_Tickler_.--Brighthelmstone, when I knew it, was a pleasant fishing village--what like it is now, I know not; but what I detest in the great folks of your time, is, that insane selfishness which makes them prefer any place, however abominable, where they can herd together in their little exquisite coteries, to the noblest mansions surrounded with the noblest domains, where they cannot exist without being more or less exposed to the company of people not exactly belonging to their own particular sect. How can society hang together long in a country where the Corinthian capital takes so much pains to unrift itself from the pillar? Now-a-day, sir, your great lord, commonly speaking, spends but a month or six weeks in his ancestral abode; and even when he is there, he surrounds himself studiously with a cursed town-crew, a pack of St. James's Street fops, and Mayfair chatterers and intriguers, who give themselves airs enough to turn the stomachs of the plain squirearchy and their womankind, and render a visit to the castle a perfect nuisance. _Theodore (aside to Mullion.)_--A prejudiced old prig! _Tickler_.--They seem to spare no pains to show that they consider the country as valuable merely for rent and game--the duties of the magistracy are a bore--county meetings are a bore--a farce, I believe, was the word--the assizes are a cursed bore--fox-hunting itself is a bore, unless in Leicestershire, where the noble sportsmen, from all the winds of heaven cluster together, and think with ineffable contempt of the old-fashioned chase, in which the great man mingled with gentle and simple, and all comers--sporting is a bore, unless in a regular _battue_, when a dozen lordlings murder pheasants by the thousand, without hearing the cock of one impatrician fowling-piece--except indeed some dandy poet, or philosopher, or punster, has been admitted to make sport to the Philistines. In short, every thing is a bore that brings the dons into personal collision of any kind with people that don't belong to the world. _Odoherty_.--The world is getting pretty distinct from the nation, I admit, and I doubt if much love is lost between them.--_Blackwood's Magazine_. * * * * * THE HOPKINSONIAN JOKE.