in bill-discounting matters, by making it a felony. It
is perfectly disgraceful. It would be a most
beneficial act if any gentleman would take the subject in
hand, and bring in a bill making such a transaction
a felony. It is no less than stealing a man's money.
If such an act of parliament were passed the good
effected would be incalculable, and the parties would be
at the bar at the Old Bailey." The jury said they
were quite of the opinion expressed by his lordship as to
the necessity of something being done by the Legislature
in order to put a stop to this system of bill-dealing.

At the Westminster police-court, on the 2nd inst., the
Rev. Mr. Lowder, one of the curates of St. Barnabas,
Pimlico, was charged with an Assault. The
complainant's counsel stated the circumstances of this
extraordinary charge. There was in the district of
St. Paul and St. Barnabas an election on Easter Tuesday
for the office of churchwarden. There were two candidates
for the office, the cause of one of whom was
espoused by the defendant, while the complainant was a
man employed to carry a board by a committee seeking
to procure the return of the other candidate. The
complainant was carrying his board in Ebury Street on
the day in question, when he was astounded at finding
himself suddenly attacked by a number of lads throwing
eggs and stones at him. The circumstance became the
subject of inquiry by the committee, when, to their
surprise, it was ascertained that the eggs were furnished
to the persons throwing them by the defendant, and
that they were incited by him to commit the assault
which was the subject of the present charge. After the
information received by the committee, the
churchwardens waited upon the defendant, as they could not
possibly believe that he had so far forgotten himself,
when he made a direct admission of the act imputed to
him, stating that it had been done in a moment of
indiscretion and want of reflection. This admission
was followed by a letter from defendant repeating it,
and acknowledging that he had incited the boys (the
choristers of St. Barnabas) to bedaub the boards, and
offering to make any reparation to the person who had
carried them. As it was a public offence and required
public notice, the matter had been brought to this
court; but if the defendant was now willing to express
his regret publicly, as he had done privately, the
complainant was willing to retire from this prosecution.
The rev. defendant repeated his expression of regret;
gave the complainant £2 as a compensation for the
pelting he had received; and so the matter ended.

In the Insolvent Debtors Court on the 4th instant,
Mr. Sackville Walter Lane Fox, late member for
Beverley and Ipswich, and brother-in-law of the Duke
of Leeds, Applied for his Discharge. The following is
an outline of his case: From various landed estates,
from a house in St. James's Square, from funded
property, and from coal royalties, he derived an income
of more than £17,000 per annum. From this gross
income a certain deduction must be made for various
charges upon the estate of about £5,000 a-year, leaving
to Mr. Fox in the shape of disposable income, as life
tenant, no less than £12,000 a-year. This large income
he had spent among coal-merchants, wine-merchants,
fruiterers, &c.—upon electioneering expenses to the
extent of £7,000, and upon the interest on money raised
to satisfy the debts contracted in the two methods just
named. The schedule, which contained 175 creditors,
exhibited an aggregate amount of debts, contracted since
1810, of £168,803 17s. 1d., of which £36,709 were
inserted as without consideration, leaving a net amount
of £132,054 1s. 11d. for which consideration had been
received. The gross income of the insolvent from 1840
to 1851 was entered at £14,860. The unsecured debts
amounted to about £28,000, and the creditors comprised
almost every description of tradesmen. To milkmen
£225 was due; to coal merchants, £662; to wine
merchants, £714; fruiterers, £295; confectioners, £108;
grocers, £293; chimneysweepers, £22, &c. Several
tradesmen who had trusted Mr. Fox to a considerable
amount, in despite of all circumstances which should
have given them timely warning of his position, came
forward to claim the protection of the court against the
insolvent, but the commissioner in the course of his
remarks said: "If creditors did not come to prove that
they had been deceived, the court could not act for
them; but the probability was that these London
tradesmen knew well that Mr. Fox was an embarrassed
man, and yet, for some reason or other, they gave him
credit and left him unmolested for years. They could
not expect this court now to deny to a man his liberty
for ever." The insolvent was ordered to be discharged.
He had been fourteen months in prison.

Moses Moses, the Receiver of Stolen Goods, whose
case has been already mentioned, pleaded guilty to
thirteen indictments. He had warehouses in Bell Lane,
Spitalfield, and there received stolen property by wholesale.
His counsel attempted to obtain a lenient
sentence, by urging that Moses had only recently taken
to dishonest pursuits, that he had been led astray by
another man who has escaped; and that he had given
useful information to the police. The recorder did not
believe that Moses had offended only at a recent period,
and, after enlarging on the enormity of the offence of
receiving stolen property, as it directly led to robberies,
he sentenced the prisoner to be transported for fourteen
years.

At the Marlborough police-court on the 13th,
Edmund Edwards, Edward Masters, and Edward
Kensington Vernon, describing themselves as gentlemen,
were charged with being Drunk and Driving Recklessly
through the crowd of spectators assembled before the
French Ambassador's mansion on the night of the ball,
whereby a woman was injured. A witness deposed that
he was among the crowd at Albert-gate, and saw the
defendant Edwards driving a dog-cart, in which the
other two defendants were. He turned through the
crowd into the park, and there was great shouting. He
saw a woman knocked down by the horse, a high-spirited
animal, and he saw the dog-cart go over her body. The
defendant drove right through the crowd in a reckless
manner, and the horse was just on witness's shoulder,
when he seized the reins and stopped the animal.
The woman appeared to be carried away lifeless by her
friends, and the defendants, who appeared to have been
drinking, made quite a laugh at the matter. Edwards
in defence, said they had been dining at Hampton-court,
and had taken rather too much wine. The magistrate
said, he should inflict on Edwards the highest penalty
the law allowed, which was 40s., and he fined the other
two defendants 5s. each for being drunk.

A melancholy Suicide has been committed by a young
lady at Glasgow. She had resided for several days at a
fashionable hotel, and on Saturday evening, the 13th
inst., she was found suspended from a cord fixed in the
window shutter of her room. Some letters found in a
French ornamented fruit box, led to her being identified
as Jessie Lauder, whose family resides in Edinburgh.
The act appears to have been the result of disappointed
love, and to have been deliberately premeditated. She
must have been engaged for the last day or two in
writing parting letters to relatives and friends, all
couched in the most affectionate and endearing terms.
A letter to her sister reminds the latter of a stroll they
had together in the cemetery at Edinburgh three weeks
before, in which "I told you where to lay my head.
You thought I was joking with you, but now you know
how deeply I was in earnest. I kissed my little brothers
as they lay asleep in bed the morning I left home.
Alas, it was to me a painful kissing, knowing that I
never should see them more." She further advises her
sister, "Never let intoxicating liquor enter the threshold
of your door—it is the cause of my death; not that I
ever drank myself—nobody on earth can ever say I
did." She appears to have written to her lover a few
days previously, and the letter which the servant girl
took up to her room when she found her dead was an
answer to it. He apologises for delay in writing to her,
ascribes this delay to her letter having been missent to
a town three miles distant from his proper address, in
proof of which he encloses the envelope marked
"missent to G——." The melancholy event was
immediately intimated to her father, and to the young
man, to whom she seems to have been so deeply attached.

A case in the Insolvent Debtors' Court on the 13th
exhibited a Novel System of Swindling. John Smith,
a commission agent, was opposed by Mr. Dowse,
instructed by the Society for the Protection of Trade, for