According to the Report of the Commissioners of Public Charities, the annual sum of 972,396l. has been bequeathed by pious donors to England only! This is surely the promised land of benevolence; but in Salop only, there are arrears now due to the poor for upwards of 42 years!
M. La Combe, in his Picture of London, advises those who do not wish to be robbed to carry a brace of blunderbusses, and to put the muzzle of one out of each window, so as to be seen by the robbers.
The silly habit of praising every thing at a man's table came in for a share of the late Dr. Kitchener's severity. He said, "Criticism, sir, is not a pastime; it is a verdict on oath: the man who does it is (morally) sworn to perform his duty. There is but one character on earth, sir," he would add, "that I detest; and that is the man who praises, indiscriminately, every dish that is set before him. Once I find a fellow do that at my table, and, if he were my brother, I never ask him to dinner again."
A daily literary journal has lately been started in Paris, and has, in less than three weeks, above 2,000 subscribers.
Reviewing, as a profession by which a certain class of men seek to instruct the public, and to support themselves creditably in the middle order, and to keep their children from falling, after the decease of enlightened parents, on the parish, is at the lowest possible ebb in this country; and many is the once well-fed critic now an hungered—Blackwood.
Oranges.—It is not perhaps generally known or suspected, that the rabbis of the London synagogues are in the habit of affording both employment and maintenance to the poor of their own persuasion, by supplying them with oranges at an almost nominal price.—Ibid.
Noble Authors.—The poor spinsters of the Minerva press can scarcely support life by their labours, so completely are they driven out of the market by the Lady Charlottes and the Lady Bettys; and a rhyming peer is as common as a Birmingham button. It would take ten Horace Walpoles at least to do justice to the living authors of the red book.
Buying Books.—Money is universally allowed to be the thing which all men love best; and if a man buys a book, we may safely infer he thinks well of it. What nobody buys, then, we may justly conclude is not worth reading.
On the Duchess of Devonshire's canvassing for Mr. Fox at the Westminster Election.