Ye living atoms, who unconscious sit, Jumbled by chance in gallery, box, and pit, For you no Peter opes the fabled door, No churlish Charon plies the shadowy oar; Breathe but a space, and Boreas’ casual sweep Shall bear your scatter’d corses o’er the deep, To gorge the greedy elements, and mix With water, marl, and clay, and stones, and sticks; While, charged with fancied souls, sticks, stones, and clay Shall take your seats, and hiss or clap the play. O happy age! when convert Christians read No sacred writings but the Pagan creed— O happy age! when, spurning Newton’s dreams, Our poets’ sons recite Lucretian themes, Abjure the idle systems of their youth, And turn again to atoms and to truth;— O happier still! when England’s dauntless dames, Awed by no chaste alarms, no latent shames, The bard’s fourth book unblushingly peruse, And learn the rampant lessons of the stews! All hail, Lucretius! renovated sage! Unfold the modest mystics of thy page; Return no more to thy sepulchral shelf, But live, kind bard—that I may live myself! XVI. THEATRICAL ALARM-BELL. BY THE EDITOR OF THE M. P. {81} [MORNING POST.] * * * * * “Bounce, Jupiter, bounce!”—O’HARA. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, As it is now the universally-admitted, and indeed pretty-generally-suspected, aim of Mr. Whitbread and the infamous, bloodthirsty, and, in fact, illiberal faction to which he belongs, to burn to the ground this free and happy Protestant city, and establish himself in St. James’s Palace, his fellow committeemen have thought it their duty to watch the principles of a theatre built under his auspices. The information they have received from an undoubted authority—particularly from an old fruit-woman who has turned king’s evidence, and whose name, for obvious reasons, we forbear to mention, though we have had it some weeks in our possession—has induced them to introduce various reforms—not such reforms as the vile faction clamour for, meaning thereby revolution, but such reforms as are necessary to preserve the glorious constitution of the only free, happy, and prosperous country now left upon the face of the earth. From the valuable and authentic source above alluded to, we have learnt that a sanguinary plot has been formed by some United Irishmen, combined with a gang of Luddites, and a special committee sent over by the Pope at the instigation of the beastly Corsican fiend, for destroying all the loyal part of the audience on the anniversary of that deeply-to-be-abhorred-and-highly-to-be-blamed stratagem, the Gunpowder Plot, which falls this year on Thursday the fifth of November. The whole is under the direction of a delegated committee of O. P.’s whose treasonable exploits at Covent Garden you all recollect, and all of whom would have been hung from the chandeliers at that time, but for the