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

"----Day, natheless, will glow
Down in the regions far below,"

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!

* * * * *

[Illustration]

THE PLAYS AND SHOWS.

There 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 WAL