Captain Whistleborough has almost every requisite for an orator.  He is an army officer; so his manners are good and his self-possession complete.  His voice is commanding, for it has been long his duty to give the word of command.  Above all, he has a mania to become a member.  Yet, alas! one trifling deficiency ruins his prospects; he has an impediment in his speech, which debars him from the use of the W’s.  Like the French alphabet, that letter is denied to him.  When he comes to a syllable it begins, he is spell-bound; though he longs to go on, he pulls up quite short, and sticks fast.  The first W he meets with in the flowery paths of rhetoric causes him to be as dumb as an oyster, or as O. Smith in “Frankenstein.”  In vain does he try the Demosthenes’ plan by sucking pebbles on the Brighton shore and haranguing the waves, though he is unable to address them by name.  All is useless, and he has resigned himself to despair and a Brighton boarding-house, when Mr. Enfield Bam gives him fresh hopes.  He informs him that the proprietress of a pocket borough resides under the same roof, and that he will (for the usual consideration) get the Captain such an introduction to her as shall ensure him a seat in her good graces, and another in St. Stephen’s. Mr. Bam, therefore, goes off to negotiate with Miss Polecon (Mrs. Tayleure), and makes way for the intrigues of another sort of an agent, who lives in the house.

This is Rivet (Mr. C. Mathews), a gentleman who undertakes to procure for an employer anything upon earth he may want, at so much per cent. commission.  There is nothing that this very general agent cannot get hold of, from a hack to a husband—­from a boat to a baronetcy—­from a tortoise-shell tom-cat to a rich wife.  Matrimonial agency is, however, his passion, and he has plenty of indulgence for it in a Brighton boarding-house. Captain Pacific wants a wife, Mrs. Coo is a widow, and all widows want husbands.  Thus Rivet makes sure of a swingeing commission from both parties; for, in imagination, and in his own memorandum-book, he has already married them.

Here are the ingredients of the farce; and in the course of it they are compounded in such wise as to make Woodpecker jealous, merely because he happens to find Fanny in the dark, and in Whistleborough’s arms; to cause the latter to negotiate with Mrs. Coo for a seat in Parliament, instead of a wedding-ring; and Pacific to talk of the probable prospects of the nuptial state to Miss Polecon, who is an inveterate spinster and a political economist, professing the Malthusian creed. Rivet finding Fanny and her friend are taking business out of his hands by planning an elopement en amateur, gets himself “regularly called in,” and manages to save Woodpecker all the trouble, by contriving that Whistleborough shall run away with the young lady by mistake, so that Woodpecker might marry her, and no mistake. Bam bams Whistleborough, who ends the piece by threatening his deceiver with an action for breach of promise of borough, all the other breaches having been duly made up; together with the match between Mrs. Coo and Pacific.