LONDON GOSSIP.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XIV, Issue 183, 2 August 1879, Page 1

LONDON GOSSIP.

{Melbourne Argus correspondent.) It is not unlikely, tha ks to the improvement in science, that the days of pluralism may be revived, since the telephone now enables a clergyman to equal Sir Boyle Roche's bird, in being, or at least in preaching, in two places at once. On Sunday morning a number of gentlemen met at a telegraph offioe in Manchester to hear a sermon preached by a divine at Leeds, a distance of 36 miles. During the singing "his sonorous voice," we are told, " waa distinctly heard above the congregation," but during the sermon the professional habit in which he indulged of dropping his voice at the end of a sentence made his delivery rather fragmentary. In order not to inform the Leeds congregation that he was addressing another flock (which they would probably have resented), the transmitter was placed under the pulpit next to the rev. gentleman's legs, and ai he could not always be speaking to his boots without exciting remark, a good deal was lost in tbia way. Upon the whole, however, the experiment was successful and certainly noteworthy. Although Americans lick creation in the invention of impossible stories, they are, as Martin Chuzzlewit has described, extremely credulous in matters about which they have no personal knowledge. I see it seriously stated in a Transatlantic newspaper that Queen Victoria receives a royalty of 60 dollars a night from the Mapleeon Company in New York for the right of using her name. (I suppose this refers to their being called Her Majesty's Servants.) The paragraph goes on to state that Mr Haver has offered her 50 dollars a night for the right of using her name with his" Matador Minstrels," who are about to travel in England. In the last draft of soldiers to the Cape there was a serious omission. William Thompson, of the Royal Horse Artillery, ought to have been included. He has been assaulting the police right and left, and could only be seized by the combined efforts of five constables. All this, however, it seems was but an experiment; the corpus vile being the officers of the law. "I am going to the war," was bis defence. lf and I wanted to know what I was made of." Now he knows, but the experiment has cost him 14 days of hard labor. I 1 In a sermon on "The Rechabite's Vow," Cannon Farrar said :— ls there not then, I would aek you, some special, some national need in the circumstance of this age that we should take well to heart the vow and example recorded in this evening's lesson ? If I were to tell yon that there is, in the British Isles, a Being into whose treasuries are annually poured, in unproductive consumption, more than 140 millions of our national wealth; whose actions crush year by year more victims than have been crushed for oentnries together by the car of Juggernaut; whose unchecked power causes year by year horrors incomparably more multitudinous than those which have reoently thrilled our sou's with pity and indignation ; if I were to say that the service wrought by this Being were, if any at all, which is an open question, yet almost valueless in kind, and infinitesimal in extent, while on the other hand, the direct admitted indisputable miseries be inflicts were terrible in virulence and vast in ramification ; if I were to say that at his right hand and his left, as eager and ever active ministers, stood idiocy and pauperism, degradation and brutality, and at this point you were all to rise up at once and cry out " Tell as the name of this being, that we may drive him with execration from the midst of us. and that every one of ua may be a Jehu and a Jonadab, to extirpate bis power and expel bis polluting footsteps from our soul ;" and I were to say that, far from doing this, we all as a nation, and nearly all of us as individuals, crown him with garlandß, honor him with social customs, introduce him with gladdest gatherings, sing songs in his glory, build myriads of temples to his service, familiarise oar very children with his fame aod praise ; were Ito say thia then, sentence by sentence, clause by clause, word by word, it would be literally true, not of a mao, but of a thing, and that thing " intoxicating drink !"

In a first floor back room in Whitechapel, the Sanitary Officer found " a foreigner, his wife, and two children, with 12 fowls feeding under the bed." In the next apartment — in fact the drawing-room-— -belonging to the same tenant he Gads 125 fowls. In another house in the occupation of another resident foreigner, be finds 300 fowls on the second floor. The atmosphere of the grooms and passages of these dwellings he describes as " stifling." I : know of some cows who liva in a first floor off Baker street, but then cowa are sweet. I wonder to what nationality these foreigners belong who can stand such company. But Ino longer wonder that egge " guaranteed to be fresh laid " in London do not taste so — at least, they do (i taste so," but I mean not fresh. I hear Verona is, socially, not an attractive town. An English resident there was lately expressing his views upon it to a fellow-countryman. "My dear sir," he said, " until I came hither I had never done full justice to the genius of Shakspeare. I now appreciate the magnitude of his conceptions. He has imagined two gentlemen of Verona — while I have lived here half my life and never met with one I" Cynicißm is carried by the Crutch and Toothpick school to a great extent, but one can hardly say to a fine point. They are not epigrammatic, but have a certain grim humor which some honest folks may be excused tor mistaking for ill nature. I beard two of them the other day discoursing of a dinner party which they bad lately honoured with their presence at the house of a common friend. " The sherry was filthy," said j A. " The claret, however, was not so bad," pleaded B. " You mean not so bad as the champagne," returned A. " Yes," said B, « that is what I did mean. But on the other hand, let us remember there was very little of it.

The Bank of England was 185 years old oq the 27th July. The charter, granted at first for eleven years, has been renewed from time to time. In the large building on Threadneedlestreet eight hundred persons are now employed. The WhiUMonday of 1879 was the most miserable that has been experienced since the passing of Sir John Lubbock's " Bank Holiday Act." Bain fell almost incessantly from early morning until midnight, and the streets of the metropolis were throughout the day in a grand state of slush and filth. Nevertheless, a great many holiday folks ventured out of town, the Crystal and Alexandra Palaces coming in for more than their ordinary share of support. There were as many as 55,850 people at the former, and over 30,000 at the latter institution. The various railways took over 100,000 people from the metropolis to different country haunts. In town the Royal Aquarium was visited by 18,000 people, Madame Tussaud's by 12,000, the British Museum by 16,000, the Eoyal Academy by 7500, the South Kensington Museum by 25,000, the Grosvenor Gallery by 1500, and the National Gallery by do fewer than 22,000. There is now every probability that the Epping Hunt will, during the coming autumn, be revived with most of its old pomp and splendour. When in February last her Majesty was pleased to appoint his Royal Highness the Duke of Connaught as Ranger of the Forest of Epping, a committee was formed and the question discussed whether his Royal Highness's first year of office should not be inaugurated by a revival of the old hunt of the indigenous deer of the forest. At first the paucity of deer was thought to be an insuperable obstacle ; but happily, although the forest has only been two years under the care of the Corporation, this difficulty has been removed' The deer have thriven wonderfully, and nearly a score of full-headed bucks have been eeen in the glades. The Committee have therefore decided to call in the aid of Chingford, Loughton, Epping, and all the districts skirting the forest in preparing an invitation to the Duke to take formal possession of his power of rangership, and to inaugurate the same by a grand hunt. It is. stated that in consequence of the unprofitable character of most of the great mercantile pursuits in England, the amount of unemployed money held in London is over £120,000,000.