The _Daily News_ is none the less able on the subject, because for once disposed to be smart. Does "Singleton Fontenoy" speak in the following?-- 'There is a true savour of sea-salt in the grim irony of that couplet in one of Dibdin's sea-songs, where Jack is contrasting the freedom and security of life aboard ship with the continual jeopardy to which landsmen who walk about streets and dwell in houses are exposed:-- "While you and I, Bill, on the deck Are comfortably lying, My eyes! what tiles and chimbly pots Around their heads are flying!" 'The recklessness of temperament which sends a lad to sea, and which, hardened and confirmed by conflict with the elements, laughs at real danger, and yet is apt to shrink with a sort of dismayed disgust from the vulgar inconveniences of artificial existence, is happily and humorously expressed. The dweller in cities, on the other hand, with all his habitual scepticism and indifference, who peeps at the moon as at a raree show, and takes a return ticket to go and gape at an eclipse from some distant hill in the country--your acute, hard-headed, practical man on Change, in the Law-court, in the Club, stares and marvels like a mere baby when he is brought face to face with the terror and mystery of Nature in any of her sublimer moods. A fashionable public at Brighton running out to see the effects of a gale of wind upon real "water" is surely as sorry and ludicrous a combination as the genius of mockery can devise for the laughter of the stars. Accidents and offences, fires and murders, burglaries and poisonings, are as dull and stale as taxation, or as births, deaths, and marriages; they are the "useful and the beautiful" of well-regulated society; and who but a dry statistical philanthropist reads the wreck-list, or ponders the significance of the annual catalogue of casualties among merchantmen and coasters? It is only when the great meteorological staple of English conversation derives a certain freshness and novelty from a sudden attack of winter upon the rear of autumn, or when a hurricane has torn up a tree in the park and blown an old woman into the river or a child into the canal, that our inland world begins to feel that the universe is not absolutely done to order yet.