Almost the last thing that you expect in a starting-price bookie is a strong penchant for poetry. It is true that I have before me, as I write, a Turf Commissioner's telegraphic code which contains some rather picturesque symbols. Thus "amber" is the codeword for L1; "heliotrope" for L20; "rainbow" for "win and 1, 2." Still I do not think it probable that if the author of this code should go bankrupt as a bookie--and this he is never likely to do as far as I am concerned--he would be able to retrieve his fortunes by taking up the profession of a publisher of poetical works. Yet this is just what happened, in Mr. MONCKTON HOFFE'S play, with the firm of _Wilberforce Brothers_, Turf Commissioners. In the first Act we find them in such straits that they can barely scrape together enough petty cash to satisfy the demands of a Water-Rate Collector, insistent on the door-step. In the next Act, a year later, they are all flourishing like green bay-trees as a firm of Poetry Commissioners trading under the name of _The Lotus Publishing Company_. This amazing result they have achieved by foisting on the office typewriter--_tres gamine_--the poetical output of one of their own number, and exploiting her as a prodigy under the auspices of a patron of the arts--one _Lord Glandeville_. How this Maecenas, this connoisseur in taste, was ever imposed upon by the masquerading of such incredible types, and how they could have amassed all that wealth by the publication of serious poetry, the most notorious of drugs on the market--these are among the "things" that we should all "like to know" in case our own professions should fail us.