class="c15">Both a Certain Holy 'un
And the last NAPOLEON.
And darkness will come wholly on
The Sun. Day, natheless, will glow
Down in the regions far below."

Now this is certainly a very astounding prophecy. If the numbers mentioned at the beginning of the oracular ditty be added together without using the ace, they make the year 1776. Now the value of an ace in Seven-up (and seven is the uppermost word in the line in which our ace occurs) is four. So four, added to the former sum, makes the year 1780. But even the first NAPOLEON had not made his appearance in this year, and so it would seem there must be a mistake somewhere. But such is not the case. If, after the manner of the regular prophecy-makers, we treat this sum according to the rule of probabilities, we shall see that, if "seventeen-eighty" will not work prophecy, we must reverse the year and call it "eighteen-seventy." This hits the mark exactly, and makes us tremble at the prophetic power of some of those old delvers in the mines of dark prediction.

For now we see plainly that not only the Pope and the ex-Emperor of France will probably disappear this year from the scenes of their glory, but that the Sun, over which a certain dirty mistiness has been stealing for some time past, will be entirely shrouded in the blackness of ruin. The lines

doubtless refer to DANA the less, who, when his sheet is utterly overwhelmed in its self-made oblivion, will deserve, and probably obtain, all the brightness and warmth to which the verse refers.

Placing this astounding prediction by the side of the amazing events of the present year, it is impossible for Mr. PUNCHINELLO to repress his feelings of wonder and awe!

THE PLAYS AND SHOWS.

here is an old conundrum song that begins—"Why do summer roses fade?" The late ARTEMUS WARD thought they did it as a matter of business. Why do the "Two Roses" bloom? That is WALLACK'S business. Also just now it happens to be mine.

The modern English comedy is divided into two kinds. Everybody will consider this statement a conundrum, and answer,—"Bad and good." Wrong, my little dears. All your lexicographers agree that "kind" means a "race," which is absurd, because a horse-race, for instance, is anything but kind. But they explain by saying that it means a genus. Good plays are not a genus. They are freaks of nature, like the woolly horse and the sacred cow; only, when they are produced, so many people will not pay money to see them as to see the w.h. and the s.c.

The division of modern plays, as JONATHAN EDWARDS said wittily, in his sparkling treatise on "The Will," is into the tame and the wild. For the latter the recipe is simple. Take some black false beads, hatchets, pistols, a "dog"—not a quadruped, but the article which was left in Mr. NATHAN'S hall—a woman in black hair and a white garment, suggestive of repose, strolling at midnight by the banks of the prattling East River, foot of Grand Street, and set a house afire at the end of the third act. That is the BOUCICAULT style, and as the flippant EDWARDS goes on to observe, it draws like a factory chimney in the Bowery and at NIBLO's.

But this sort of thing will not do at all at WALLACK'S. Of course not. STODDART is permitted to swear there, to be sure; but I understand that he does it for fear people should call WALLACK'S the hall of the Old Men's Christian Association. With that exception there is, as somebody said about something, absolutely nothing to offend the most fastidious. Any person who exhibits excitement upon the stage is discharged at the end of the week with a pension. Miss MOORE is permitted to weep, but she does it so quietly and nicely that it does not disturb anybody. And the ushers have received strict orders to eject anybody in the audience who manifests any marked interest in the performance. A friend of mine from Peoria once went to WALLACK'S, and took no pains whatever to conceal his admiration of the acting. On the contrary, at a particularly nice point, he actually clapped his hands together twice. Of course he was arrested for breach of the peace, and locked up over night. But the management declined, to prosecute when it was represented to them that the man had lately seen McKEAN BUCHANAN at the Peoria Academy of Music, and that he could not help testifying his gratification that LESTER WALLACK behaved so differently, and he was discharged. He went back to Peoria, and told his neighbors that there was a place in New York where they got up a yawning match (this coarse person called it a "gaping bee") every night between the stage and the audience, and the stage always won.

Now we know, that is those of us who are in good society, that what this uncouth rustic mistook for indifference is the air of society. TALLEYRAND said, or somebody said he said, that the use of language was to conceal thought. Go to WALLACK'S and you will see that the art of acting is to suppress emotions. Everything is below concert-pitch, except perhaps the orchestra, which insists upon playing lively and popular music, instead of doing the Dead March in Saul for a funeral procession while the audience files out dreamily to drink, and empties some dull opiate to the drains. The entire audience are making heroic efforts all through the play to prevent each other from seeing that they know they are listening to the most finished acting to be seen anywhere, and looking at the prettiest stage pictures ever set. All the actors are all the while trying to conceal the fact that they are doing any good acting. The whole theatre is in a condition of sweet repose, like the placid bosom of a mill-pond on a summer afternoon, when STODDART shoots the Dam.

Well, when you have society theatres, where they do this sort of thing, you must have society plays. The recipe for these is different from the gallon of gore and the ton of thunder which make up the other sort. You must have your actors representing people who are always bored to death, if you wish to maintain the respect and patronage of a society audience, whose ambition is to seem to be always bored to death in real life. You must have what the sweet but-not exemplary SWINBURNE calls "the lilies and languors of virtue" at WALLACK'S, to balance "the raptures and roses of vice" which you get at the sensational shops. People may fall in love, in a mild way, as they do in society, but they must not undergo the ravages of that passion, as it is exhibited out of society. They are, so to speak, vaccinated for love, and they are safe from the virulent confluent or even the varioloid type of the original malady. They may also transact business, of a high-toned sort, and sometimes they get out of temper. But their main employment is to wander about and yawn, or to sit down and sneer.

There is a laborious lunatic who makes ice at the fair of the American Institute, with the thermometer at 80° or so in the shade. (Note to Editor.—I don't know the man from ADAM, and have received no consideration from him whatever for this allusion,) I believe his ice costs this ingenious individual about four dollars per pound to make—but no matter. Well, this is exactly the trick by which you make society plays. ROBERTSON does it to perfection. He is the patent refrigerator. And the man who did "The Two Roses" has plagiarized his process and reproduced his results. I don't know whether the idea is to interest people in what is uninteresting, or to uninterest people in what is interesting. But he does both.

Perhaps, however, some absurd person would like to know something about this play. There is a commercial traveller in it, who is taken, by-the-by, bodily and even to his checked trousers, out of one of ROBERTSON'S plays. The only addition that has been made is that this one swears. But then STODDART personates him. This commercial traveller has a wife. To whom, by-the-by, did it ever occur, before the author of this play, that commercial travellers could have wives? The wife of this itinerant commercial person is a stationary commercial person, who keeps a boarding-house which the youths, the heroes of the play, have the misery to inhabit. All this is undeniably low for WALLACK'S, and the sales-ladies in the audience express their sense of that fact by intimating that EFFIE GERMON'S jewels are not real, and the sales-gentlemen by confiding to one another at the bar, whither they wend after the second act to quaff the maddening sarsaparilla, that WALLACK'S is running down.

As I have abused several revered institutions in these few lines. I will, in terror of public opinion and private wrath, execute a small variation on my usual and familiar autograph, and sign myself

PICADOR.

VORACIOUS VEGETATION.

It appears that our ever-active Park Commissioners are making vigorous efforts to establish a Zoological Garden in Central Park. It has been generally supposed that gardens were either horticultural or agricultural; but if the Commissioners can get up anything of the kind which shall be zoological, Mr. PUNCHINELLO has not the least objection in the world. He supposes that in such a garden the principal plants will be Tiger-lilies, Cock's-combs, Larkspurs, Ragged Robins, Coltsfoots, Horse-chestnuts, Goose-berries, Dandelions, Foxgloves, and Dog-wood. If full crops are desired, a good many pigeons and chickens should be kept on the grounds, and that portion of the gardens devoted to leg-uminous products will probably be occupied by storks and giraffes.

Q.

Is it likely that a set of Chinese gardeners would be able to mind, at the same time, both their Peas and their Queues?

"ENGLISH GRAMMAR INCLUDED."

1st Young Gentleman. "I TELL YOU WHAT, IT'S AWFUL HARD TO GET ANYTHING TO DO, JUST NOW."

2d ditto. "THAT'S SO. I SEEN AN ADVERTISEMENT YESTERDAY FOR A TUTOR IN A FAMILY, AND I'VE JUST BIN AND WROTE AN ANSWER."

THE QUEUE-RIOUS FUTURE.

Of all the queues which any man or any nation ever gave to another, the Chinese have supplied us with the most queue-rious. The arrived man from that celestial part of the world, who is now so industriously engaged washing for us in New Jersey, and again, making our shoes in Massachusetts, and who proposes to be our dairymaid, our chambermaid, our barmaid, and, if BARNUM will go into the humbug business again, our mermaid, brought the queue on the back of his head when he crossed the Pacific Ocean, and landed on the coast of California. Thence he conveyed it across the Plains, and now our mothers are going back to two queues such as those they wore when the roses which bloomed upon their cheeks were not produced by rouge, and to comprehend the lessons in the school-books which they carried was the severest trial which they knew, except, indeed, the restrained desire to get married. And our fathers will wear one tail, as did their ancestors, who curled those appendages gracefully around the limbs of the trees while they played base-ball with cocoanuts, or visited in that nimble manner in which none other than monkeys are capable of moving about. Our great American agriculturist, too, who has ploughed so deeply in the Tribune office, is going to look like a Chinese; and she, who has given us our Caudle lectures now for many years past, will exhibit ANNA DICKINSON as a convert to two tails. Next, he who serves up for us our religion every once a week in the form of sanctimonious speeches on the subject of political economy, will let his congregation go behind Plymouth Pulpit for the purpose of getting their queues for the next Sunday love-feast by observing his. The "long" and the "short" of the new vanity, however, will be found in fullest perfection among the bully-bears in Wall street, who, of all other honest men, are best able to teach the rising generation the significance of "heads I win, tails you lose." Then, again, in the far future perhaps some industrious antiquary will exhume an awful tail of the present generation that was invented by Mrs. H.B. STOWE, when she looked across the Atlantic Ocean, and interviewed the ghost of BYRON. The future is going to be glorious and queue-rious for all who wish to up-braid, and when our fathers pass us, and we see their heads, we will be convinced that thereby hangs a tail; also, when our mothers' heads go by, that thereby hang two tails.

AN ODE-IOUS SUGGESTION.

Swinburne has written an ode to the French Republic. This lofty rhyme is built up of strophes, anti-strophes, and an epode. In its construction, and grandiloquence are thrown about with the careless disregard for innocent passers-by which characterizes that poet's freedom of style. Most probably no sane English-speaking person has read it through and preserved his sanity. The poet's idea in writing it was to get the French engaged in trying to understand it, and the Germans to engage in translating it, and thus stop the war by pure exhaustion of the combatants. The idea was good, but hardly practical.

SOCIAL SCIENCE BY TELEGRAPH.

The right of an independent Briton to beat his wife without being liable to impertinent foreign interference is well known to be one of the most precious privileges inherited from Magna Charta. The national use of this privilege is now generally considered, by social philosophers, to be the foundation of the love of "fair play," so universally characteristic of the English. It is only upon this ground that we can account for the following item recently telegraphed from London as a special to the N. Y. Times.

"It is curious to see that, while the married men of the city are against interference, all military and naval men are loud in expressions of indignation because no effort is made by England to save France from ruin."

As we see it, this is not curious at all. To the comprehensive English mind, the war in Europe is a mere family quarrel, on a large scale. But what is really curious the special does not tell us. What position do the military and naval men take who happen to be married?

A GROWL FROM A BRITON.

Mr. Punchinello:—One of the balloon reporters from Paris says:

"Great care is taken to save food from waste. There is much horse-flesh eaten."

For a Frenchman in a state of siege horse-flesh is all right—the French eat frogs, you know, and horses have frogs in their feet. What I like about the thing in Paris, though, is that they call it horse-flesh, and don't try to jerk it on a fellow for beef. Jerked beef is bad enough, but only think of jerked horse, by Jove, you know!

Now I want to say that here in New York, not being in a state of siege, we are eating a lot more horse-flesh than we know of, all the same—but they call it beef.

Look here, now.

I take my grub, sometimes (only for the sake of seeing life, you know), at a decent sort of a place enough, to which butchers resort. There is a man always to be seen there at grub time, a cockish-looking fellow, somewhat, with a horse-shoe pin in his scarf, and he is as thick as thieves with the butchers. Yesterday, for the first time, I got an inkling of who and what he is. I saw him performing an operation upon a horse, in the yard of a livery stable. He is a VETERINARY SURGEON! He consorts with BUTCHERS! Put that and that together, Mr. PUNCHINELLO,