Noblemen and gentlemen contracting for seven years allowed a
    handsome discount.  No connexion with any other house.

* * * * *

“WHEN VULCAN FORGED,” &c.

“Bless my soul!” said Sir Peter Laurie, rushing into the Justice-room the morning the Exchequer Bill affair was discovered, and seizing Hobler by the button; “This is a dreadful business.  Have you any idea, Hobler, who the delinquent is?” “Why really, Sir Peter, ’tis difficult to say; but from an inspection of the forged instruments I should say it was Smith’s work.”  Sir Peter felt the importance of the suggestion, and rushed off to Sir Robert Peel to recommend the stoppage of all the forges in the kingdom.

* * * * *

PEEL’S PRE-EXISTENCE!

“Every man is not only himself,” says Sir THOMAS BROWNE; “there hath been many Diogenes, and as many Timons, though but few of that name. Men are lived over again.  The world is now as it was in ages past:  there was none then but there hath been some one since that parallels him, and, as it were, his revived self.”  We are devout believers in the creed.

HERR VON TEUFELSKOPF was a High German doctor, of the first class.  He had taken his diploma of Beelzebub in the Black Forest, and was gifted with as fine a hand to force a card—­with as glib a tongue to harangue a mob at wakes and fairs, as any professor since the birth of the fourth grace of life,—­swindling.  He would talk until his head smoked of his list of miraculous cures—­of his balsams, his anodynes, his elixirs; in the benevolence of his soul he would, to accommodate the pockets of the poor, sell a pennyworth of the philosopher’s stone; and, as a further illustration of his sympathy for suffering man or woman, give, even for a kreutzer, a mouthful of the Fountain of Youth.  As a water-doctor, too, his Sagacity was inconceivable.  A hundred years ago, he told to a fraction the amount of the national debt, from a single glance at the specimen sent him by JOHN BULL; and more, for five-and-twenty years predicted who would be the incoming Lord Mayor of London, from an inspection of a pint of water presented to him every season from Aldgate-pump.  He could prophesy all the politics of the Court of Aldermen from a phial filled at Fleet-ditch; and could at any time—­no trifling task—­tell the amount of corruption in the House of Commons, by taking up a handful of water at Westminster-bridge.  On his stolen visit to England—­for the honour he has done our country has never been generally known—­he calculated to a nicety how many puppies and kittens were annually drowned in the Thames, and how many suicides—­particularising the sex and dress of each sufferer—­were committed in the same period, from a bottlefull of Thames water brought to him wherewith to dilute his brandy at the Ship public house, Greenwich—­a hostelry much