Forum
(!) as Imagined by our Volatile Friends_, which represents a party of
English conspirators from a French point of view. They wear the peaked
hats, long cravats, long hair, boots, and inexpressibles peculiar to the
Reign of Terror, and carry knives, revolvers, axes, and other weapons of
destruction; a speaker occupies the rostrum, and below him sits the
registrar with a bowl of blood, in which sanguinary fluid the
proceedings are supposed to be recorded. The opposite picture, _A
Discussion Forum (!) as it is in Reality_, shows us a number of foolish,
ignorant, harmless youths, smoking pipes, drinking brandy and water, and
discussing politics (so far as they are capable of understanding them)
in a tavern club-room. Returning once more to his attacks on what he
justly deemed the Romanizing tendency of the practices of certain
members of the English Church, he gives us the cartoon of _Religion a la
Mode_, in which a handsome woman is about to "confess" to a truculent
and knavish looking ritualist. In the distance appears John Bull with
his horsewhip, "No, no, Mr. Jack Priest," says he; "after all I have
gone through, I am not such a fool as to stand any of _this_ disgusting
nonsense." Some sensation was created this year by a private fete which
was given by a member of the aristocracy at Cremorne Gardens. It
occasioned considerable talk at the time, and as Ritualism was then in
the ascendant amongst certain female leaders of fashion, Leech gives us
(in vol. xxxv.) a powerful picture, entitled _Aristocratic Amusements_,
in which John Thomas asks his mistress (a magnificent specimen of the
artist's handsome women) as he puts up the steps of her carriage,
whither she would wish to be driven,--"Confession or Cremorne, my lady?"

Misfortune, the proverb tells us, makes us acquainted with strange
associates. The Emperor Louis, during his early exile, had picked up
certain undesirable acquaintances, who were in the habit in after life
of forcing themselves on his notice after a peculiarly disagreeable and
dangerous fashion. His unfaithfulness to the principles of the
brotherhood of which he and they had been members, had seriously
exercised the minds of certain of these quondam acquaintances, who had
given forcible expression to their feelings by attempting his
assassination. The pear-shaped hand grenades of Orsini and his
fellow-conspirator were the fruit of Louis's early connection with the
secret societies of the Carbona