THE POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTION.
This popular place of entertainment devoted its receipts of Thursday night to the fund for the relief of the wives and children' widows and orphans, of soldiers ordered on active service. A crammed house marked the occasion. Lord Shaftesbury had consented to take the chair, and he urged vigorously the objects of the Association ; backed by its honorary secretary, Major Powys. The band of the First Life Guards was in at- tendance, and played music national and operatic throughout the evening. There was to have been a lecture on the munitions of war; but this, however appropriate to the gathering, slipped out of the programme, while the audience's enthusiasm veated itself in cheerings and vociferous demands for "Rule Brifannia." The display of dissolving views, begin- ning with the Holy Places which gave the pretext for Russia's exactions, and closing with Sebastopol, after other views from the seat of war, eli- cited demonstrations of the like kind ; and the meeting, got up with spirit, passed off altogether in a thoroughgoing mood.
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