WHAT THE WORLD SAYS.

Globe, Volume VI, Issue 686, 31 August 1876, Page 4

WHAT THE WORLD SAYS.

(By Atlas in the World of July 5.) Mr P. J. Smyth, who made such an unexpectedly good speech in the House on Friday night on the Irish Home Rule debate, helped the late John Mitchell to run away from his penal retirement in Australia—that is to say, so far as providing horses and a steamer for the purpose, and accompanying the irrecon cilable rebel with a brace of pistols on his flight. Mr Smyth has since been for a period editor of the Irishman, an excessively green journal of Dublin. That was a fine retort flashed the other night upon a youth who inherits an honored name without any of the genius that brought honour upon it. "Do you know who I am?" he angrily a gentleman who had coolly treated his boisterously friendly advancfs. "My name is ." "I beg your pardon," said the one addressed, "that was your grandfather's name." At the annual symposium of murder—l mean the conversazione of the College of Physicians—last week, there were several very remarkably hideous things displayed. Lungs of cats, livers of dogs, and portions of the human frame, and animalculse, for example, were among them ; but for sheer unparalleled ugliness not one of the abovementioned objects even approached the model of the new Opera-house. And a very famous surgeon, having examined it long and closely, is reported to have said : " Now I understand why people are not going to Drury Lane this season ; Colonel Mapleson exhibits there a similar model to this." An afternoon at the Westminster Aquarium is not cheerful, a day at the British Museum is not jovial, nor would one seek relief from depression at the Polytechnic; but all these are scenes of rollicking fun compared to the annual soiree given at the Royal Academy. The haughty contempt of the R.A.s and their families, the patronage of sth e Manchester purchasers, the awe and admiration of the models, and the fear and trembling of the few art critics present constitute the most melancholy exhibition to be witnessed during the season. This cannot perhaps be changed, but the Academy is not a poor body, and thev give the very woi>t wine to be obtained for love or money. The heat and the crowd and the sight of some of the pictures are quite enough to warrant a headache the next morning, without its being positively guaranteed by one glass of sherry. The exhibition of the religious rites in Mr Robert Buchanan's play, " Oorinne," would divert, if they did not shock, Roman Catholics among the audience. Conversations of the most mundane character take place at the steps of the high altar which has all its candles lighted. A 'venerable priest,' dressed in the vestments used at mass, walks in, and has an angry dialogue with the fashionable abbe of the period, who genufle-ts reverentially each time he passes the altar. The Archbishop of Paris interferes with the marriage ceremony in a very unseemly way, flourishes his crozier as if it were a quarter-staff, and is altogether a most unclerical person. The whole, indeed, shows how profoundly ignorant the combative Protestant is of the spirit of the Church he affects to denounce. Even at the Opera at Drury Lane, during the cathedral scene in " Faust," a sort of dressing-table is pushed in, carrying two lights, to do duty as an altar. I confess there is nothing more revolting than to see a supernumerary dressed up in ecclesiastical robes, and, with arms crossed upon ftis br*»asr, affecting a rapt air of devotion. Canterbury Cathedral has again narrowly escaped destruction by fire, caused by combustion of benzoline and cotton waste while cleaning the clock in the western tower.