the Grateful, in returning thanks for the toast of "the Avenue Piece," observed that "he objected to this phrase, as he did not mean to 'av a new piece for a long time, the present Bill being good enough." This cast a gloom over the assembly, which then quietly dispersed.
Mr. IRVING, disguised as Louis the Eleventh (the last of the great French cricketers), is at the Grand, in celestial Islington, where the Angel is. These angelic visits are few and far between.
We (who's "we"?) hear a favourable report of Sowing and Reaping at the Criterion,—a play that might have been only "sow sow," if it had not been for the reaping good performance of CHARLES the Reaper.