Don’t skip ELLEN TERRY’s Memoirs in The New Review.  Nothing much in them, but delightfully chatty and amusing.  See Murray’s Magazine for Mr. GLADSTONE on the Murray Memoirs, in the number for the “Murray Month of May.”  When you are routing about for something short and amusing, take up the Cornhill, and read A Flash in the Pan.  I have commenced, says the Baron, my friend GEORGE MEREDITH’s One of the Conquerors.  Now G.M. is an author whose work does not admit of the healthy and graceful exercise of skipping.  Here the skipper’s occupation is gone.  G.M.’s work should be taken away by the reader far from the madding crowd and perused and pondered over.  If Ponder’s End is a tranquil place as the name implies, then to that secluded spot betake yourself with your GEORGE MEREDITH, O happy and studious reader, and ponder in peace.

Since the time of Richard Feverel, which I shall always consider his best, “of the very best” as ZERO of the Monte Carlo Bar has it, G.M. has developed into a gold-beater of epigrams.  What once served him as a two-line epigram, is now spread out over a couple of pages.  Two volumes instead of three would serve his turn far better, or rather the public’s turn, for his own is a very peculiar one.  But to my task, says the Baron, give me a slight refresher and a suck at the lemon as it were, or a sip of the lemonade, and at him again. Festina lente.  More anon from

THE BARON DE BOOK-WORMS.

* * * * *

ROBERT ON ENGLISH AND FOREIGN WAITERS.

Well, things is cumming to a pretty pass, things is, when I’m acshally told that, as it used to be said formerly, “No Hirish need apply for nothing,” so now, we are told, that no English Waiters need apply at the Royal Nawal Xhibishun unless he bes a German!

[Illustration:  “RULE, BRITANNIA, BRITANNIA RULES THE WAVES!  FOR BRITONS NEVER, NEVER, NEVER SHALL BE SLAVES!”

Robert the Waiter.  “WHAT’S THIS!  ’NO ENGLISH NEED APPLY!  GERMANS ONLY TAKEN’!  THIS IS ‘BRITONS NEVER SHALL BE SLAVES’ WITH A WENGEANCE!”]

I never knowed as Jack Tars, and Powder-Munkys, and Admerals (as is so fond of Port, that they takes the werry name), was so werry parshal to Germans, that they woud sooner go without their dinners and tease, than be waited on by any other gennelmen, most suttenly not. “O contrare,” as the French Waiters says.  It ’ud be a jolly long time, I shood think, before your real British Sailers wood learn to call a Waiter a Gasson, tho’ as it means, I’m told, a Boy, there is sum little sense in it, coz there’s, in course.  Old Boys as well as yung ones; but what on airth meaning is there in a Kelner! as I’m acshally told all German Waiters insists on being called!  Why the thing’s too absurd to tork about.