What will our dear friends of the Anti-Sporting League say to this? Here's yet another form of iniquity, the Poet Stakes at the Aquarium! We looked in last night at that classic abode, and found them all hard at it in the Bijou Theatre. We soon made a pretty book, and only regret we hadn't entered BALLYHOOLY and DOSS CHIDERDOSS. A black-haired colt was making the pace with what he called "beautiful prose music," quite as good as any we turn out in our first page. But the backers rather fancied a Chestnut Pegasus, who was going well within his stride with his "Odes and Poems." There were one or two other dark horses in the field, that we put down for a place. That worthy and veteran sportsman, and cutest of tipsters, G. ALLEN, wielded the flag, and got his little lot off, as we were told, with only ten false starts. We left at the fifty-seventh hour, when the leaders had completed two hundred and twenty laps of very blank verse and other paces, it being a go-as-you-please contest. A sonnet divided the first and second, and there was an epigram and a half between the second and the third. As it promised to be a long-winded affair, and rather too noisy for our refined and delicate constitutions, we retired early. We give the odds, however, on another page. * * * * * [Illustration: A PARLIAMENTARY HOUSE WARMING! (PARTIES ARE OFTEN RENDERED VERY ATTRACTIVE BY THE ADOPTION OF FANCY DRESS!)] * * * * * ESSENCE OF PARLIAMENT. EXTRACTED FROM THE DIARY OF TOBY, M.P. _Tuesday, February 5._--House filled once more with bustle of new Session. Lobby crowded. Corridors, long silent, burst into bustling life. "Seems to me," says JEMMY LOWTHER, looking on with his juvenile-veteran air, "that the happiest day in a member's life is the first of a Session, if indeed the cup of his joy isn't fuller on the day of prorogation." For some the jubilation of the hour is toned down by saddened thought. There is one step that will never more be heard in the lobby, one familiar face seen here no more, one voice, wont to sway the passions of the House, that now is still. LYCIDAS is dead, not quite ere his prime, but in what, had fate been kinder, should have been the fulness of his rich gifts.