The bird of ÆSCULAPIUS ought, certainly, to have been a goose; for "Quack, quack, quack," should be the great motto of medicine. One professor invents an ointment for other people's bad legs, which keeps him comfortably on his own, while another makes a harvest of every body's corn, and a third publishes a pill to smooth the pillow of every invalid, or a bolus to render his bolster bearable. In another phase of quackery, we find specifics for the hair recommended to those who are ready to take any nonsense into their heads, and will boldly stand "the hazard of the dye," in the vain hope that the gray, indicating the twilight or winter time of life, may be exchanged for the dark, brown tints of summer, or autumn at the latest; and we are constantly being invited to "remove our baldness" in advertisements, which we know to be the very essence of balderdash. Quackery, however, seems to be successful in some cases, for the public will swallow any thing from a puff to a pill, from music to medicine, from a play to a plaster, and there is no doubt that (to paraphrase MACBETH, when speaking of the possibility that Birnam Wood being come to Dunsinane:) "If BARNUM would but come to Drury Lane," he would, by his force of quackery, make that pay him which has paid no one else during the last quarter of a century. Such is the spirit of the age, that, reading the accounts from America relative to our own _protégée_, JENNY LIND, we are disposed to think that the nightingale is being made a goose of in the United States--so vast is the amount of quackery with which her name is just now identified. As there is good to be got from every evil, we are justified in expecting that the puff and quack malady will cure itself, and if things are likely to mend when they get to the worst, we may congratulate ourselves upon humbug having reached almost the antipodes of sense and propriety. The balloon mania has already nearly exhausted the utmost resources of absurdity; for M. POITEVIN on a donkey--how very like putting butter upon bacon! has failed to attract, and three or four women suspended in the air are now necessary to tempt the curiosity of the Parisian public when a balloon ascends from the Hippodrome. We expect to hear next that POITEVIN intends going up attached to the balloon by the hair of his head, for he seems quite silly enough to become the victim of such a very foolish attachment.--_Punch._ CAROL FOR THE NEW YEAR. BY ALFRED TENNYSON. "Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light. The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. "Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow, The Year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. "Ring out the grief that saps the mind, For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind.