However, to return to poor Goffoni. The day of his trial at length arrived. On being placed in the dock it seemed to him as if he were standing on the doorstep of Eternity; for reflection and everybody had conspired to assure him of the utter hopelessness of his case. And when, to his infinite horror, he heard the drover, without the least hesitation, swear that he, the Signor, was the man who had taken his purse, Goffoni felt as though his shoulders had already served his head with notice to quit. The judge, however, finding that the case turned on a point of disputed identity, ordered the prisoner to put on the hat which had been dropped on the road. Goffoni did so, and was suffused with a cold perspiration on finding that it fitted him to a hair. He was then directed to endorse his body with the cloak, which, alas! also suited the poor devil as though it had been made to measure. The drover looked at him for a second, and then swore with even greater certainty than before that he was the identical person who had robbed him. Goffoni now saw that the sands of his last moments were fast running through the egg-boiler of his existence, when—as the gentlemen of the Italian press afterwards expressed it—"a stranger, dressed in the first style of fashion, rose from the body of the court, and requested to be permitted to put on the articles in which the prisoner had just appeared." Having obtained the sanction of the judge, he attired himself in the cloak and hat, and demanded of the drover, on his oath, whether he, the stranger, was not the party who had taken his purse? The drover eyed the stranger from top to toe, and then, after a little deliberation, swore even still more emphatically that he was. Whereupon the stranger pointed out to the judge that since the drover had sworn with equal certainty to two different parties as the culprit, it was clear that he might be mistaken in both.
A word to the wise is sufficient. So, reader, if your skull be not as thick as a bombshell, it is hardly necessary for us to tell you that Goffoni was acquitted—that it was Virtuoso, the brigand, who procured his acquittal; and that the Moral of all this is (for we must be "moral to the last"), never take the good or bad action of another to yourself, nor be shabby or silly enough to—"SAY YOU DID IT."
ELEGANT EXTRACTS FROM THE LAST NEW BURLESQUE.
Billingsgate in the ascendant.
Burlesque standing on its merits.
A BATTLE WITH BILLINGSGATE.
SUGGESTED BY THAT OF BLENHEIM.
It was the Christmas Holidays,