How much does this ten-per-center want?  He “waggles along the Condamine;” he mixes with many who are “pebble-beached;” he speaks of his intimates as “Pa,” “The Coal-Shunter,” “Ballyhooly,” &c., and declares of the French soldier that “the short service forty-eight-day men don’t have a very unkyperdoodlum time of it.”  There’s wit for you, there’s elegance!  Then he becomes Jeromeky-jeromistically eloquent on the subject of fleas, throws in such lucid expressions as “chin music,” “gives him biff,” “his craft is thusly,” and, altogether, proves himself and his fellow-explorer to be a couple of the slangiest and most foolish greenhorns who ever put pen to any sort of paper.  I can imagine the readers who enjoy their stuff.  Dull, swaggering, blatant, gin-absorbing, red-faced Cockneys, who masquerade as sportsmen, and chatter oaths all day.  “Ditto to you,” says the Baron to his Extra-Ordinary Reader, and backs his opinion with his signature,

THE BARON DE BOOK-WORMS.

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MORE IBSENITY!

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Dear EDITOR,—­Noticing that the author of The Doll’s House was to have another morning, or, to use an equally suitable epithet, mourning performance devoted to his works, I made up my mind, after bracing up my nerves, to attend it.  The 23rd of February (the date of the proposed function) as the second Monday in Lent, seemed to me, too, distinctly appropriate.  By attending the performance—­IBSEN recommends self-execution—­I sentenced myself to three hours and a half of boredom, tempered with disgust.  I cannot help feeling that whatever my past may have been, the penance paid to wipe it out was excessive, and therefore rendered it unnecessary that I should attend a second performance announced for last week.

Rosmershoelm is in four Acts and one Scene—­a room in Rosmer’s House.  Act I. Rector Kroll, who is the brother-in-law of Pastor Rosmer, calls upon the latter, to ask him to edit a paper in the Conservative interest. Kroll (who, by the way, is a married man) before seeing the widower of his dead sister, has a mild flirtation with Rebecca West, a female of a certain age, who has taken up her abode for some years in the Rector’s house.  And here I may observe that the Rector’s housekeeper, Madame Helseth, presumably a highly respectable person, although she has excellent reasons, from the first, for believing that the relations between her Master and Rebecca are scarcely platonic, accepts the domestic arrangements of the Rosmer menage with hearty acquiescence, not to say enthusiasm. Rosmer interrupts the Rector’s tete-a-tete with the fascinating Rebecca, and declines the proffered editorship, because he is a Radical, and an atheist.  End of Act I.,—­no action to speak of, but a good deal of wordy twaddle.  In Act II. we learn that the late Mrs. Rosmer has committed suicide,