MR. SALVATOR ROSE, R.A., is working hard to get all his pictures ready for the forthcoming Royal Academy Exhibition. Perhaps, the most striking is a scene from SMITH'S _Classical Dictionary_, in which AGAMEMNON is represented as blowing a kiss, across the Prytaneum, to CLYTEMNESTRA, who is pacing the Bema, in the absence of her guardian on a secret expedition. AEGISTHUS appears in the background, detained by some law business, and the Chorus is endeavouring to convince him that he is in the wrong. This powerful painting, with its subtle _nuances_, its harmonious play of light and shade, its truthful rendering of the Piraeus, and the splendid drawing of the Chorus's left leg, will carry conviction to all who can reverence a conscientious manipulation of another of the grand old trilogies of the Athenian stage. The new metal, Fluozinium, is steadily making its way against the current of scientific prejudice. It has been discovered in almost limitless quantities in conjunction with tufa and haematite; and the most delicate persons may inhale its fumes with perfect safety. In specific gravity Fluozinium is superior both to nickel and cobalt; it will ignite nowhere but on the box, and not often there; and for porosity, frangibility, and opalescence, no metal in our time has approached it. The Dryrot Society have at the present time two more volumes of unusual interest ready for their subscribers, who, it must be said, regretfully, are much in arrear with their subscriptions. One is the Foundation Deeds, in abbreviated Latin, of the Monastery of St. Kilda, in Kincardineshire, dating as far back as the fourteenth century; the other, a list of all persons holding _in capite_ a carucate of land and upwards, who were in fief to the Crown in the Border Wars. A few copies will be struck off on large paper, and six on vellum. * * * * * =THE SPEAKER-ELECT.= [Illustration: T]HE details supplied by the newspapers give but an inadequate idea of the interesting rites and ceremonies which cluster round the election of a new SPEAKER, and have been observed, with undeviating fidelity, since those early times, when the original SPEAKER received the sanction of his Sovereign under the shade of the "Parliament Oak" in "Merry Sherwood." From the first moment that he gets a post-card informing him he is to be proposed to the House for the vacant Chair, the SPEAKER-designate gives up the sports of the field, dinner company, and all other pleasures and amusements, and devotes himself, night and day, to the perusal of the journals of the House of Commons, the investigation of the Standing Orders, and the study of the Constitutional History of England, Parliamentary precedents and privileges, and the Biographies of his predecessors. He reads a fixed portion of _Hansard_ every morning and evening. He sees no one but the Clerk of the House and his Assistants, who call to give him daily private tuition.