The humour which is not of a practical kind appears to have died away out of our literature, our legislature and our judicature alike. Nay, it is fading out of our street life with the disappearance of the omnibus cad and the driver of the hansom. Even the gamin is losing his characteristic gaiety in the solving of puzzles in his favourite publications or in calculating the odds in turf handicaps. The last of the Parliamentary wits was Bernal Osborne. He scintillated before I entered on a journalistic career, but I well remember the stimulation which the newspaper reports of his utterances afforded me in my younger days. In contesting Waterford at a General Election, he was opposed by Sir Patrick O’Brien, a very old man whose enunciation was not of the clearest. Following the revered Baronet on the hustings, Osborne, exactly mimicking the tones of his rival, commenced: “Pity the sorrows of a poor old man whose trembling limbs have borne him to these hustings!” Then, addressing himself to one of the nasty points of the other candidate’s attack, he said: “But when the honourable Baronet describes me as the rejected of seven constituencies, I hurl the accusation back in his teeth—_if he has any_!” In the House he was equally ready. Liskeard was among the constituencies that had rejected him. A question arising regarding that now happily disfranchised borough, it was referred to Bernal Osborne. He immediately rose and said: “I regret, sir, that I am unable to recall any particulars respecting _that highly respectable street_!” Viscount Amberley was a small, baby-faced man. When he sat in Parliament, and when Bernal Osborne was at the Admiralty, Amberley asked some inconvenient question regarding that Department. Osborne smilingly informed the House: “That is a matter which was settled when the honourable Viscount was in his—er—perambulator!” Bernal Osborne’s patronymic was Bernal. He was a Jew and the son of Mr. Ralph Bernal, who was for many years Chairman of Committees in the House of Commons. He added the name Osborne to his own on marrying Lady Osborne, with whom he did not always agree. When he married he was a dashing young officer and Aide-de-Camp to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. I suppose he was not quite so successful in the dull domestic round, for he and his wife led a cat-and-dog life. They soon separated, and during the period of this first grass-widowhood the lady wrote a novel in which her husband was depicted, under a thin disguise and in very lurid colours. Society was greatly diverted. Bernal begged his wife’s forgiveness. A reconciliation was effected, the novel was withdrawn from circulation, and Bernal settled down once more as the model married man. The vivacity of his disposition, however, and his great extravagance, occasioned fresh quarrels. There was another separation, succeeded shortly after by a reissue of the wife’s literary caricature of her refractory husband.