reports sent in, varying in length from
a leaf of note-paper to six or eight folio
pages. We should like to see the History
of England from the days of Ancient Britons
to the death of John, epitomised by Lubin,
ploughboy, on a page of note-paper. The
Chorleywood reporters are nine men, seven
women, five school-boys, and a dozen school-
girls.

The association now proposes to get up a
Rent Fund, a Savings' Bank and a Flower
Show, combined with a Tea-party.

A correspondent sends us, with his
comment on it, this announcement:

CHORLEY WOOD ASSOCIATION.

A General Meeting of the Members will be held
in the School-room, on Wednesday, April 27th, at
6.15 o'clock in the Evening, to consider the best
method of protecting the Members' gardens from
Robbery, and the course which should be adopted in
reference to the case of TWO young men, sons of
Members, found trespassing on the GARDENS on the
night of Saturday, April 9th.

The following Subjects will also be brought under
consideration: The establishment of a CRICKET CLUB
in connexion with the Association, and the proposed
FLOWER SHOW.

All Members are particularly requested to attend.

The chief subject of debate our
correspondent thus explains: On a certain night,
he tells us, the allotment-gardens were
robbed. Some of the men therefore resolved
to watch. At midnight the watches saw two
persons coming over the hedge and imprudently
seized them at once, instead of waiting
to detect them in the act of theft. The
trespassers, thus punishable only as trespassers,
were sons of two allotment-holders. It was
for the members of the association to say how
they would act in such a case.

At the appointed meeting the fathers of
two lads who had been caught gave their
own and their sons' story in exculpation.
After some conversation, the personal part of
the question was entirely dropped. The
point in debate then became, What measures
of precaution shall be taken for the future?
Upon this point there was maintained a
strictly parliamentary discussion. It was
suggested that it would be desirable to fix the
hours during which members might or might
not enter their gardens. The labourers got up
one after another in the most orderly manner
to deliver and support their several opinions.
Motions were made, amendments proposed,—
men spoke on the amendments, and these
were successively put to the vote. It was
then moved by one member of the corduroy
parliament that a committee be appointed to
consider and report on any measures that
might seem to it desirable. There was a
debate and vote upon this motion; the names
of members to serve on committee being
finally selected and put to the meeting. This
orderly discussion lasted two hours, and led
to the most sensible conclusion.

Terrible masses these! How shall we keep
them in order?

A DRAMATIC AUTHOR.

DOES the public indifference towards the
stage, at the present day, extend, also, even
to books which take the stage for a subject?
The question is suggested by a work recently
published, under the title of Thirty-Five
Years of a Dramatic Author's Life, which
makes no pretension to any high literary
character, but which, as a record of personal
experience, contains many interesting
particulars in connection with the past history of
the English Stage; and, more especially with
those curious wild-flowers of the dramatic
garden which were cultivated during the last
half-century, by the managers, authors, and
actors attached to the minor theatres of the
metropolis.

The work in question is an autobiography,
and the writer of it is Mr. Edward Fitzball.
To the younger generation of readers, this
gentleman's name may, not improbably, recal
the remembrance of much conventional jesting
of the periodical sort, which never had a
large infusion of the Attic salt of wit to
recommend it; and which, in course of time,
became intolerably wearisome to all but the
jesters themselves, by dint of perpetual
repetition. To us, it has always appeared a little
unjust towards Mr. Fitzball to have mischievously
paved the way, in his case, for the
passage of ridicule, by representing him as
filled to overflowing with literary pretensions,
to which judging by his own words, in his
own book, now under review—he has never
made any claim. As we understand it—
having no personal knowledge of Mr. Fitzball,
and no object in writing, but the desire
to treat him with all fair consideration—he
has never pretended to anything more than
the possession of a natural dramatic instinct
in the shaping of plots, and the placing of
situations, and the acquisition of considerable
experience in studying the tastes of the
public of his time, as well as of great facility
in making that experience tell for what it
was fairly worth on the stage. He has claimed
to have done this successfully, and the record
of facts in his autobiography fairly establishes
his claim. It may be an excellent joke against
Mr. Fitzball that he has written plays which
have run, in more cases than one, for two
hundred nights, and have put thousands of
pounds into the pockets of the managers—
but we are not sharp enough to see it
ourselves. When a man starts as a dramatist,
he fails, no matter what his style as a writer
may be, if he empties the theatre; and he
succeeds, no matter what his style as a writer
may be, if he fills it, whether it be a large
theatre, or a small one, a theatre on this
side of the Thames, or a theatre on the
other side of the Thames, whether he be
a Syncretic whose tragedy in the blankest
possible verse no human being has ever yet