PEEL.--"Ambassador at Paris--_Alfred Bunn, or any other translator of French Operas_." PUNCH.--A person who will have a continual sense of the necessities of his country at home; and therefore, by his position, be enabled to send us the earliest copies of M. Scribe's printed dramas; or, in cases of exigency, the manuscripts themselves. And now, Bobby, what think you of Punch's Cabinet? PEEL.--Why, really, I did not think the country contained so much state talent. PUNCH.--That's the narrowness of your philosophy; if you were to look with an enlarged, a thinking mind, you'd soon perceive that the distance was not so great from St. James's to St. Giles's--from the House of Commons to the House of Correction. Well, do you accept my list? PEEL.--Excuse me, my dear Punch, I must first try my own; when if that fails-- PUNCH.--You'll try mine? That's a bargain. * * * * * PUNCH'S PENCILLINGS.--No. III. [Illustration: THE EVENING PARTY. PREPARATION. DECORATION. REALIZATION. TERMINATION.] * * * * * A FAIR OFFER In compliance with my usual practice, I send you this letter, containing a trifling biographical sketch, and an offer of my literary services. I don't suppose you will accept them, treating me as for forty-three years past all the journals of this empire have done; for I have offered my contributions to them all--all. It was in the year 1798, that escaping from a French prison (that of Toulon, where I had been condemned to the hulks for forgery)--I say, from a French prison, but to find myself incarcerated in an English dungeon (fraudulent bankruptcy, implicated in swindling transactions, falsification of accounts, and contempt of court), I began to amuse my hours of imprisonment by literary composition. I sent in that year my "Apology for the Corsican," relative to die murder of Captain Wright, to the late Mr. Perry, of the _Morning Chronicle_, preparing an answer to the same in the _Times_ journal; but as the apology was not accepted (though the argument of it was quite clear, and much to my credit), so neither was the answer received--a sublime piece, Mr. PUNCH, an unanswerable answer. In the year 1799, I made an attempt on the journal of the late Reverend Mr. Thomas Hill, then fast sinking in years; but he had ill-treated my father, pursuing him before Mr. Justice Fielding for robbing him of a snuff-box, in the year 1740; and he continued his resentment towards my father's unoffending son. I was cruelly rebuffed by Mr. Hill, as indeed I have been by every other newspaper proprietor.