could be had, of small detached estates and
plots of land, quit rents and scattered rights of
the crown over private persons, such lands and
privileges being usually of more value to the private
persons who for their own advantage are
glad to buy out the small rights of the crown,
than they are to the crown as troublesome outlying
rights and possessions. The money obtained
by these sales, about three-quarters of a million in
the ten years, has been invested in enlargement or
improvement of the more compact and valuable
tracts of crown land. And the land bought
has been not only from position more productive
to the crown than the land sold, but the average
price got for the land sold has been thirty-six
years' purchase, while the average price paid
for the land bought has been only twenty-nine
years' purchase. Again, of the money
obtained, more than two hundred thousand
pounds were for wastes, encroachments, foreshore,
and other rights that had been producing
nothing.

Then there have been the gains by disafforestation.
Hainault was disafforested in
the year 'fifty-two. For the five years before
that time, owing to the conflict of rights between
the crown, the hereditary lord warden, and the
commoners, the crown revenue was but five hundred
pounds a year. The cost of reclaiming the
share allowed to the crown by the act of parliament
was covered by sale of the timber and
underwood that stood upon it, and a rental of
more than four thousand a year was secured
from farmers of the land thus cleared. In
Whichwood Forest the same conflict of rights
between the crown, the hereditary ranger, and
the commoners, left to the crown little profit.
Whichwood has been disafforested, and the
share of the crown is now an estate worth five
thousand a year. At Whittlewood Forest the
share of the crown was nearly all sold advantageously
to the adjoining owners, and the act
of parliament that disposed finally of forest
claims on Whittlewood dealt with the last forest
in which there remained the office of hereditary
ranger.

NOT A NEW "SENSATION."

IT is much the fashion now to dwell with
severity on certain morbid failings and cravings
of the grand outside Public — the universal
customer— the splendid bespeaker, who goes
round every market, purse in hand, and orders
plays, poems, novels, pictures, concerts, and
operas. Not by any means a grudging purchaser,
or one to drive a hard churlish bargain.
He is ready with a good price for a good thing
— a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, and
all other suitable sentiments. Yet, because
this faithful patron chooses to have his meats
highly spiced and flavoured, the cry is, an
unnatural appetite for sensation! This is a new
and unhealthy greed— a diseased craving, an
unwholesome fancy. This hungering after
"sensation" is a diseased and morbid appetite,
something novel and significant of degeneration.

And yet this taste for fiery sauces, and strongly-seasoned
meats and drinks, is of very ancient
date; nay, with the public— so long as it has been
a public— it has been a constant taste. Not now,
for the first time, has the collective British novel-reader
sat up of night's reading how the wicked
but fascinating lady has married a baronet of
ancient family during the lifetime of an absent
but obscurer husband— how, when this latter
becomes obtrusive, she buries him in a convenient
well, and thus happily disposes of an
unpleasant and disagreeable persecution. Not
now, for the first time, has the collective British
playgoer endured heat and hustling, and crush
and struggle to see a plunge (without a splash)
into mimetic waters, and gallant rescue from
drowning; or the prevention of a Deed of Blood
in a lonely quarry, happily accomplished by the
agency of a bending sapling. Such devices were
popular years and years ago, and the dramatic
"sensation," more or less modified, will always
be in favour.

Travelling backward nearly seventy years,
we find ourselves— as the collective British
play-goer— struggling with heat and pressure
through the narrow entrances of Old Drury,
during the run of one very famous " sensation"
piece, which, for effects and " thrilling" situations,
is rather in advance of our modern efforts.
Everybody was hurrying to see Mr. Matthew
Gregory Lewis's famous melodrama of The
Castle Spectre. The common mind had been
suitably prepared by draughts from the goblet
of German horrors, and the notorious Monk,
and Tales of Wonder, had produced a suitable
tone. The Castle Spectre still keeps the
stage; and though inflated, and every instant
in danger of tottering over into burlesque, it is
a far more artistic " sensational drama" than
our modern attempts.

The ingredients, mixed in this dish, are all
highly effective. A gloomy castle, with dungeons,
"movable panels, subterranean passages,
and secret springs" for the scene; a truculent,
ruffianly, and splendidly dressed " Earl Osmond"
for the authorised villain, assisted by a troop of
"black slaves" — Hassan, Sahib, and Muley —
who are always coming on in a most effective
procession, and always eager for employment in
their own nefarious line of business; a monk,
fishermen, a fool, and a frightfully persecuted
heroine, Angela: all these baked together skilfully
in a melodramatic pie, ought to make a
dish acceptable to any epicure. Yet the whole
strength of this class of play would seem to have
lain in the stage directions most minutely insisted
on by our dramatic forefathers. In witness,
here is the end of Act the Fourth— the
grand sensation scene of the piece— which was
talked of at Brookes's, and at which the packed
and crowded audiences of Old Drury gazed without
daring to breathe. Wicked Earl Osmond has
been striving to accomplish his nefarious ends
in reference to the persecuted Angela; infuriated
by her resistance, he is about to resort to a