The title, I think, will strike. The fashion, you know, now, is to do away with old prejudices, and to rescue certain characters from the illiberal odium with which custom has marked them. Thus we have a generous Israelite, an amiable cynic, and so on. Now, Sir, I call my play--_The Humane Footpad_.--SYLVESTER DAGGERWOOD. Some four or five seasons since, the eccentric Buckstone produced a three-act farce, which, by dint of its after title--_The School for Sympathy_--and of much highly comic woe, exhibited in the acting of Farren and Nisbett, was presented to uproariously-affected audiences during some score nights. The hinge of the mirth was made to turn upon the irresistible drollery of one man's running away with another man's wife, and the outrageous fun of the consequent suicide of the injured husband; the _bons mots_ being most tragically humorous, and the aphorisms of the several characters facetiously concatenative of the nouns contained in the leading name of the piece--"_Love_ and _Murder_." Now this was a magnificent idea--one of those brilliant efforts which cannot but tend to lift the theatre in the estimation of every man of delicacy and education. A new source of attraction was at once discovered,--a vast fund of available fuel was suddenly found to recruit the cinerulent embers of the drama withal. It became evident that, after Joe Miller, the ordinary of Newgate was the funniest dog in the world. Manslaughter, arson, and the more practical jokes in the Calendar, were already familiar to the stage; it was a refinement of the Haymarket authors to introduce those livelier sallies of wit--crim. con. and felo-de-se. The "immense coalitions" of all manner of crimes and vices in the subsequent "highway school"--the gradual development of every unnatural tendency in the youthful Jack Sheppard (another immor-t-al work by the author of the afore-lauded comedy)--the celebration, by a classic chaunt, of his reaching the pinnacle of depravity; this was the _ne plus ultra_ of dramatic invention. Robbers and murderers began to be treated, after the Catholic fashion, with extreme unction; audiences were intoxicated with the new drop; sympathy became epidemic; everybody was bewildered and improved; and nobody went and threw themselves off the Monument with a copy of the baleful drama in his pocket! But the magnificence of the discovery was too large to be grasped by even the gluttonous eye of the managers, The Adelphi might overflow--the Surrey might quake with reiterated "pitsfull"--still there remained over and above the feast-crumbs sufficient for the battenings of other than theatrical appetites. Immediately the press-gang--we beg pardon, the _press_--arose, and with a mighty throe spawned many monsters. Great drama! _Greater Press!_ GREATEST PUBLIC!