BELFAST AND THE SATURDAY REVIEW.
Oun smart and all-knowing contemporary, the Saturday Review, has recently been the victim of a ridiculous hoax, which rather shakes its pre- tensions to sagacity. There is in Belfast an association of the " Friends of uman Rights," and the world was startled by a powerful denunciation of these dangerous " Friends," their chairman, and their head-quarters at Belfast, the City convicted of holding the monsters. Mr. John Scott, the chairman, and his friends had indeed drawn up a formidable manifesto, and sent it abroad, to the editor of the Saturday Review among others. We itiould have thought no writer, unless at a loss for a "subject," would have set himself down to comment on a document so extravagant and so puerile. But the Saturday Review had heard of Belfast, perhaps had read that it was "riotous and religious," knew that Phcenix Club men had been arrested there, and that Mr. Hanna and Dr. Cooke had made it notorious. This was enough. Forthwith the writer, nothing doubting, not caring to inquire whether John Scott and his faithful friends existed, set himself to spin out an article in two columns of small type to ridicule and refute the ravings of John Scott, imputing the ideas of that small political maniac to Belfast itself.
Probably our contemporary has by this time repented of his undignified wrestlings with the unknown Belfast "friend of humanity," for he may already have learned that John Scott was a person of whose existence even Belfast was ignorant until the Saturday Review made him famous ; that the head-quarters of the club was a Temperance Coffee-house, and the for- midable Friends attendant upon John Scott, numbered precisely three ! To accept the manifestoes of the Three Tailors of Tooley Street were ridiculouti enough ; but to declare war against all Tooley Street !
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