* Thomas Hood, the most talented of all the English humorists now living, and, like all humourists, full of human feeling, but wanting in mental energy, published at the beginning of 1844 a beautiful poem, ‘The Song of the Shirt’, which drew sympathetic but unavailing tears from the eyes of the daughters of the bourgeoisie. Originally published in Punch, it made the round of all the papers. As discussions of the condition of the sewing-women filled all the papers at the time, special extracts are needless.