I1 TJU IN [DECEMBER 7, 1861. ANNOYING FOR FREDERICK (WHOSE ONLY WEAK POINT IS HIS BOOTS). Chorus of Brigade Boys:-" HERE YAR, SIR! I-HAVE 'EM DONE ? SHINE 'EM UP, SIR ? ON'Y A PENNY!" LITERARY INTELLIGENCE. AMroN the announcements which crowd the newspaper columns at this time of the year, we observe the name of a new work by Dr. CUMMING, Things Hard to be Understood. Of these, we imagine, the hardest will be, how Da. CuMiING can write such nonsense, how people can read such nonsense, and how any reasonable being can publish such nonsense. Why the DocTOR writes such nonsense is not, we fancy, revealed in this volume. We should be more inclined to look for the reason why the profit-loving prophet writes such sensa- tional piety in the pages of another effusion said to be coming, Teach us howe to Prey-on the ignorance and credulity of religious fanatics. We observe, too, that the world is the better for the Gorilla and the Land he Inhabits, together with the Great Social Evil, by the REV. C. H. SPURGEON. What is the meaning of this? If the "by" were omitted we could see some sense in it, but as it stands, the title would seem to say that the quadrumanous giant shares the solitude of the African forests with parties in red petticoats and spoon bonnets. If the animal be so immoral, we can easily see why the immodest lecturer on shrews selected him for a subject. MR. JOHN STUART MILL is about to publish Considerations on Re- presentative Government. May we hint to him that the English people would be more at home in reading Considerations on Misrepresentative Government ? Miss AGNES STRICKLAND'S Lives of the Bachelor Kings of England will be shortly followed by the Lives of the Kings of England who wer-e Marriedic once; Ditto who were Married twice or more, as the case ight be; and Ditto who were Engaged and cried off. For the sake of the fitlhors of marriageable daughters, we are glad to see a book announced that will be invaluable next year, when the exhibition will cause an influx of French counts and German barons. It is written by Mu. BRANDON, of the Middle Temple, and is entitled, A Treatise on the Customary Law of Foreign Attachments. Recollec- tions of a Relieving Officer are promised. The greatest relief he could have.afforded us, would have been to have lost his memory. We see MESSRS. SMITH and ELDER still swear by Mn. THACKERAY'S 'Feore Georges. SPIRITUAL DARKNESS. TIE other day a poor woman, named SMITH, was prosecuted for a theft, to which, as the evidence went to show, her husband had driven her. That saintly brute, who called himself a scripture-reader (and very rightly, as being one who read it only, and neither understood nor acted up to it), was in the habit of spending the money, which should have provided his family's food, in candles-wherewithal to illuminate in honour of his own piety. If we do not recommend "The Society for the Diffusion of Christian Knowledge to look into the case of this benighted scripture-reader, it is because we think that men of his class are fitter subjects for "The Society for the Suppression of Vice." For a sinner to neglect his family and spend his money in drink is bad enough, but it is nothing when compared with the conceited turpitude of a saint, who starves his children and makes his wife a thief in order that he may light up his own righteous- ness, and dazzle the eyes of his uncanonized neighbours. There is nothing comparable to such conduct, unless it be that publicity-loving charity, which ignores the poor wretches starving around it, yet figures handsomely in subscription-lists for the Otaheitans; and which does its alms after such a manner that if its left hand does not know what its right is doing, it is chiefly because people do not use their hands to read the advertising columns of the Times with. WiY is one of M. Du CHAILLU's cannibal Fans like a person who habitually becomes intoxicated ?-Because he puts "an enemy into his mouth." 116 i I_ ~~~_~___