SIGNS OF THE TIMES.

Seventeen hundred individuals a year, for the last seven years, have been committed for poaching.—­Report Prison Discip.  Society.

Crime is a curse only to the period in which it is successful; but virtue, whether fortunate or otherwise, blesses not only its own age, but remotest posterity, and is as beneficial by its example, as by its immediate effects.

At the late Doncaster races, there were 30,000 persons well clothed, and apparently well fed and happy. 2000l. were taken at the grand stand for admission.

Mr. Kean is to receive, during the present season, fifty pounds for each night’s performance—­the yearly income of a curate!

Singing Non Nobis Domine after dinner is a very foolish custom.  People in England pay 10,000l. a year for non nobis.  Rather sing Dr. Kitchener’s Universal Prayer and the English grace.  The common people of every country understand only their native tongue; therefore if you do not understand them, you will not understand each other.  All Italian music is detestable, and nothing like our genuine native song.  Weber’s “unconcatenated chords” ought not to be listened to, while we have such composers as Braham and Tom Cooke.  The national songs of Great Britain have not sold so well as the Cook’s Oracle.  “People like what goes into the mouth better than what comes out of it.”—­Dr. Kitchener.

A museum, deanery, and a cattle-market are building at York.  Various other improvements and repairs are also in progress in that city!

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.