Should this mania spread, we shall have Striking become what might be called the order, but that it will be the disorder, of the day. The professions will strike; you will send for your lawyer to make your will, and your messenger will return with non est inventus—struck; or should you ask the legal gentleman a six-and-eightpenny question, you will discover that he has struck for 13s. 4d. The physicians and surgeons will strike for two-guinea fees; the apothecaries for ten-shilling mixtures. The clergy will all strike—as indeed some of them, the poor curates, might reasonably do—and pluralists will be demanding forty thousand a year instead of twenty; whilst bishops will hang up the mitre, stick the crosier over the chimney-piece, and hold out against the Ecclesiastical Commissioners for double incomes. In short, almost everybody will strike except the threshers, the smiths, and the pugilists.
With all this striking, though, we had better take care that we are not floored.
Musical Intelligence.
Talking about music—and our Honourable Members have been talking a great deal about it lately—a celebrated professor says: "You generally find that persons who are not fond of music play the Flute."
THE POPULAR LAURIE BALLAD
There is a song to which we have alluded before, called "Annie Laurie," being sung at all the Mansion House dinners; and though Annie is the name in common use, there can be no doubt that Peter is the party whom the ballad is designed to flatter. We have therefore engaged our own Laureate in the graceful task of fixing on the head of the Lauries the honour which had been conferred on Annie, by a poet evidently unconscious of the "coming" Alder-"man."
The Mansion House is bonnie when dinners are not few;
And it's there that Peter Laurie gave me his promise true,