Believe no tale unpleasant, scorn to list
  To slanderous charges on the British name! 
  That brutish baseness, or that sordid shame
  Can touch ‘our gallant fellows,’ is a thing
  Incredible.  Do not our poets sing,
  Our pressmen praise in dithyrambic prose,
  The ‘lads’ who win our worlds and face our foes? 
  Who never, save to human pity, yield
  One step in wilderness or battlefield!”

  Meanwhile, with troubled eyes and straining hands,
  Silent, attentive, thoughtful, Justice stands. 
  To her alone let the appeal be made. 
  Heroes, or merely tools of huckstering Trade,
  Men brave, though fallible, or sordid brutes,
  Let all be heard.  Since each to each imputes
  Unmeasured baseness, somewhere the black stain
  Must surely rest.  The dead speak not, the slain
  Have not a voice, save such as that which spoke
  From ABEL’s blood.  Green laurels, or the stroke
  Of shame’s swift scourge?  There’s the alternative
  Before the lifted eyes of those who live. 
  One fain would see the grass unstained that waves
  In the dark Afric waste o’er those two graves. 
  To Justice the protagonist makes appeal. 
  Justice would wish him smirchless as her steel,
  But stands with steadfast eyes and unbowed head
  Silent—­betwixt the Living and the Dead!

* * * * *

OPERA NOTES.

What’s a Drama without a Moral, and what’s Rigoletto without a MAUREL, who was cast for the part, but who was too indisposed to appear?  So Signor GALASSI came and “played the fool” instead, much to the satisfaction of all concerned, and all were very much concerned about the illness or indisposition of M. MAUREL.  DIMITRESCO not particularly strong as the Dook; but Mlle. STROMFELD came out well as Gilda, and, being called, came out in excellent form in front of the Curtain.  Signor BEVIGNANI, beating time in Orchestra, and time all the better for his beating.

* * * * *

“FOR THIS RELIEF MUCH THANKS.”—­The difficulties in The City, which Mr. Punch represented in his Cartoon of November 8, were by the Times of last Saturday publicly acknowledged to be at an end.  The adventurous mariners were luckily able to rest on the Bank, and are now once more fairly started.  They will bear in mind the warning of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, as given to the boys in the above mentioned Cartoon.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  BETWEEN THE QUICK AND THE DEAD.]

* * * * *

AVENUE HUNCHBACK.