Mr. Williams, for suffering, in his room in Old
Round Court, Strand, sundry persons to read
the Daily Advertiser, and other newspapers,
for the consideration of one penny each. The
offence being held to be clearly made out,
Mr. Williams is convicted in the penalty of
five pounds on each information; " which is
certainly sufficient," sagely concludes my
Mag., " to convince the proprietors of reading
rooms that newspapers must not be among
the number of the publications which they
suffer to be read for hire, or, as they call it
(my Mag. is ironical) admission money."
From which it would appear likewise that
even penny news-rooms have had their
persecutions and their martyrs. Ludicrously
and inconsistently enough my Mag. in thus
pleasantly recording Mr. Williams' malpractices,
does so in a " Historical Chronicle,"
clearly news, and taxable accordingly, but of
which the Stamp Office does not take the
slightest notice.

On September eleventh, at six o'clock
in the evening, the north-east bank of the
New River bursts near Hornsey-house, and
inundates a circuit of four miles of meadow
land.

On the 17th September, Robert Ladbrook
Troys is tried for forgery. Guilty. Death.
On the same day John Collins is indicted at
the instance of the Stamp Office for forging a
plate to counterfeit the "two shilling hat
stamps." The principal evidence against him
is that of a Jew, Barnard Solomons, who
acknowledges his having suffered about two
years previously, three months' imprisonment
for coining counterfeit halfpence. For the
forgery of the " two shilling hat stamps" the
verdict on John Collins is, Guilty. Death.
The next day, the 18th, twenty-five men are
tried on board the ship Gladiator, at Portsmouth,
for mutiny. Nineteen are found Guilty.
Death, Thirteen are executed; two are to
have two hundred lashes; two one hundred,
and one is acquitted. On the twentieth,
Mr. Silvester, the common-serjeant at the
Old Bailey, pronounces judgment (Death)
upon ten men and four women. Twenty-
six are to be transported, twenty-six
imprisoned, and two whipped. And so from
month to month 'Ninety-eight pursues the
even tenor of its way. The " awful example"
harvest is unvaryingly fruitful; but it would
be wearisome to continue recording the
statistics of each hemp crop.

Mr. Sabatier, impressed with the
prevalence of poverty and crime in 'Ninety-eight,
attempts to elucidate their causes. One great
cause of poverty according to this gentle
man is in "buying of unprofitable food.
"Tea and bread and butter," he says, " is a
very unprofitable breakfast for working
people." Cheese and porter are still worse:
"The former of these have very little nourish
ment, and the latter is costly." Unfortunately
Mr. Sabatier does not point out the profit
able food. A paramount cause of poverty is
keeping a pig; "a pig, if it runs about,
consumes time in looking after it; it frequently
gets into the pound; and eats up the scraps
of the family where there should be none; it
occasions the boiling of victuals merely for
the sake of the pot-liquor; and then this
stunted, half- starved creature must be
fattened." I wonder that in Mr. Sabatier's
virtuous indignation against the pig, he did not
add in aggravation of its crimes that it
squeaks in infancy and grunts when grown up,
and that in feeding, it puts its foot in the
trough, quite ungenteelly. Giving children
pence to buy tarts is, in Mr. Sabatier's eyes,
a heinous ofience, and invariably productive
of poverty. Pie clenches his argument by a
moral piece on the downfall of the eldest
son of a peer, who was reduced by
improvidence (beginning with penny tarts) to
the sad necessity of enlisting as a common
soldier.

The causes of crime, Mr. Sabatier ascribes,
among others, to fixing the same punishment
to different crimes, the greater of which has
a tendency to conceal the lesser: To impunity
as in unconditional pardon, or in
commuting death into transportation: To the
confinement of prisoners before trial in
idleness and bad company: To allowing legal
passages for escape: To proscribing a man's
character by visible dismemberment, such as
public whipping, the pillory, or the stocks:
To legalising, or rather not prohibiting pawn-
brokers " and other receivers:" To permitting
profligate characters to fill the religious
ministry: To non-residence and neglect of
incumbents: To permitting mendicity: To
suffering seditionists to escape punishment:
To allowing temptations to lie in the way of
poor people, such as game and wood in forests:
To the sale of spirituous liquors and lottery-
tickets: To levying high duties on foreign
commodities, and thereby encouraging
smuggling. Among a variety of notions eminently
germane to 'Ninety-eight Mr. Sabatier, as it
will be seen, is in some respects many many
years in advance of it.

So I lay by my Mag. for the present.
Years hence perhaps our grandchildren may
take up some exploded magazine for this
present year; and, as they turn it cursorily
over, wonder how such things, therein
recorded, could ever have been. I sincerely
trust, however, that little advanced as we
may be, 'Fifty-three has not evinced any
symptoms of retrogression towards 'Ninety-
eight.