"Having pulverised my pinched-nose predecessor, I pass on to a speaker of a very very opposite personality--the well-proportioned, beauteous maiden with azure starry eyes, gilded hair, and teeth like the seeds of a pomegranate (oh, _si sic omnes!_), who vaunted, in the musical accents of a cuckoo, her right to work out her own life, independently of masculine companionship or assistance, and declared that the saccharine element of courtship and connubiality was but the exploded mask of man's tyrannical selfishness. "Had such shocking sentiments been aired by some of the other lady orators in this room, I must facetiously have recalled them to a certain fabular fox which criticised the unattainable grapes as too immature to merit mastication; but the particular speaker cannot justly be said to be on all fours with such an animal. Understand, please, I am no prejudiced, narrow-minded chap. I would freely and generously permit plainfaced, antiquated, unmarriageable madams and misses to undertake the manufacture of their own careers _ad nauseam_; but when I behold a maiden of such excessive pulchritude---- (_Second intervention by Hon'ble Chairwoman desiring me to abstain from personal references._) I assure the Hon'ble Miss CHAIRWOMAN that I was not alluding to herself, but since she has spoken in my wheel with such severity, I will conclude with my peroration on the subject for debate, namely, the theatrical dramas of Hon'ble IBSEN. When, Madams and Misses, I make the odious comparison of these works, with which I am completely unacquainted, to the productions of Poet SHAKSPEARE, where I may boast the familiarity that is a breeder of contempt, I find that, in _Hamlet's_ own words, it is the 'Criterion of a Satire,' and I shall assert the unalterable _a priori_ of my belief that the melodious Swan of Stony Stratford, whether judged by his longitude, his versical blankness, or the profoundly of his attainments in Chronology, Theology, Phrenology, Palmistry, Metallurgy, Zoography, Nosology, Chiropody, or the Musical Glasses, has outnumbered every subsequent contemporary and succumbed them all!" With this, I sat down, leaving my audience as _sotto voce_ as fishes with admiration and amazement at the facundity of my eloquence, and should indubitably have been the recipient of innumerable felicitations but for the fact that Miss SPINK, suddenly experiencing sensations of insalubriousness, requested me, without delay, to conduct her from the assemblage. I would willingly make a repetition of my visit and rhetorical triumphs, only Miss SPINK informs me that she has recently terminated her membership with the above society. IX _How he saw the practice of the University Crews, and what he thought of it._