Did Jack then, you will ask, walk out as he had threatened, when he got the Squire’s answer?  Not he.  He now gave notice that he intended to apply for an Act of Parliament on the subject:  and that, in the meantime, the matter might stand over.  Meantime, and in case matters should come to the worst, he is busily engaged begging all over the country, for cash to erect a new wooden tenement for him, in the event of his having to leave his old one of stone and lime.  Some say even that he has been seen laying down several pounds of gunpowder in the cellar of his present house, and has been heard to boast of his intention to blow up his successor when he takes possession; but for my own part, and seeing how he has shuffled hitherto, I believe that he is no nearer removing than he was a year ago.  Indeed he has said confidentially to several people, that even if his new house were all ready for him, he could not, with his asthmatic tendency, think of entering it for a twelvemonth or so, till the lath and plaster should be properly seasoned.  Of all this, however, we shall hear more anon.

* * * * *

PAUL DE KOCKNEYISMS.

BY A COCKNEY.

When any one thinks of French literature, there immediately rises before him a horrid phantasmagoria of repulsive objects—­murders, incests, parricides, and every imaginable shape of crime that horror e’er conceived or fancy feigned.  He sees the whole efforts of a press, brimful of power and talent, directed against every thing that has hitherto been thought necessary to the safety of society, or the happiness of domestic life—­marriage deliberately written down, and proved to be the cause of all the miseries of the social state:  and strange to say, in the crusade against matrimony, the sharpest swords and strongest lances are wielded by women.  Those women are received into society—­men’s wives and daughters associate with them—­and their books are noticed in the public journals without any allusions to the Association for the prevention of vice, but rather with the praises which, in other times and countries, would have been bestowed on works of genius and virtue.  The taste of the English public has certainly deteriorated within the last few years; and popularity, the surest index of the public’s likings, though not of the writer’s deservings, has attended works of which the great staple has been crime and blackguardism.  A certain rude power, a sort of unhealthy energy, has enabled the writer to throw an interest round pickpockets and murderers; and if this interest were legitimately produced, by the exhibition of human passions modified by the circumstances of the actor—­if it arose from the development of one real, living, thinking, doing, and suffering man’s heart, we could only wonder at the author’s choice of such a subject, but we should be ready to acknowledge that he had widened our sphere of knowledge—­and made us feel,