“Here is power that would furnish forth a whole legion of the poetasters who crawl through our effete literature!” But I cannot pursue these memories.  They are too painful.  For who speaks of CHEPSTOWE now?  Who cares to cumber his bookshelves with the volumes in which this inflated arm-chair prophet of the tin pots delivered his shrieking message?  His very name has flickered out; and when I spoke of him the other day, I was asked, by a person of some intelligence, if I referred to CHEPSTOWE who had just made 166 playing cricket for the Gentlemen against the Players.  Not even the lion and the lizard keep his courts, and yet JAMSHYD CHEPSTOWE gloried and drank deep in his day.  He blustered through many editions, he bellowed his contempt at a shrinking world, he outraged conventionality, he swung himself by the aid of newly-fashioned metres to lofty peaks of poetic daring, and to-day the dust lies thick upon his books, and his name is confounded with that of an eminent cricket-player!

My excellent SWAGGER, it was meanly done.  If you meant to wipe him out so swiftly, why did you ever exalt him?

Farewell for a space.  I may have to write to you again.

Yours, DIOGENES ROBINSON.

* * * * *

“USED UP.”—­Lord BRASSEY requested several papers last week to publish his denial as to having the finest collection of stamps in the world.  His Lordship, it appears, “doesn’t take the smallest interest in foreign stamps.”  Fortunate for Lord BRASSEY.  There are some excellent people who can’t get up any interest, or capital either, at all without a stamp of some sort.  Lord BRASSEY wished it further known, that he was not a collector of curios, and had no curiosity of any kind.  Lord BRASSEY must be a later edition of L’Homme Blase, to whom the world was round like an indiarubber-ball and “nothing in it.”

* * * * *

“IN NUBIBUS.”—­If the new Sky-signs with which we are threatened, viz., advertisements reflected in the clouds, become the fashion, the aspect of the heavens by daylight will be as delightful and artistic as are the walls of our hoardings and Railway-stations.  The anthem of “The Heavens are Telling” will have to be adapted for large towns.  Perhaps pictures may be projected on the nebulous back-ground.  If so, some of our best Artists may not object to taking a good sum, and then having their work “Sky’d.”

* * * * *

PHANTASMA-GORE-IA!

PICTURING THE VARIOUS MODES OF MELODRAMATIC MURDER. (BY OUR “OFF-HIS"-HEAD POET.)

NO.  I.—­THE DAGGER MURDER.

[Illustration]

  They stand alone on the moonlit spot,—­
    Sing Ho—­ho! and Ha—­ha! there! 
  One is the villain, and one is not,
    But the heroine’s father. 
  They stand alone on the patch of light
  (Which comes from the left as well as right)—­
  Oh, ’tis a glorious place and night
    For a Murder Scene!  Rather!