QUANTITY OF BRAINS REQUIRED TO MAKE A MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT.

To Peter Borthwick, for his ingenious Treatise, proving logically that a Member requires no Brains, instancing his own case, where the deficiency was supplied by the length of his ears—­

    The Pewter Medal, and a Copy of Enfield’s Speaker.

FIFTH PREMIUM.

AMOUNT OF CASH REQUIRED BY A GENTLEMAN TO KEEP A WALKING-STICK, A PAIR OF MOUSTACHES, AND A CIGAR.

To the Society of Law Clerks, for the best Account of how Fifteen Shillings a week may be managed, to enable the Possessor to “draw it rather brisk” after office-hours in Regent-street, including board and lodging for his switch and spurs, and Warren’s jet for his Wellingtons—­

    The Tin Medal and a Penny Cuba.

SIXTH PREMIUM.

FATTENING ALDERMEN.

To Sir Peter Laurie, for a Bill of Fare of the various viands demolished at the Lord Mayors’ Dinners for the last ten years—­also, for an account of certain experiments made to ascertain the contents of the Board of Aldermen at City Feasts, by the application of a new regulating-belt, called the Gastronometer—­

    A German Silver Medal and a Gravy Spoon.

* * * * *

PUNCH’S REVIEW.

THE MEMOIRS OF MADAME LAFFARGE.

The title, I think, will strike.  The fashion, you know, now, is to do away with old prejudices, and to rescue certain characters from the illiberal odium with which custom has marked them.  Thus we have a generous Israelite, an amiable cynic, and so on.  Now, Sir, I call my play—­The Humane Footpad.—­SYLVESTER DAGGERWOOD.

Some four or five seasons since, the eccentric Buckstone produced a three-act farce, which, by dint of its after title—­The School for Sympathy—­and of much highly comic woe, exhibited in the acting of Farren and Nisbett, was presented to uproariously-affected audiences during some score nights.  The hinge of the mirth was made to turn upon the irresistible drollery of one man’s running away with another man’s wife, and the outrageous fun of the consequent suicide of the injured husband; the bons mots being most tragically humorous, and the aphorisms of the several characters facetiously concatenative of the nouns contained in the leading name of the piece—­“Love and Murder.”

Now this was a magnificent idea—­one of those brilliant efforts which cannot but tend to lift the theatre in the estimation of every man of delicacy and education.  A new source of attraction was at once discovered,—­a vast fund of available fuel was suddenly found to recruit the cinerulent embers of the drama withal.  It became evident that, after Joe Miller, the ordinary of Newgate was