the funniest dog in the world.  Manslaughter, arson, and the more practical jokes in the Calendar, were already familiar to the stage; it was a refinement of the Haymarket authors to introduce those livelier sallies of wit—­crim. con. and felo-de-se.  The “immense coalitions” of all manner of crimes and vices in the subsequent “highway school”—­the gradual development of every unnatural tendency in the youthful Jack Sheppard (another immor-t-al work by the author of the afore-lauded comedy)—­the celebration, by a classic chaunt, of his reaching the pinnacle of depravity; this was the ne plus ultra of dramatic invention.  Robbers and murderers began to be treated, after the Catholic fashion, with extreme unction; audiences were intoxicated with the new drop; sympathy became epidemic; everybody was bewildered and improved; and nobody went and threw themselves off the Monument with a copy of the baleful drama in his pocket!

But the magnificence of the discovery was too large to be grasped by even the gluttonous eye of the managers, The Adelphi might overflow—­the Surrey might quake with reiterated “pitsfull”—­still there remained over and above the feast-crumbs sufficient for the battenings of other than theatrical appetites.  Immediately the press-gang—­we beg pardon, the press—­arose, and with a mighty throe spawned many monsters.  Great drama! Greater Press! GREATEST PUBLIC!

Now this was all excellent well as far as it went; but still there was something wanted of more reality than the improvisations of a romancist.  Ainsworth might dip his pen in the grossest epithets; Boz might dabble in the mysterious dens of Hebrew iniquity; even Bulwer might hash up to us his recollections of St. Giles’s dialogue; and yet it was evident that they were all the while only “shamming”—­only cooking up some dainty dish according to a recipe, or, as it is still frequently pronounced, a receipt,—­which last, with such writers, will ever be the guide-post of their track.

But something more was wanted; and here it is—­here, in the Memoirs of Marie Cappelle.

This lady, perhaps the most remarkable woman of her age, has published a book—­half farce, half novel—­in which she treats by turns with the clap-trap agony of a Bulwer, the quaint sneer of a Dickens, and the effrontery of an Ainsworth, that serious charge which employed the careful investigation of the most experienced men in France for many weeks, and which excited a degree of interest in domestic England almost unexampled in the history of foreign trials.  This work is published by a gentleman who calls himself “Publisher in ordinary to her Majesty,” and may be procured at any book-seller’s by all such as have a guinea and a day’s leisure at the mercy of the literary charlatan who contrived it.

In the strictest confidence we would suggest, that if a treaty could be ratified with Madame Marie Cappelle Laffarge, we do not doubt that our nursery—­yea, our laundry—­maids would learn to spell the precious sentences, to their own great edification and that of the children placed under their charge.