ther, if
anything happens so scandalous as to require an open reproof, the world
may meet with it there. Accordingly at the end of every paper we find
'Advice for the Scandalous Club: A weekly history of Nonsense,
Impertinence, Vice, and Debauchery.'" This contained a considerable
amount of indelicacy, and the humour was too much connected with
ephemeral circumstances of the times to be very amusing at the present
day. The Scandalous Club was a kind of Court of Morals, before whom all
kinds of offences were brought for judgment, and it also settled
questions on love affairs in a very judicious manner. Some of the advice
is prompted by letters asking for it, but it is probable that they were
mostly fictitious and written by Defoe himself. Many of the shafts in
this Review were directed against magistrates, and other men in
authority. Thus we read in April 18, 1704:

"An honest country fellow made a complaint to the Club that he had been
set in the stocks by the Justice of the Peace without any manner of
reason. He told them that he happened to get a little drunk one night at
a fair, and being somewhat quarrelsome, had beaten a man in his
neighbourhood, broke his windows, and two or three such odd tricks.
'Well, friend,' said the Director of the Society, 'and was it for this
the Justice set you in the stocks?' 'Yes!' replied the man. 'And don't
you think you deserved it?' said the Director. 'Why, yes, Sir,' says the
honest man; 'I had deserved it from you, if you had been the Justice,
but I did not deserve it from Sir Edward--for it was not above a month
before that he was so drunk that he fell into our mill-pond, and if I
had not lugged him out he would have been drowned.' The Society told him
he was a knave, and then voted 'that the Justice had done him no wrong
in setting him in the stocks--but that he had done the nation wrong
when he pulled him out of the pond,' and caused it to be entered in
their books--'That Sir Edward was but an indifferent Justice of the
Peace.'"

Sometimes religious subjects are touched upon. The following may be
interesting at the present day--

"There happened a great and bloody fight this week, (July 18th 1704),
between two ladies of quality, one a Roman Catholic, the other a
Protestant; and as the matter had come to blows, and beauty was
concerned in the quarrel, having been not a little defaced by the
rudeness of the scratching sex, the neighbours were called in to part
the fray, and u