That short pithy criticisms are occasionally as pointed as those that are more elaborated, may be gleaned from the following, which we cull at random for the amusement of our readers.

A little calculation would have saved a well-known novelist being taken to task by a fair graduate of Elmira College, who thus relieved her mind by writing as follows to the College magazine: ‘In a novel of Miss Braddon's, a book of wonderful plot and incident, the hero, after coming to grief in a civilised country, went to Australia to make his fortune; and while yet an apprentice at the pick and shovel, found an immense nugget of gold, which he hid, now in one place, now in another, and finally, was obliged to carry in his under-shirt pocket for weeks. When he reached home its sale made him immensely rich. I had a little curiosity in the matter, and obtaining the current price of gold, found, by a simple computation, that the nugget must have weighed a hundred and ninety-four pounds. A sizeable pocket that must have been!’

Albert Smith had his pronouns criticised in the following neat way by Thackeray. Turning over the leaves of a young lady's album, Thackeray came upon the following lines:

And wrote underneath:

W. M. Thackeray.

Not quite so good-naturedly did Chorley treat Patmore's Angel in the House, in his critical versicles: ‘The gentle reader we apprise, That this new Angel in the House, Contains a tale, not very wise, About a parson and a spouse. The author, gentle as a lamb, Has managÈd his rhymes to fit; He haply fancies he has writ Another In Memoriam. How his intended gathered flowers, And took her tea, and after sung, Is told in style somewhat like ours, For delectation of the young.’ Then after giving ‘some little pictures’ in the poet's own language, the cruel critic went on—‘From ball to bed, from field to farm, The tale flows nicely purling on; With much conceit there is no harm, In the love-legend here begun. The rest will come some other day, If public sympathy allows; And this is all we have to say About the Angel in the House.’

This hardly amounted to faint praise, a kind of encouragement Mr Buckstone owned had a very depressing effect upon him when he ranked among youthful aspirants to theatrical honours. ‘I was,’ said the comedian, ‘given by my manager a very good part to act, which being received by the public with roars of laughter, I considered that my future was made. A worthy vendor of newspapers, a great critic and patron of the drama, asked me for an order. On giving him one, I called the next day expecting to hear a flattering account of my performance, but was disappointed. Determined to learn what effect my acting had produced on him, I nervously put the question: “Did you see me last night?” to which he replied: “O yes.” “Well,” said I, “were you pleased?” And he again replied with his “O yes.” I then came to the point with: “Did you like my acting?” And he rejoined: “O yes; you made me smile.”’

A more appreciative critic was the lady who after seeing Garrick and Barry severally play Romeo, observed that in the garden scene, Garrick's looks were so animated and his gestures so spirited, that had she been Juliet she should have thought Romeo was going to jump up to her; but that Barry was so tender, melting, and persuasive, that had she been Juliet she should have jumped down to him.

An old seaman after looking long at the picture of ‘Rochester from the River,’ cried: ‘Yes, that's it—just opposite old Staunton's, where I served my time—just as it used to look when I was a youngster no higher than my stick. It's forty years since I saw the old place; but if the haze would only clear off, I could point out every house!’

When M. Gondinet's Free was produced at the Porte St Martin Theatre, a Parisian critic commended the playwright for rendering a good deal of the dialogue inaudible by a liberal employment of muskets and cannon; and then conjugated Free thus: ‘I am free to go to the play; thou art free to be bored by the first act; he or she is free to be bored by act second; we are free to be bored by the third; you are free to be bored still more by the fourth and fifth acts; and they are free to stay away for the future.’

M. Gondinet's drama was seemingly as fitting a subject for the pruning-knife as the play of which Mark Twain, speaking for himself and partner, deposed: ‘The more we cut out of it, the better it got along. We cut out, and cut out, and cut out; and I do believe this would be one of the best plays in the world to-day, if our strength had held out, and we could have gone on and cut out the rest of it.’

An Ohio politician ‘on the stump,’ stayed the torrent of his eloquence for a moment, and looking round with a self-satisfied air, put the question: ‘Now, gentlemen, what do you think?’ A voice from the crowd replied: ‘Well, Mr Speaker, if you ask me, I think, sir, I do indeed, that if you and me were to stump the state together, we could tell more lies than any other two men in the country, sir; and I'd not say a word myself, sir, all the time.’ The orator must have felt as grateful as the actor whose impersonation of the hero of Escaped from Sing-Sing impelled a weary pittite to proclaim aloud that the play would have been better ‘if that chap hadn't escaped from Sing-Sing;’ or the Opera tenor whose first solo elicited from Pat in the upper regions the despairing ejaculation: ‘Och, my eighteen-pince!’

A young negro, carefully conducting an old blind woman through the Philadelphia Exhibition, stopped in front of a statue of Cupid and Psyche, and thus enlightened his sightless companion: ‘Dis is a white mammy and her babby, and dey has just got no clo' onto 'em at all, and he is a-kissin' of her like mischief, to be shuah. I's kind o' glad you can't see 'em, 'cause you'd be flustered like, 'cause dey don't stay in de house till dey dresses deyselves. All dese figures seem to be scarce o' clo', but dey is mighty pooty, only dey be too white to be any 'lation to you and me, mammy.’ Then turning to a statue in bronze: ‘Dere be one nigger among 'em which is crying over a handkerchief. Dey call him Othello. Mebbe his mother is dead, and he can't fetch her to de show, poor fellow!’

An American officer riding by the bronze statue of Henry Clay in Canal Street, New Orleans, was asked by his Irish orderly if the New Orleans ‘fellers’ were so fond of niggers that they put a statue of one in their ‘fashionablest’ street. ‘That's not a nigger, Tom; that's the great Clay statue,’ said the amused officer. Tom rode round the statue, dismounted, climbed upon the pedestal, examined the figure closely, and then said: ‘Did they tell yez it was clay? It looks to me like iron!’

Tom's ignorance was more excusable than that of the Yankee who, learning on inquiry that the colossal equestrian figure in Union Square, New York, was ‘General Washington, the father of his country,’ observed: ‘It is? I never heard of him before; but there is one thing about him I do like—he does set a horse plaguy well.’ A compliment to the artist, at all events.

Perhaps Salvini took it as a compliment when his Othello was compared to the awakening fury of the Hyrcanian tiger disturbed at his feast of blood, and his Hamlet described as ‘a magnificent hoodlum on his muscle, with a big mad on, smashing things generally;’ and the Boston actress was delighted to know her ‘subtle grace, flexible as the sinuosities of a morning mist, yet thoroughly proportioned to the curves of the character, was most especially noticeable.’ But the Hungarian prima donna must have felt a little dubious as to the intentions of the critic who wrote of her: ‘Her voice is wonderful. She runs up and down the scale with the agility of an experienced cat running up and down a house-top, and two or three fences thrown in. She turns figurative flip-flaps on every bar, tearing up the thermometer to away above two hundred and twelve, and sliding down again so far below zero that one feels chilled to the bone.’ The fair singer would probably have preferred something in this style: ‘Miss —— wore a rich purple suit with a handsome shade of lavender, a white over-garment, tight-fitting, with flowing sleeves, and a white bonnet trimmed with the same shades of purple and lavender, and she sang finely.’

That has the merit of being intelligible. The writer was not in such a desperate condition as the Memphis theatrical reporter who lauded an actress as ‘intense yet expansive, comprehensive yet particular, fervid without faultiness; glowing and still controlled, natural but refined, daring anything, fearing nothing but to violate grace; pure as dew, soft as the gush of distant music, gentle as a star beaming through the riven clouds. With mystery of charms she comes near to us, and melts down our admiration into love; but when we take her to us as something familiar and delicious, she floats away to the far heights of fame, and looks down on our despair with countenance of peaceful lustre and smiles as sweet as spring.’ If the lady did not reciprocate, her heart must have been of adamant.