There is a laborious lunatic who makes ice at the fair of the American Institute, with the thermometer at 80 deg. or so in the shade. (Note to Editor.—­I don’t know the man from ADAM, and have received no consideration from him whatever for this allusion,) I believe his ice costs this ingenious individual about four dollars per pound to make—­but no matter.  Well, this is exactly the trick by which you make society plays.  ROBERTSON does it to perfection.  He is the patent refrigerator.  And the man who did “The Two Roses” has plagiarized his process and reproduced his results.  I don’t know whether the idea is to interest people in what is uninteresting, or to uninterest people in what is interesting.  But he does both.

Perhaps, however, some absurd person would like to know something about this play.  There is a commercial traveller in it, who is taken, by-the-by, bodily and even to his checked trousers, out of one of ROBERTSON’S plays.  The only addition that has been made is that this one swears.  But then STODDART personates him.  This commercial traveller has a wife.  To whom, by-the-by, did it ever occur, before the author of this play, that commercial travellers could have wives?  The wife of this itinerant commercial person is a stationary commercial person, who keeps a boarding-house which the youths, the heroes of the play, have the misery to inhabit.  All this is undeniably low for WALLACK’S, and the sales-ladies in the audience express their sense of that fact by intimating that EFFIE GERMON’S jewels are not real, and the sales-gentlemen by confiding to one another at the bar, whither they wend after the second act to quaff the maddening sarsaparilla, that WALLACK’S is running down.

As I have abused several revered institutions in these few lines.  I will, in terror of public opinion and private wrath, execute a small variation on my usual and familiar autograph, and sign myself

PICADOR.

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VORACIOUS VEGETATION.

It appears that our ever-active Park Commissioners are making vigorous efforts to establish a Zoological Garden in Central Park.  It has been generally supposed that gardens were either horticultural or agricultural; but if the Commissioners can get up anything of the kind which shall be zoological, Mr. PUNCHINELLO has not the least objection in the world.  He supposes that in such a garden the principal plants will be Tiger-lilies, Cock’s-combs, Larkspurs, Ragged Robins, Coltsfoots, Horse-chestnuts, Goose-berries, Dandelions, Foxgloves, and Dog-wood.  If full crops are desired, a good many pigeons and chickens should be kept on the grounds, and that portion of the gardens devoted to leg-uminous products will probably be occupied by storks and giraffes.

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Q.

Is it likely that a set of Chinese gardeners would be able to mind, at the same time, both their Peas and their Queues?