Room for Sir Punch!-Reporters, nibiyour pens! CHORUS TO SIR PUNCH'S PERFORMANCE. Shame to the sunken state! and Britain's pride, As mean in talent, as in moral vile. What! shall the knave and blockhead dare to sit * * * When such a herd pollutes St. Stephen's fane, JANUARY AND MAY. Train'd by some venal, match-contriving jade, Like flowers transplanted to a sandy heath, She prays for death,—and sees it in his nap! ANOTHER BRACE OF CHARACTERS. Next, see the Rectors, whose ancestral worth, Secures a good fat' living, at their birth; From college ripe, they chant the hunter's song, Drink, chase, and shoot the wood's wild 'feather'd throng.' Let the lean Curate, in his white-wash'd room, Gulp the small beer, and preach the sinner's doom,— A WATER PROCESSION, YCLEPED SWAN-HOPPING.' A PROCESSION OF GENTLEMEN OF THE LONG ROBE! A tribe there is,-the tribe of every street, That cheat unhang'd, yet help to hang the cheat! A plague so direful Egypt never saw,一 The money-gulping vermin of the law: See! where the dapper caitiffs bustling come, Whose law is quibble, and whose cheat's a boast. [ENTER THE CI-DEVANT RESPECTABLE' JOHN BULL AND FAMILY.] Superbly see the trader's costly bale And shed a glory on the counter's side! He keeps a groom and blood,' and Sabbath chaise, And then, he gives his ball, and swills his wine, And deems it courtly not till eve to dine: In short, no nabob more sublimely swells CHORUS TO THE ABOVE PERFORMANCE. Pride is the monster-passion of the times, GRAND INTERLUDE, BETWEEN THE ACTS, ON MERCANTILE SWINDLING. Tune, TANTARARA ROGUES ALL. Tremendous ones for coke, and silk, and steam*, For gin well poison'd, and for wine soon sour; *Horne Tooke once said to one of that class of traders who are anxious to believe that authors must be visionary and unbusinesslike, and who, to disparage Tooke's authorship, boasted of his own common sense-that his (the boaster's) sense was very common indeed. So, it has been pleaded, that commercial men lost their senses during the bubble year. The pleaders are too adulatory; it must have been a very small minority, indeed, that had any senses to lose. The benevolence of parliamentary jobbers, in heaping up mockmountains of gold, was more obvious than their sense. Like that of the patriarch of bubble-mongers, much-injured Blunt,' their patriot purpose, doubtless, was to hasten the present respectable and profitable euthanasia of party; 6 To buy both sides, and give their country peace. I reflect, with pleasure, on having been allied with the Times and Herald, in various papers (town and provincial) then under my control, in unremitting exposure of the bubble-concoctors. The following leading article, written during the time I edited the Sheffield Iris, after the secession of Mr. James Montgomery, was copied into the Morning Herald. Never was volume more instructive opened to the perusal of mankind, than the recent pages of our cotemporary experience, recounting the history of joint-stock companies-the frauds of their authors, and the infatuation of their dupes. The former were, in many instances, insolvents, whose desperate circumstances stimu lated their invention, and who often matured within the walls of a prison that "golden plan" which was destined, like the talisman of a wizard, to change the stone floor of a debtor's cell for a drawingroom with rich carpets, and substitute a splendid directorship for squalid captivity. The latter-their dupes-the covetous fools, who rushed blindly into the great gambling-house opened by knaves, under the lazy and absurd delusion of obtaining wealth without labour, and profit without industry, are equally blameable for encouraging, as the former for projecting. Neither our nobility, our bankers, nor our merchants are free from blame, in yielding to that torrent of avaricious cupidity, the fearful reflux of which is now inundating all classes with disaster. Have not some of our nobles sighed after the ores of the South American mountains, and gloated in voluptuous dreams of Sybarite imagination, over the glowing produce of silk-worms reared among the mists and bogs Or schemes for golden mines,—as yet all clay, And Cent. per Cent. fans all their hearts on fire!— But, sad surprise!-kind PETER paws the shares, Each sawney hoots, and d—s, and puffs, and swears; And proves the genuine stock—a stock of rogues! ENTER A CI-DEVANT JEUNE HOMME, OR BATTERED DANDY. Once king of rakes, LOTHARIO mopes forgot, No more the midnight haunt shall welcome him, A PSEUDO DANDY. What titled Nabob he, that quizzes there, ex of Ireland? Have not some of our bankers busied themselves in trcating sunbeams from cucumbers ?" Have not our merchants— once a name for integrity and honour-deeply involved themselves in the general corruption of delirious greediness, and, to use the words of an energetic writer," shewed their plague-spots, as if they were badges of distinction?" Have not, in short, lords and commoners, divines and lawyers, quakers and stock brokers, physicians and literati, all embarked promiscuously in the same shoreless sea of infatuation, in which he that invented the most brutally stupid, and most visionary commercial romance, (compared with which, Laputan speculation might shew like wisdom,) was deemed the most complete man of business; and he was pronounced most clever, who proved himself to be the greatest cheat. This comes of people not being content to go on in the plain old-fashioned Englishway of getting rich by regular industry. Hence the deterioration of the British merchant's character. Once his word was as good as his bond; but now, as a learned and witty counsel said in a shuffling case of Alderman A. spection.' 'no prudent man would take his bond without rigid in |