The present Lord Mayor appears to have waxed fat and
kicked. He took offence the other day at some temperate criticisms of the Daily News, and wrote the editor a letter declining to give his reporter a place at the banquet to Lord Napier of Magdala. This was a very silly outbreak of personal feeling ; but he appears to have done something sillier still in refusing to give away the prizes of the City of London school (a school managed by the London Corporation), because the Head Master,—one of the ablest and most eloquent clergynien in London, the Rev. E. A. Abbott,—had preached a sermon in Westminster Abbey which the Lord Mayor had not heard himself, but had heard of, and heard of to the effect that it tended " to set the poor against the rich,"—like Christ's parable about Dives and Lazarus
So that the Lord Mayor took a hearsay charge against a ser- mon, and made it the ground of at first refusing to discharge a regular official duty. When, however, it was moved in the Com- mon Council that one of the City Members be requested to take -his place, the Lord Mayor gave in. He had evidently thought that Nature abhorred a vacuum—of Lord Mayor; and finding she did not, that even a City Member could more than fill it, he thought it best not to create the vacuum. May we suggest to the worthy Lord Mayor that Mr. Abbott could teach him more, both intel- lectually, morally, and religiously, than it had ever entered into iris aldermanic heart to conceive?
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