really interrupted—of the entente cordiale between us, is a blessed boon not to be matched in value by a hundred—Tunnels!

Madame France. And this Convention is the sign and seal of that renewal, n'est-ce-pas? I knew you never intended to stop in Egypt.

Mr. Bull. Longer than was necessary—assuredly not, Madam. And I was certain the New Hebrides had no real charms to permanently arrest your feet.

Madame France. Though a pied à terre in Raraitea, of course—you comprehend, Monsieur!

Mr. Bull. Perfectly. The questions of Egypt and the New Hebrides, of our post near the Pyramids, and your Protectorate near Tahiti, have, of course, no real connection.

Madame France. Obviously, Monsieur! Are they not dealt with in separate Conventions?

Mr. Bull. Ah! if all quarrels—I beg pardon, political problems—could as easily be settled by a Conventional Act!

Madame France. How welcome to you, Monsieur, to all parties in your Parliament, to the "rescuers" as to the "retirers," to your Lord Chamberlain, as well as to your Grand Old Gladstone, must be the prospect of an early, not to say immediate withdrawal from the Land of the Pharaohs! Surely the fugitive Israelites of old never left it with such pleased promptitude as you will—"scuttle out" of it! Have I accurate memory of the Beaconsfieldian phrase, Monsieur?

Mr. Bull. Your memory, Madam, is miraculous. The forty centuries—or, however, many more there may happen to be there at the moment of my departure—will doubtless, in the words of your own great phraser, "look down from the Pyramids" with emotions not less marked than my own—and yours, Madam.

Madame France. My emotions at the present moment—and yours, I hope, Monsieur—are simply of supreme joy at the so happy removal of difficulties and the so complete restoration of amity between us by this charming Convention, so satisfactory in its actual terms, so much more so in its promises for the future. I felicitate you, dear Monsieur Bull.

Mr. Bull. And I, Madam, reciprocate your felicitations. (Aside.) It pleases her, apparently, and I do not see that it can possibly hurt me! [Left bowing.

CONVENTION-AL POLITENESS.

John Bull. "DELIGHTED, MY DEAR MADAM! IT PLEASES YOU, AND—(Aside)—IT DOESN'T HURT ME!!"

SPEEDING THE PARTING GUEST.

Host (who has trod on the Lady's Skirt). "Oh! Forgive me! You see it's my Natural Instinct to Detain you!"

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

"My Autobiography and Reminiscences," by W. P. Frith, R.A. The Modern Hogarth, painter of "Ramsgate Sands," "The Derby Day," and "The Road to Ruin," can use his pen as well as his pencil. "Where got thou that goose-quill?" as Macbeth would have said, had Shakspeare wished him to do so. How is it that Mr. Frith has never employed his goose-quill before? Sometimes it is soft-nibbed, and occasionally hard-nibbed, but it is almost always well pointed; and, though he writes with an overflowing pen—for he frequently has to check his impulsive waywardness—yet there is scarcely a blot on the paper throughout the two volumes.

Mr. Frith is, first and foremost, a humorist, and, in his humour, so like Thackeray, and so unlike Dickens, that it is no wonder, considering the consistent inconsistency of human nature, he should have loved the latter, and disliked the former. Yet, with all his aversion to Thackeray, personally—and "all his works" too, apparently, as he hardly mentions them—he records something very remarkable about the Satirist of the Snobs which could not be guessed at from Thackeray's own letters, nor from the anecdotes told about him. And it is this; that Thackeray could make, and on occasion did make an excellent after-dinner speech. At the Macready banquet with Bulwer Lytton and Dickens present, Mr. Frith tells us, "Thackeray also spoke well and very humorously." And there are three other instances; so that Thackeray, who has recounted his own failure at the Literary Fund dinner, and whose utter collapse at the Cornhill Magazine dinner is a matter of Literary history, was not always a mistake as an after-dinner speaker. The modesty exhibited by Mr. Frith in this autobiography is an exhibition as novel and attractive as was Frith's other exhibition in Bond Street,—because few autobiographers possess so keen a sense of humour as to be able to laugh at themselves, and to be candid about their own foibles and follies. Indeed some persons may think, and indeed he inclines to this opinion himself, that he goes too far in his frankness when narrating the practical jokes of that unscrupulous and cruel farçeur Sothern the actor, in some of which the autobiographer appears to have played a small, but not altogether unimportant part. In his way Mr. Frith is as frank and open in his revelations as to his past career, as was Cardinal Newman in his straightforward Apologia pro suâ vitâ. In fact in these Sothern latitudes—there was a great deal of latitude in that quarter—Mr. Frith's work is suggestive less of an autobiography than of a naughty-biography. He owns that he feels "humiliated and pained" at recounting Thackeray's rude jocularity towards himself, and from the apologetic tone with which he introduces some of Sothern's caddish practical jokes, in which Mr. Frith had no share, and of which he was not the victim, it may be inferred that he had already begun to feel "humiliated and pained" at having given so much space to such stories. How glad he must now be that he kept a "dear Diary," which has been an invaluable aid to his memory.

Another great merit in the book is that, without ever sacrificing its character as an Autobiography, it is never egotistical; egoism being the great "I-sore" of such works. Should the humble individual who writes this necessarily brief notice ever arrive at the time for publishing his Recollections, he is perfectly sure that the book will be unequalled as a work of imagination. Mr. Frith tells us how he improved his pictures by touching them up,—some people, too, are occasionally improved by the same process, if the "touching up" is only done judiciously,—and his self-restraint is therefore really admirable when he rejects the temptation to embellish, or spice, a story which no one is likely to contradict. For instance, in what may be called the Sass-age portion of his early life, he has some amusing anecdotes about Mr. Jacob Bell, then an Art