Then comes an Overture by the band, which is a little commonwealth, in which none aspires to lead, none condescends to follow.  At it they go indiscriminately, and those who get first to the end of the composition, strike in at the point where the others happen to have arrived; so that, if they proceed at sixes and sevens, they generally contrive to end in unison.

Occasionally we are treated with Musard’s Echo quadrilles, when the solos are all done by the octave flute, so are all the echoes, and so is everything but the cada.

But the grand performance of the night is the dramatic piece, which is generally a three-act opera, embracing the whole debility of the company.  There is the villain, who always looks so wretched as to impress on the mind that, if honesty is not the best policy, rascality is certainly the worst.  Then there is the lover, whose woe-begone countenance and unhappy gait, render it really surprising that the heroine, in dirty white sarsnet, should have displayed so much constancy.  The low comedy is generally done by a gentleman who, while fully impressed with the importance of the “low,” seems wholly to overlook the “comedy;” and there is now and then a banished nobleman, who appears to have entirely forgotten everything in the shape of nobility during his banishment.  There is not unfrequently a display of one of the proprietor’s children in a part requiring “infant innocence;” and as our ideas of that angelic state are associated principally with pudding heads and dirty faces, the performance is generally got through with a nastiness approaching to nicety.  But it is time to make our escape from the Bower, and we therefore leave them to get through the “Chough and Crow”—­which is often the wind-up, because it admits of a good deal of growling—­in our absence.  We cannot be tempted to remain even to witness the pleasing performances of the “Sons of Syria,” nor the “Aunts of Abyssinia.”  We will not wait to see Mr. Macdonald sing “Hot codlings” on his head, though the bills inform us he has been honoured by a command to go through that interesting process from “nearly all the crowned heads in Europe.”

* * * * *

PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

VOL. 1.

FOR THE WEEK ENDING SEPTEMBER 25, 1841.

* * * * *

THE HEIR OF APPLEBITE.

CHAPTER V.

SHOWS THAT “THERE’S MANY A SLIP” BETWEEN OTHER THINGS BESIDE “THE CUP AND THE LIP.”

[Illustration:  T]The heir of Applebite continued to squall and thrive, to the infinite delight of his youthful mamma, who was determined that the joyful occasion of his cutting his first tooth should be duly celebrated by an evening party of great splendour; and accordingly cards were issued to the following effect:—­