Chapter 9

THE CHOICE OF A LIFE.

In looking back, after a long lapse of years, I can not refrain from a feeling of astonishment, to think how little remembrance I possess of the occurrences of that day--one of the most memorable that ever dawned for France--the eventful 29th of July, that closed the reign of terror by the death of the tyrant! It is true that all Paris was astir at daybreak; that a sense of national vengeance seemed to pervade the vast masses that filled the streets, which now were scenes of the most exciting emotion. I can only account for the strange indifference that I felt about these stirring themes, by the frequency with which similar, or what, to me, at least, appeared similar scenes had already passed before my eyes.

One of the most remarkable phases of the revolution was, the change it produced in all the social relations, by substituting an assumed nationality for the closer and dearer ties of kindred and affection. France was every thing--the family nothing; every generous wish, every proud thought, every high ambition or noble endeavor belonged to the country. In this way, whatever patriotism may have gained, certainly all the home affections were utterly wrecked; the humble and unobtrusive virtues of domestic life seemed mean and insignificant beside the grand displays of patriotic devotion which each day exhibited.

Hence grew the taste for that "life of the streets," then so popular; every thing should be "en évidence." All the emotions which delicacy would render sacred to the seclusion of home, were now to be paraded to the noonday. Fathers were reconciled to rebellious children before the eyes of multitudes; wives received forgiveness from their husbands in the midst of approving crowds; leave-takings, the most affecting, partings, for those never to meet again, the last utterings of the death-bed, the faint whispers of expiring affection, the imprecations of undying hate, all, all were exhibited in public, and the gaze of the low, the vulgar, and the debauched, associated with the most agonizing griefs that ever the heart endured. The scenes, which now are shrouded in all the secrecy of domestic privacy, were then the daily life of Paris; and to this cause alone can I attribute the hardened indifference with which events the most terrible and heart-rending were witnessed. Bred up amidst such examples, I saw little matter for emotion in scenes of harrowing interest. An air of mockery was on every thing, and a bastard classicality destroyed every semblance of truth in whatever would have been touching and affecting.

The commotion of Paris on that memorable morning was, then, to my thinking, little more than usual. If the crowds who pressed their way to "The Place de la Révolution" were greater; if the cries of vengeance were in louder utterance; if the imprecations were deeper and more terrible, the ready answer, that satisfied all curiosity, was--it was Robespierre, who was on his way to be executed. Little knew I what hung upon that life! and now the fate of millions depended upon the blood that morning was to shed. Too full of myself and my own projects, I disengaged myself from the crowds that pressed eagerly toward the Tuileries, and took my way by less frequented streets in the direction of the Boulevard Mont Parnasse.

I wished, if possible, to see the Père once more, to take a last farewell of him, and ask his blessing, too; for still a lingering faith in the lessons he had taught me, continued to haunt my mind, amidst all the evil influences with which my wayward life surrounded me. The further I went from the quarter of the Tuileries, the more deserted and solitary grew the streets. Not a carriage or horseman was to be seen; scarcely a foot-passenger. All Paris had, apparently, assembled on the "Place de la Révolution;" and the very beggars had quitted their accustomed haunts to repair thither. Even the distant hum of the vast multitude faded away, and it was only as the wind bore them, that I could catch the sounds of the hoarse cries that bespoke a people's vengeance; and now I found myself in the little silent street which once had been my home. I stood opposite the house where we used to live, afraid to enter it, lest I might compromise the safety of her I wished to save, and yet longing once more to see the little chamber where we once sat together--the chimney-corner where, in the dark nights of winter, I nestled, with my hymn-book, and tried to learn the rhymes that every plash of the falling hail against the windows routed; to lie down once more in the little bed, where so often I had passed whole nights of happy imaginings--bright thoughts of a peaceful future, that were never to be realized!

Half-choking with my emotion, I passed on, and soon saw the green fields, and the windmill-covered hill of Montmartre, rising above the embankment of the Boulevards; and now the ivy-clothed wall of the garden, within which stood the chapel of St. Blois. The gate lay ajar, as of old, and pushing it open, I entered. Every thing was exactly as I had left it--the same desolation and desertion every where--so much so, that I almost fancied no human foot had crossed its dreary precincts since last I was there. On drawing nigh to the chapel, I found the door fast barred and barricaded, as before; but a window lay open, and on examining it closer, I discovered the marks of a recent foot-track on the ground and the window-sill. Could the Père Michel have been there? was the question that at once occurred to my mind. Had the poor priest come to take a last look and a farewell of a spot so dear to him? It could scarcely have been any other. There was nothing to tempt cupidity in that humble little church; an image of the "Virgin and Child" in wax was the only ornament of the altar. No, no; pillage had never been the motive of him who entered here.

Thus reasoning, I climbed up to the window, and entered the chapel. As my footsteps echoed through the silent building, I felt that sense of awe and reverence so inseparably connected with a place of worship, and which is ever more impressive still, as we stand in it alone. The present, however, was less before me than the past, of which every thing reminded me. There was the seat the marquise used to sit in; there the footstool I had so often placed at her feet. How different was the last service I had rendered her! There the pillar, beside which I have stood spell-bound, gazing at that fair face, whose beauty arrested the thoughts that should have wended heavenward, and made my muttered prayers like offerings to herself. The very bouquet of flowers--some peri's hand had placed beneath the shrine--withered and faded, was there still. But where were they whose beating hearts had throbbed with deep devotion? How many had died upon the scaffold!--how many were still lingering in imprisonment, some in exile, some in concealment, dragging out lives of misery and anxiety. What was the sustaining spirit of such martyrdom? I asked myself again and again. Was it the zeal of true religion, or was it the energy of loyalty, that bore them up against every danger, and enabled them to brave death itself with firmness?--and if this faith of theirs was thus ennobling, why could not France be of one mind and heart? There came no answer to these doubts of mine, and I slowly advanced toward the altar, still deeply buried in thought. What was my surprise to see that two candles stood there, which bore signs of having been recently lighted. At once the whole truth flashed across me--the Père had been there; he had come to celebrate a mass--the last, perhaps, he was ever to offer up at that altar. I knew with what warm affection he loved every object and every spot endeared to him by long time, and I fancied to myself the overflowing of his heart, as he entered once more, and for the last time, the little temple, associated with all the joys and sorrows of his existence. Doubtless, too, he had waited anxiously for my coming; mayhap, in the prayers he offered, I was not forgotten. I thought of him kneeling there, in the silence of the night, alone, as he was, his gentle voice the only sound in the stillness of the hour; his pure heart throbbing with gratitude for his deliverance, and prayerful hopes for those who had been his persecutors. I thought over all this, and, in a torrent of emotions, I knelt down before the altar to pray. I know not what words I uttered, but his name must some how have escaped my lips; for suddenly a door opened beside the altar, and the Père Michel, dressed in his full vestments, stood before me. His features, wan and wasted as they were, had regained their wonted expression of calm dignity; and by his look I saw that he would not suffer the sacred spot to be profaned by any outburst of feeling on either side.

"Those dreadful shouts tell of another massacre," said he, solemnly, as the wind bore toward us the deafening cries of the angry multitude. "Let us pray for the souls' rest of the departed."

"Then will your prayers be offered for Robespierre, for Couthon, and St. Just," said I, boldly.

"And who are they who need more the saints' intercession--who have ever been called to judgment with such crimes to expiate--who have ever so widowed France, and so desecrated her altars? Happily a few yet remain where piety may kneel to implore pardon for their iniquity. Let us recite the Litany for the Dead," said he, solemnly, and at once began the impressive service.

As I knelt beside the rails of the altar, and heard the prayers which, with deep devotion, he uttered. I could not help feeling the contrast between that touching evidence of Christian charity, and the tumultuous joy of the populace, whose frantic bursts of triumph were borne on the air.

"And now come with me, Maurice," said he, as the mass was concluded. "Here, in this little sacristy, we are safe from all molestation; none will think of us on such a day as this."

And as he spoke, he drew his arm around me, and led me into the little chamber where once the precious vessels and the decorations of the church were kept.

"Here we are safe," said he, as he drew me to his side on the oaken bench, which formed all the furniture of the room. "To-morrow, Maurice, we must leave this, and seek an asylum in another land; but we are not friendless, my child--the brothers of the 'Sacred Heart' will receive us. Their convent is in the wilds of the Ardennes, beyond the frontiers of France, and there, beloved by the faithful peasantry, they live in security and peace. We need not take the vows of their order, which is one of the strictest of all religious houses; but we may claim their hospitality and protection, and neither will be denied us. Think what a blessed existence will that be, Maurice, my son, to dwell under the same roof with these holy men, and to imbibe from them the peace of mind that holiness alone bestows; to awake at the solemn notes of the pealing organ, and to sink to rest with the solemn liturgies still chanting around you; to feel an atmosphere of devotion on every side, and to see the sacred relics whose miracles have attested the true faith in ages long past. Does it not stir thy heart, my child, to know that such blessed privileges may be thine?"

I hung my head in silence, for in truth, I felt nothing of the enthusiasm with which he sought to inspire me. The Père quickly saw what passed in my mind, and endeavored to depict the life of the monastery as a delicious existence, embellished by all the graces of literature, and adorned by the pleasures of intellectual converse. Poetry, romance, scenery, all were pressed into the service of his persuasions; but how weak were such arguments to one like me, the boy whose only education had been what the streets of Paris afforded--whose notions of eloquence were formed on the insane ravings of "The Mountain," and whose idea of greatness were centred in mere notoriety.

My dreamy look of inattention showed him again that he had failed; and I could see in the increased pallor of his face, the quivering motion of his lip, the agitation the defeat was costing him.

"Alas! alas!" cried he, passionately, "the work of ruin is perfect; the mind of youth is corrupted, and the fountain of virtue defiled at the very source. Oh! Maurice, I had never thought this possible of thee, the child of my heart!"

A burst of grief here overcame him; for some minutes he could not speak. At last he arose from his seat, and wiping off the tears that covered his cheeks, with his robe, spoke, but in a voice whose full round tones contrasted strongly with his former weak accents.

"The life I have pictured seems to thee ignoble and unworthy, boy. So did it not appear to Chrysostom, to Origen, and to Augustin, to the blessed saints of our church, the eldest born of Christianity. Be it so. Thine, mayhap is not the age, nor this the era in which to hope for better things. Thy heart yearns for heroic actions--thy spirit is set upon high ambitions--be it so. I say, never was the time more fitting for thee. The enemy is up; his armies are in the field; thousands and tens of thousands swell the ranks, already flushed with victory. Be a soldier, then. Ay, Maurice, buckle on the sword--the battle-field is before thee. Thou hast made choice to seek the enemy in the far-away countries of heathen darkness, or here in our own native France, where his camp is already spread. If danger be the lure that tempts thee--if to confront peril be thy wish--there is enough of it. Be a soldier, then, and gird thee for the great battle that is at hand. Ay! boy, if thou feelest within thee the proud darings that foreshadow success, speak the word, and thou shalt be a standard-bearer in the very van."

I waited not for more; but springing up, I clasped my arms around his neck, and cried, in ecstasy, "Yes! Père Michel, you have guessed aright; my heart's ambition is to be a soldier and I want but your blessing to be a brave one."

"And thou shalt have it. A thousand blessings follow those who go forth to the good fight. But thou art yet young, Maurice--too young for this. Thou needest time and much teaching, too. He who would brave the enemy before us, must be skillful as well as courageous. Thou art as yet but a child."

"The general said he liked boy-soldiers," said I, promptly; "he told me so himself."

"What general--who told thee?" cried the Père in trembling eagerness.

"General Lacoste, the Chef-d'-Etat, major of the army of the Rhine; the same who gave me a rendezvous for to-morrow at his quarters."

It was not till I had repeated my explanation again and again, nor, indeed, until I had recounted all the circumstances of my last night's adventure, that the poor Père could be brought to see his way through a mystery that had almost become equally embarrassing to myself. When he did, however, detect the clew, and when he had perceived the different tracks on which our minds were traveling, his grief burst all bounds. He inveighed against the armies of the Republic as hordes of pillagers and bandits, the sworn enemies of the church, the desecrators of her altars. Their patriotism he called a mere pretense to shroud their infidelity. Their heroism was the bloodthirstiness of democratic cruelty. Seeing me still unmoved by all this passionate declamation, he adopted another tactic, and suddenly asked me if it were for such a cause as this my father had been a soldier?

"No!" replied I, firmly; "for when my father was alive, the soil of France had not been desecrated by the foot of the invader. The Austrian, the Prussian, the Englishman had not yet dared to dictate the laws under which we were to live."

He appeared thunderstruck at my reply, repealing, as it seemed to him, the extent of those teachings, whose corruptions he trembled at.

"I knew it, I knew it," cried he, bitterly, as he wrung his hands. "The seed of the iniquity is sown--the harvest-time will not be long in coming! And so, boy, thou hast spoken with one of these men--these generals, as they call themselves, of that republican horde?"

"The officer who commands the artillery of the army of the Rhine may write himself general with little presumption," said I, almost angrily.

"They who once led our armies to battle were the nobles of France--men whose proud station was the pledge for their chivalrous devotion. But why do I discuss the question with thee? He who deserts his faith may well forget that his birth was noble. Go, boy, join those with whom your heart is already linked. Your lesson will be an easy one--you have nothing to unlearn. The songs of the Girondins are already more grateful to your ear than our sacred canticles. Go, I say, since between us, henceforth, there can be no companionship.

"Will you not bless me, Père," said I, approaching him in deep humility; "will you not let me carry with me thy benediction?"

"How shall I bless the arm that is lifted to wound the Holy Church? how shall I pray for one whose place is in the ranks of the infidel? Hadst thou faith in my blessing, boy, thou hadst never implored it in such a cause. Renounce thy treason--and not alone my blessing, but thou shalt have a 'Novena' to celebrate thy fidelity. Be of us, Maurice, and thy name shall be honored, where honor is immortality."

The look of beaming affection with which he uttered this, more than the words themselves, now shook my courage, and, in a conflict of doubt and indecision, I held down my head without speaking. What might have been my ultimate resolve, if left completely to myself, I know not; but at that very moment a detachment of soldiers marched past in the street without. They were setting off to join the army of the Rhine, and were singing in joyous chorus the celebrated song of the day, "Le chant du depart." The tramp of their feet--the clank of their weapons--their mellow voices--but, more than all, the associations that thronged to my mind, routed every other thought, and I darted from the spot, and never stopped till I reached the street.

A great crowd followed the detachment, composed partly of friends of the soldiers, partly of the idle loungers of the capital. Mixing with these, I moved onward, and speedily passed the outer boulevard, and gained the open country.

(_To be continued._)

[From Household Words.]

THE PLANET-WATCHERS OF GREENWICH.

There is a morsel of Greenwich Park, which has, for now nearly two centuries, been held sacred from intrusion. It is the portion inclosed by the walls of the Observatory. Certainly a hundred thousand visitors must ramble over the surrounding lawns, and look with curious eye upon the towers and outer boundaries of that little citadel of science, for one who finds admission to the interior of the building. Its brick towers, with flanking turrets and picturesque roofs, perched on the side of the gravelly hill, and sheltered round about by groups of fine old trees, are as well known as Greenwich Hospital itself. But what work goes on inside its carefully preserved boundary, and under those movable, black-domed roofs, is a popular mystery. Many a holiday-maker's wonder has been excited by the fall, at one o'clock, of the huge, black ball, high up there, by the weather vane on the topmost point of the eastern turret. He knows, or is told if he asks a loitering pensioner, that the descent of the ball tells the time as truly as the sun; and that all the ships in the river watch it to set their chronometers by, before they sail; and, that, all the railway clocks, and all the railway trains over the kingdom are arranged punctually by its indications. But how the heavens are watched to secure this punctual definition of the flight of time, and what other curious labors are going on inside the Observatory, is a sealed book. The public have always been, of necessity, excluded from the Observatory walls, for the place is devoted to the prosecution of a science whose operations are inconsistent with the bustle, the interruptions, the talk, and the anxieties of popular curiosity and examination.

But when public information and instruction are the objects, the doors are widely opened, and the press and its _attachés_ find a way into this, as into many other sacred and forbidden spots. Only last week one of "our own contributors" was seen in a carriage on the Greenwich railway, poring over the paper in the last Edinburgh Review that describes our national astronomical establishment, and was known afterward to have climbed the Observatory hill, and to have rung and gained admission at the little, black, mysterious gate in the Observatory wall. Let us see what is told in his report of what he saw within that sacred portal.

In the park on a fine day all seems life and gayety--once within the Observatory boundary, the first feeling is that of isolation. There is a curious stillness about the place, and the foot-step of the old pensioner, who closes the gate upon a visitor, echoes again on the pavement as he goes away to wake up from his astronomical or meteorological trance one of the officers of this sanctum. Soon, under the guidance of the good genius so invoked, the secrets of the place begin to reveal themselves.

The part of the Observatory so conspicuous from without is the portion least used within. When it was designed by Christopher Wren, the general belief was that such buildings should be lofty, that the observer might be raised toward the heavenly bodies whose motions he was to watch. More modern science has taught its disciples better; and in Greenwich--which is an eminently practical Observatory--the working part of the building is found crouching behind the loftier towers. These are now occupied as subsidiary to the modern practical building. The ground floor is used as a residence by the chief astronomer; above is the large hall originally built to contain huge moveable telescopes and quadrants--such as are not now employed. Nowadays, this hall occasionally becomes a sort of scientific counting-house--irreverent but descriptive term--in which, from time to time, a band of scientific clerks are congregated to post up the books, in which the daily business of the planets has been jotted down by the astronomers who watch those marvelous bodies. Another portion is a kind of museum of astronomical curiosities. Flamstead and Halley, and their immediate successors, worked in these towers, and here still rest some of the old, rude tools with which their discoveries were completed, and their reputation, and the reputation of Greenwich, were established. As time has gone on, astronomers and opticians have invented new, and more perfect, and more luxurious instruments. Greater accuracy is thus obtainable, at a less expenditure of human patience and labor; and so the old tools are cast aside. One of them belonged to Halley, and was put up by him a hundred and thirty years ago; another is an old brazen quadrant, with which many valuable observations were made in by-gone times; and another, an old iron quadrant, still fixed in the stone pier to which it was first attached. Some of the huge telescopes that once found place in this old Observatory, have been sent away. One went to the Cape of Good Hope, and has been useful there. Another of the unsatisfactory, and now unused instruments, had a tube twenty-five feet long, whose cool and dark interior was so pleasant to the spiders that, do what they would, the astronomers could not altogether banish the persevering insects from it. Spin they would; and, spite of dusting and cleaning, and spider-killing, spin they did; and, at length, the savans got more instruments and less patience, and the spiders were left in quiet possession. This has been pleasantly spoken of as an instance of poetical justice. It is but fair that spiders should, at times, have the best of astronomers, for astronomers rob spiders for the completion of their choicest instruments. No fabric of human construction is fine enough to strain across the eyepiece of an important telescope, and opticians preserve a particular race of spiders, that their webs may be taken for that purpose. The spider lines are strained across the best instruments at Greenwich and elsewhere; and when the spinners of these beautifully fine threads disturbed the accuracy of the tube in the western wing of the old Observatory, it was said to be but fair retaliation for the robberies the industrious insects had endured.

A narrow stair leads from the unused rooms of the old Observatory to its leaded roof, whence a magnificent view is obtained; the park, the hospital, the town of Greenwich, and the windings of the Thames, and, gazing further, London itself comes grandly into the prospect. The most inveterate astronomer could scarcely fail to turn for a moment from the wonders of the heavens to admire these glories of the earth. From the leads, two turrets are reached, where the first constantly active operations in this portion of the building, are in progress.

At the present time, indeed, these turrets are the most useful portions of the old building. In one is placed the well-known contrivance for registering, hour after hour, and day after day, the force and direction of the wind. To keep such a watch by human vigilance, and to make such a register by human labor, would be a tedious, expensive, and irksome task; and human ingenuity taxed itself to make a machine for perfecting such work. The wind turns a weather-cock, and, by aid of cog-wheels the motion is transferred to a lead pencil fixed over a sheet of paper, and thus the wind is made to write down the direction which itself is blowing. Not far distant is a piece of metal, the flat side of which is ever turned by the weather-cock to meet the full force of the wind, which, blowing upon it, drives it back against a spring. To this spring is affixed a chain passing over, pullies toward another pencil, fixed above a sheet of paper, and moving faithfully, more or less, as the wind blows harder or softer. And thus the "gentle zephyr" and the fresh breeze, and the heavy gale, and, when it comes, the furious hurricane, are made to note down their character and force. The sheet of paper on which the uncertain element, the wind, is bearing witness against itself, is fixed upon a frame moved by clock-work. Steady as the progress of time, this ingenious mechanism draws the paper under the suspended pencils. Thus each minute and each hour has its written record, without human help or inspection. Once a day only, an assistant comes to put a new blank sheet in the place of that which has been covered by the moving pencils, and the latter is taken away to be bound up in a volume. The book might with truth be lettered, "The History of the Wind; written by Itself"--an Æolian autobiography.

Close by is another contrivance for registering in decimals of an inch the quantity of rain that falls. The drops are caught, and passing down a tube, a permanent mark is made by which the quantity is determined.

The eastern turret is devoted to the Time Ball and its mechanism. Far out at sea--away from all sources of information but those to be asked of the planets, his compass, his quadrant, his chronometer, and his almanack, the mariner feels the value of _time_ in a way which the landsman can scarcely conceive. If his chronometer is right, he may feel safe; let him have reason to doubt its accuracy, and he knows how the perils surrounding him are increased. An error of a few seconds in his time may place him in danger--an error of a few minutes may lead him to steer blindly to his certain wreck. Hence his desire when he is leaving port to have his time-pieces right to a second; and hence the expenditure of thought, and labor, and money, at the Greenwich Observatory, to afford the shipping of the great port of London, and the English navy, the exact time--true to the tenth of a second, or six hundredth of a minute--and to afford them also a book, the Nautical Almanack, containing a mass of astronomical facts, on which they may base their calculations, with full reliance as to their accuracy. Every day for the last seventeen years, at five minutes before one o'clock, the black ball five feet across and stuffed with cork, is raised halfway up its shaft above the eastern turret of the observatory--at two-and-a-half minutes before that hour, it rises to the top. Telescopes from many a point, both up and down the river, are now pointed to this dark spot above the Greenwich trees, and many an anxious mariner has his time-pieces beside him, that their indications may be made true. Watch the ball as you stand in the Park. It is now just raised. You must wait two minutes and a half, and as you do so, you feel what a minute may be. It seems a long, palpable, appreciable time, indeed. In the turret below, stands a clock telling the true time, gained by a laborious watching of the _clock-stars_; and beside the clock, is a man with a practiced hand upon a trigger, and a practiced eye upon the face of the dial. One minute--two minutes pass. Thirty seconds more, and the trigger has released the Ball. As it leaves the top of the shaft, it is one o'clock to the tenth of a second By the time it has reached the bottom it is some five seconds later.

Leaving the Ball Turret, and the old building which it surmounts, the new Observatory, where the chief work of the establishment is done, claims our notice. This attention would scarcely be given to its outward appearance for it is a long, low building, scarcely seen beyond its own boundaries. The Greenwich Observatory is not a _show_ place, but an eminently practical establishment. St. Petersburg and other cities have much more gorgeous buildings devoted to astronomical purposes, and Russia and other countries spend much more money on astronomy than England does, yet the Greenwich Tables have a world-wide reputation, and some of them are used as the groundwork for calculations in all Observatories at home and abroad. The astronomer does not want marble halls or grand saloons for his work. Galileo used a bell-tower at Venice, and Kepler stood on the bridge at Prague to watch the stars. The men, not the buildings, do the work. No disappointment, need be felt, then, to find the modern Observatory a range of unadorned buildings running east and west, with slits in the roof and in some of the walls. Within these simple buildings are the instruments now used, displaying almost the perfection of mechanical skill in their construction and finish--beautifully adapted to the object they have to fulfill, and in perfect order. They are fixed on solid piers of masonry, deeply imbedded in the earth, to secure freedom from vibration--a quality better obtained when the foundations are on sand or gravel than when on rock.

To describe the instruments by their technical names, and to go into any particulars of the instruments they have superseded, would take space, only to do the work of a scientific treatise. Enough, therefore, to say, that there are the telescopes best adapted to the chief duty of the place, which is, watching the moon whenever she is visible; watching the _clock-stars_, by which the true time is calculated more exactly than it could be from observations of the sun alone; and watching other planetary bodies as they pass the meridian. Eclipses, occultations, and other phenomena, of course, have their share of attention, and add to the burden of the observer's duties.

The staff of the Observatory includes a chief astronomer, Mr. Airy, with a salary of £800 a year; and six assistants who are paid, £470, £290, £240, £150, £130, and £130, respectively. This does not include the officers of the Meteorological branch of the establishment, to be spoken of hereafter; and which consists of Mr. Glaisher, with £240 a year, one assistant at £120, and two additional computers. At times, when these scientific laborers have collected more observations than they are able to work out; additional help is summoned, in shape of the body of scientific clerks before spoken of; who, seated at desks, cast up the accounts the planetary bodies, including such regular old friends as the moon and fixed stars, but not forgetting those wandering celestial existences that rush, from time to time, over the meridian, and may be fairly called the chance customers of the astronomer.

Though the interior of the Observatory seems so still, the life of those employed there has its excitements. Looking through telescopes forms a small part only of their duty--and that duty can not be done when the weather is unfavorable. On cloudy days the observer is idle; in bright weather he is busy; and a long continuance of clear days and nights gives him more employment than he can well complete. Summer, therefore, is his time of labor; winter his time of rest. It appears that in our climate the nights, on the whole, are clearer than the days, and evenings less cloudy than mornings. Every assistant takes his turn as an observer, and a chain of duty is kept up night and day; at other periods, the busiest portion of the twenty-four hours at the Observatory, is between nine in the morning and two in the afternoon. During this time they work in silence, the task being to complete the records of the observations made, by filling in the requisite columns of figures upon printed forms, and then adding and subtracting them as the case requires. While thus engaged, the assistant who has charge of an instrument looks, from time to time, at his star regulated clock, and when it warns him that his expected planet is nearly due, he leaves his companions, and quietly repairs to the room where the telescope is ready. The adjustment of this has previously been arranged with the greatest nicety. The shutter is moved from the slit in the roof, the astronomer sits upon an easy chair with a movable back. If the object he seeks is high in the heavens, this chair-back is lowered till its occupant almost lies down; if the star is lower, the chair-back is raised in proportion. He has his note-book and metallic pencil in hand. Across the eye-piece of the telescope are stretched seven lines of spider-web, dividing the field of view. If his seat requires change, the least motion arranges it to his satisfaction, for it rests upon a railway of its own. Beside him is one of the star-clocks, and as the moment approaches for the appearance of the planet, the excitement of the moment increases. "The tremble of impatience for the entrance of the star on the field of view," says an Edinburgh Reviewer, "is like that of a sportsman whose dog has just made a full point, and who awaits the rising of the game. When a star appears, the observer, in technical language, _takes a second from the clock face_; that is, he reads the second with his eye, and counts on by the ear the succeeding beats of the clock, naming the seconds mentally. As the star passes each wire of the transit, he marks down in his jotting-book with a metallic pencil the second, _and the second only_, of his observation, with such a fraction of a second as corresponds, in his judgment, to the interval of time between the passage of the star, and the beat of the clock which preceded such passage."

An experienced observer will never commit an error in this mental calculation, exceeding the tenth of a second, or six hundredth of a minute. When the star has been thus watched over the seven cobweb lines (or wires), the observer jots down the hour and minute, in addition to the second, and the task is done. Stars, not very near the sun, may be seen in broad daylight, but, at night, it is requisite to direct a ray of light from a lamp, so far to enlighten the field of the telescope, as to permit the spider lines to be seen running across the brighter ground on which the expected star is to be visible.

The adjustment of the instruments is a task of great nicety. If they are out of trim only a shadow of a shade of a hair's-breadth, the desired accuracy is interfered with, and they have to be re-adjusted. Temperature is of course an important element in their condition, and a slight sensibility may do mischief. The warmth of the observer's body, when approaching the instruments, has been known to affect their accuracy; and to avoid such sources of error, instruments have at times been cased in flannel, that the non-conducting powers of that homely fabric might screen the too-sensitive metal.

Sunday is a comparative holiday at the Observatory, for then, except when any extraordinary phenomena are expected, the only duty done is to drop the Time Ball, and observe the moon's place. The moon is never neglected, and her motions have been here watched, during the last hundred and seventy years, with the most pertinacious care--to the great service of astronomy, and the great benefit of navigation.

The library should not pass unnoticed. It is small; but being devoted to works upon astronomy, and the kindred sciences, there is ample room for all that has hitherto been written on the subject, or that can, for many generations, be produced. The observations of a lifetime spent in watching the stars may be printed in marvelously few pages. A glance through the Greenwich Astronomical Library gives a rough general idea of what the world has done and is doing for the promotion of this science. Russia contributes large, imperial-looking tomes, that tell of extended observations made under the munificent patronage of a despot; Germany sends from different points a variety of smaller, cheaper-looking, yet valuable contributions; France gives proofs of her genius and her discoveries; but _her_ forte is not in observation. The French are bad observers. They have no such proofs of unremitting, patient toil in search of facts, as those afforded in the records of the Greenwich Tables of the Moon. Indeed, Greenwich, as we have already said, is a working Observatory; and those who go into its library, and its fire-proof manuscript-room, and see how its volumes of observations have been growing from the small beginnings of the days of Flamstead and Halley, to those of our later and more, liberal times, will have good reason to acknowledge that the money devoted to this establishment has been well employed.

One other spot must be noticed as among the notable things in this astronomical sanctum. It is the Chronometer-room, to which, during the first three Mondays in the year, the chief watch-makers of London send in their choicest instruments for examination and trial. The watches remain for a good portion of a year; their rates being noted, day by day, by two persons; and then the makers of the best receive prizes, and their instruments are purchased for the navy. Other competitors obtain certificates of excellence, which bring customers from the merchant service; while others pass unrewarded. To enter the room where these admirable instruments are kept, suggests the idea of going into a Brobdingnag watch-factory. Round the place are ranged shelves, on which the large watches are placed, all ticking in the most distinct and formidable way one against another. When they first arrive, in January, they are left to the ordinary atmospheric temperature for some months. Their rates being taken under these circumstances, a large stove in the center of the apartment is lighted, and heat got up to a sort of artificial East India or Gold Coast point. Tried under these influences, they are placed in an iron tray over the stove, like so many watch-pies in a baker's dish, and the fire being encouraged, they are literally kept baking, to see how their metal will stand that style of treatment. While thus hot, their rates are once more taken; and then, after this fiery ordeal, such of them as their owners like to trust to an opposite test, are put into freezing mixtures! Yet, so beautifully made are these triumphs of human ingenuity--so well is their mechanism 'corrected' for compensating the expansion caused by the heat, and the contraction induced by the cold--that an even rate of going is established, so nearly, that its variation under opposite circumstances becomes a matter of close and certain estimate.

The rates of chronometers on trial for purchase by the Board of Admirality, at the Observatory, are posted up and printed in an official form. Upon looking to the document for last year, we find a statement of their performances during six months of 1849, with memoranda of the exact weeks during which the chronometers were exposed to the open air at a north window; the weeks the Chronometer-room was heated by a stove, the chronometers being dispersed on the surrounding shelves; and the weeks during which they were placed in the tray above the stove. The rate given during the first week of trial is in every case omitted; like newly entered schoolboys their early vagaries are not taken into account; but after that, every merit and every fault is watched with jealous care, and, when the day of judgment comes, the order of the arrangement of the chronometers in the list is determined solely by consideration of their irregularities of rate as expressed in the columns, "Difference between greatest and least," and, "Greatest difference between one week and the next."

The Royal Observatory, according to a superstition not wholly extinct, is the head-quarters, not only of Astronomy, but of Astrology. The structure is awfully regarded, by a small section of the community which ignorance has still left among us, as a manufactory of horoscopes, and a repository for magic mirrors and divining-rods. Not long ago a well-dressed woman called at the Observatory gate to request a hint as to the means of recovering a lost sum of money; and recently, somebody at Brighton dispatched the liberal sum of five shillings in a post-office order to the same place, with a request to have his nativity cast in return! Another, only last year, wrote as follows: "I have been informed that there are persons at the Observatory who will, by my inclosing a remittance and the hour of my birth, give me to understand _who is to be my wife_? An early answer, stating all particulars, will oblige," &c.

This sketch descriptive of its real duties and uses are not necessary to relieve the Greenwich Observatory from the charge of being an abode of sorcerers and astrologers. A few only of the most ignorant can yet entertain such notions of its character; but they are not wholly unfounded. Magicians, whose symbols are the Arabic numerals, and whose _arcana_ are mathematical computations, daily foretell events in that building with unerring certainty. They pre-discover the future of the stars down to their minutest evolution and eccentricity. From data furnished from the Royal Observatory, is compiled an extraordinary prophetic Almanack from which all other almanacks are copied. It foretells to a second when and where each of the planets may be seen in the heavens at any minute for the next three years. The current number of the Nautical Almanack is for the Year of Grace 1853.

In this quiet sanctuary, then, the winds are made to register their own course and force, and the rain to gauge its own quantity as it falls; the planets are watched to help the mariner to steer more safely over the seas; and the heavens themselves are investigated for materials from which their future as well as their past history may be written.

RAPID GROWTH OF AMERICA.

Every one who visits America has something to say of the rapidity with which towns spring up in the West. Sir Charles Lyell, however, mentions some facts which remind us very forcibly how close to our own times was the settlement of the first English colony upon the continent. At Plymouth he sees the tombs of the first pilgrims, who came out in the Mayflower. Some of the houses which they built of brick brought from Holland, are still remaining, with their low rooms and paneled walls. In some private houses he saw many venerated heir-looms, kept as relics of the first settlers; among others, an antique chair of carved wood, which came over in the Mayflower, and which still retains the marks of the staples which fixed it to the floor of the cabin. He also saw a chest, or cabinet, which had belonged to Peregrine White, the first child born in the colony. Part of the rock upon which the pilgrim fathers landed has been removed to the centre of the town, and, with the names of forty-two of their number inscribed upon it, inclosed within an iron railing. This is the American _Roll of Battle Abbey_. But to return to Peregrine White, the first child born in the colony: Colonel Perkins, the munificent founder of the asylum for the blind, where we found our friend Laura Bridgman, informed Sir Charles Lyell, in 1846, "that there was but one link wanting in the chain of personal communication between himself and Peregrine White." White was known to a man of the name of Cobb, whom Colonel Perkins visited, in 1807, with some friends, who still survive. This Cobb remembered when there were many Indians near Plymouth; the inhabitants of the town frequently firing a cannon to frighten them, to which cannon the Indians gave the name of "Old Speakum." So that, in this case, one link is sufficient to connect men now alive with the first whites born in New England, and with the time when Indians were in the neighborhood of the first town that was settled.

As a pendant to this, we may mention something connected with the originals of that other continent which our race is peopling at the antipodes. A few weeks ago, we were dining at the table of a naval officer, well known in the scientific and literary world, upon which occasion he mentioned, that being off the infant town of Sydney, in New South Wales, in the year 1806, he ate some of the first home-bred bullock which was killed in the colony. The son of the first governor having just returned from the colony, which he had now made his home, happening to be of our party, added, that "since that time their progress had been so rapid, that this year they were to melt down two million sheep for their tallow."

There are three events in the history of the world which will bear comparison with this rapid extension of the English race. The first--and this has always appeared to us to be the most striking occurrence in history--is the marvelous manner in which a handful of Greeks, under Alexander and his successors, overran and held for a long period the whole of the East. The wonder is increased when we consider the difficulty of maintaining communications in that part of the world. They, in a great measure, changed the language and ideas of the East. The Gospel was written in Greek; and the law of Moses, the writings of the Hebrew prophets, were translated into Greek on the banks of the Nile. A Greek kingdom was ever able to maintain itself for a long period of time on the very confines of Tartary; and specimens of the Græco-Bactrian coinage are even to this day abundant in that part of the world. All this, however, passed away, and has not left any very obvious traces on the present state of things. The second event was the establishment of the Roman empire. Strongly as we are disposed to maintain that, on a general view of human affairs, every thing happens for the best, yet we may say of the Roman empire that it was in many respects a giant evil. No man of great original genius ever spoke the Roman language; in the sense in which many Greeks, and among ourselves Bacon, Shakspeare, and Newton, were men of original genius. There was a time when there were men of spirit and ability in every Greek city: there was a time when the Roman empire governed the world and there was not one great man from Britain to the Euphrates. Having fulfilled its destiny--which seems to have been the introduction into the Western World of the ideas of unity, law, and order, though unintentionally on its part, for it was nothing but a military despotism--it perished as it deserved, and its language is now nowhere spoken.

The third event was the irruption of the Barbarians. That a higher civilization followed this every body knows; but how many centuries did it take to civilize the Barbarians?

Now these, the three great events of past history, are all dwarfed very much when compared with what we are now, doing. We are sending out every year, literally, hundreds of thousands of civilized men to people two continents in opposite hemispheres, and on opposite sides of the globe. In North America there are already twenty millions of our race. This population doubles every twenty-two years. Australia will inevitably become "the Queen of the South." Now that literature has given permanency to language, no other tongue than ours will ever be spoken upon these continents. We can see no limit to the spread of our laws, literature, and language. Greek and Roman greatness are really, in comparison, nothing to this. And, compared with the millions of civilized men which we have sent and are sending to occupy so large a portion of the earth's surface, how insignificant becomes the irruption of some savage, or half-savage hordes, into Italy, France, Spain, and England!

At a time when civilization is at a standstill, if not retrograding, upon the continent of Europe, it is very delightful, particularly to an Englishman, to have such a picture to contemplate.--_Frazer's Magazine._

[From the London Times.]

LORD COKE AND LORD BACON.

Lord Campbell has devoted a considerable portion of his first volume of the Lives of the Chief Justices of England to the biography of Sir Edward Coke. The theme is worthy of the space afforded it. Independently of the professional renown of this great man, there are circumstances connected with his career that render it, perhaps, more deeply interesting than that of any other legal functionary. He began the world with the immortal Bacon; the two were rivals during life; they fought together for distinction, and were even competitors in love. Both were devoured by a raging desire for wealth and honors, both gained the objects of their fiery ambition, and neither found happiness when they were acquired. If Bacon was more unscrupulous than Coke in the ignoble race, his fall also was more fatal and ignominious. Both represent to our minds distinct forms of undoubted greatness. _The Body of the Common Law of England_ is the type that speaks for Coke. The glory of human wisdom shines forever around the drooping head of Bacon. Both teach posterity how much intellectual grandeur may co-exist with the most glaring moral turpitude; both pay homage to virtue by seeking refuge in disgrace in the tranquil pursuits that have since immortalized them. Bacon, with a genius only less than angelic, condescends to paltry crime, and dies branded. Coke, with a profound contempt for the arts that Bacon loved, enraged by disappointment, takes revenge for neglect, and dies a patriot. In the days of Coke there would seem to have been a general understanding on the part of royal sycophants to mislead the monarch, and all became his sycophants who received his favors. Coke is no exception to the rule. It is true enough that to him we are mainly indebted for the movement which, beginning on the 30th of January, 1621, ended that very day eight-and-twenty years with the decapitation of the king; but it is likewise undeniable that the nation's difficulties would have waited some time longer for solution had not the defender of the people's rights been inoculated with a love of liberty by the sudden application of the royal lancet, whose sharp edge his judicious self-love would never have provoked. Coke was born in what a Royalist of the days of Charles the First might well have called "the good old times," when Queens were gentle despots and Parliaments the most devoted of self-constituted slaves; when Mr. Speaker "upon his allegiance was commanded, if a certain bill be exhibited, not to read it," and when "Mr. Vice-Chamberlain, to the great comfort of the Speaker and the House, brought answer of Her Majesty's acceptance of the submission" of legislators who had presumed to speak of matters "not proper and pertinent for the house to deal in." Elizabeth was on her splendid throne when Coke, having quitted the University of Cambridge without a degree, was working like a horse at Clifford's-inn. Stony-hearted and stony-minded, he loved neither poetry nor pleasure. From the moment he began the appointed task of his life, he dreamed of nothing but fame, and of that only for the sake of the sterling recompense it brings. Friendships not convertible to cash, Coke resolutely foreswore at the commencement of his career, and he was blessed with none at the close of it. Spenser yielded him no delight, Shakespeare no seduction. The study of law began at three in the morning, and, with short intervals of rest, ceased at nine in the evening, at which hour the indefatigable student at last took repose. Fortified by such discipline, and brim full of law, Coke was called to the bar in the year 1578, being then twenty-seven years of age, and he rose in his profession as rapidly as he had all along resolved to rise.

In pursuance of his design Coke married well in 1582; the lady was young, beautiful, and accomplished; virtues thrown, as it were, into the bargain, since the lawyer had been well satisfied with the ample fortune by which they were accompanied. Before he was thirty years old the desperate money-seeker had made himself master of manor upon manor, and laid the foundation of the enormous possessions which at length alarmed the Crown, lest they should prove too magnificent for a subject. In 1585 he was elected Recorder of Coventry, in 1586 of Norwich, and in 1592 of London itself. In the last-named year he was also appointed Reader in the Inner Temple by the Benchers, and in 1592, being in his forty-first year, by the influence of Burleigh, he was made Solicitor-General to the Queen. The solicitorship secured the Speakership of the House of Commons, according to custom. Coke in his address to the Queen upon his appointment compared himself to a star in the heavens, "which is but _opacum corpus_ until it receiveth light from the sun." Her Majesty in answer graciously condescended to accept the metaphor, for she informed her humble Speaker that liberty of speech was granted him, "but you must know what privilege you have; not to speak every one what he listeth, or what cometh in his brain to utter, but your privilege is ay or no; wherefore, Mr. Speaker, Her Majesty's pleasure is, that if you perceive any idle heads which will meddle with reforming the church and transforming the commonwealth, and do exhibit bills to such purpose, you receive them not until they be viewed and considered by those who it is fitter should consider of such things, and can better judge of them." The times were sweetly Arcadian. Elizabeth should be painted a shepherdess, and her faithful Parliament a meek and timid flock about her.

The obsequiousness of Coke to his Royal mistress was in perfect keeping with his character. Nothing exceeds his abject servility while in the sunshine, save his fixed malignity when dismissed to the shade. In 1594 the office of Attorney-General became vacant; Coke regarded the prize as his own until he found one ready to dispute it with him. Bacon, eager to outstrip his rival, had made interest at Court, and, had his age been as ripe as his genius, Coke might have been thrust aside in the encounter. Intrigues failed, because "one precedent of so raw a youth being promoted to so great a place" it was impossible to find. Coke was left master of the field, but neither combatant forgot the result of the contest. The new Attorney-General declined his marvelous opponent for Solicitor-General, and Bacon resolved to take unmeasured revenge both for the disappointment and the insult.

A fitter tool for its melancholy work prerogative never found than in Attorney-General Coke, who, for his punishment, lived to destroy the foul abuses he had been paid to nourish. The liberty of the subject is identified with the name of the individual who, as much as any of his time, sought to crush it. The perversions of criminal law to which this man condescended, as prosecutor for the Crown, are familiar to the readers of history. His cruel arrogance and atrocious bearing toward the unfortunate (we do not speak of the guilty) can never be forgotten. Lord Campbell tells us that Coke, in his age, "made noble amends" for the licentious and unscrupulous dealings of his earlier life. We can not admit the term; for repentance to be noble, the motive must be pure. The gain to society by the stand made by Coke, in the name of the people, against the encroachments of the Crown is not to be overestimated; but respect does not attach to the soiled instrument by which our blessings were secured. A singular instance of the brutality of the Attorney-General, and of his overstrained duty to the Crown, occurred at the trial of the unfortunate and gallant Essex. Well may the present biographer exclaim, "This was a humiliating day for our _order_!" Essex had striven hard to obtain for Bacon the office then held by his accuser. The insurrection in the city might sooner be pardoned than that offense, which, indeed, received no mercy. For once, Bacon and Coke ceased to be rivals, but only that they might be co-partners in inexpiable guilt. Divines may preach even to the infidel of the inherent rottenness of our fallen nature, when they can point to Bacon, the pride of humanity, the wonder of the civilized world, imploring to be counsel _against_ his best friend and benefactor, and leaving no base means untried to bring that high and chivalrous spirit to the scaffold. Prerogative never boasted so rare a sacrifice; the might of kings never extorted so signal an acknowledgment.

On the 27th of June, 1598, Coke lost his wife, who had borne him ten children. His memorandum-book feelingly describes the virtues of the departed; but within four months of her burial the disconsolate widower had taken unto himself a second mate, whose beauty, though extraordinary, was still surpassed, as before, by the brilliancy of the marriage portion. Lady Hatton, daughter of Thomas Cecil, was the widow of the nephew of Lord Chancellor Hatton, and but 20 years of age when she agreed to become the wife of a man whom she disliked on her wedding-day and hated ever afterward. Bacon, her cousin, had preferred his suit to be rejected, although Lord Essex, then powerful enough, had declared to the lady that "if he had a daughter of his own he would rather match her with the accomplished lawyer than with a man of far greater titles." To spite Bacon, and to add to his heaps, Coke consented to a private marriage, to break the law, and to listen complacently to the openly declared aversion of his bride. He enjoyed all the happiness he had earned. The lady refused to adopt her husband's name, spurned his company and dry pursuits, took her pleasure abroad, and, giving birth to a daughter, flatly refused to live with him any longer; and greater punishment came hereafter.

Upon the death of Elizabeth, James I. conferred upon Coke the dignity of knighthood, and continued him in his office. The first appearance of the Attorney-General as public prosecutor in the new reign was at the trial of the adventurous Raleigh, the judge upon the occasion being the reformed highway-robber, Popham, who made amends for the delinquencies of his youth by hanging every criminal within his reach. Raleigh laid down the law as Coke himself years afterward knew how to define it; but the legal tools of the Court were neither to be shamed nor argued from their purpose. Coke disgracefully bullied the high-souled prisoner. Popham shrunk from his calm and unanswerable defense; but both contrived to prove him guilty. The instance is one of a hundred. So long as Coke could find payment for unclean work, he betrayed no uneasy desire to wash his fingers. It was not until all hope of turning sycophancy to further account was gone that he took up with patriotism.

Coke's last prosecution as Attorney-General was a famous one; for the objects of his malevolence were no other than Guy Faux and his accomplices. It would have been sufficient to dismiss in silence to the scaffold men upon whom the brand of guilt was so deeply fixed. Justice required no more than their death; much more readily satisfied the officious love of the king's devoted servant. While the Attorney-General was hurling insult at the heads of the culprits, one of them, Sir Everard Digby, interrupted him, confessing "that he deserved the vilest death, and the most severe punishment that might be," but humbly petitioned "for mercy and some moderation of justice." Coke, overflowing with mercy, promised him such moderation as he might discover in the Psalms, where it is written, "Let his wife be a widow and his children vagabonds--let his posterity be destroyed, and in the next generation let his name be quite put out." Digby's pathetic appeal upon the rising of the Court may well stand side by side with this brutality. "If I may but hear any of your lordships," exclaimed the doomed man, "say you forgive me, I shall go more cheerfully to the gallows." The lords answered in Coke's presence, "The Lord forgive you, and we do."

The gunpowder plot disposed of, Coke, in the year 1606, became Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, "fatigued," as Lord Campbell has it, "if not satiated, with amassing money at the bar." The new judge was as fully alive to the rights of his office as he had been before to the prerogatives of the king. The pedantic presumption of James was safe till it rubbed against the more stubborn pride of Coke. The monarch was of opinion that the constitution and the law allowed him personally to try causes between his loyal subjects. "By my soul," he said pettishly to Coke, who begged leave to differ, "I have often heard the boast that your English law was founded upon reason. If that be so, why have not I and others reason as well as you, the judges?" Coke explained why and by the manner of his explanation compelled the king to think no more of his folly. Unfortunately for all parties His Majesty at the same time remembered the affront.

Had he been disposed to forget it there was one at his side eager enough to jog his memory. Bacon's advancement depended upon the downfall of Coke, and the sublimest yet meanest of men gave his whole heart to the accomplishment of either work. By the elevation of the Attorney-General, Bacon had become Solicitor-General, and a more servile spirit never filled the office. The first triumph of Coke over the king encouraged him to more open war against despotism and abuse. The monarchs before the Revolution loved to repair laws by royal proclamation, and none were busier at that trade than the silly James. Coke asserted his authority again, and again defeated him. To console His Majesty and to help himself, Bacon recommended the _promotion_ of the incorrigable assailant. Coke was made, accordingly, Chief Justice of the King's Bench. The profits of the office were much less than those of the Justice of the Common Pleas, although the rank was higher. Hence Coke's disgust at the bettering of his condition, which also helped Bacon on a step, by furnishing Attorney-General Hobart with the chiefship of the Common Pleas.

Coke continued to display his independence during the three years that he presided in the Court of King's Bench, but he had stopped short of committing an act that might deprive him of the reversion of the Chancellorship, to which his great acquirements and reputation well entitled him. Bacon, always alive to his master's interests, urged upon the king the danger of elevating the Chief Justice to the woolsack, long before the vacancy occurred. "If you take my Lord Coke," said he, "this will follow: first, your Majesty shall put an overruling nature into an overruling place, which may breed an extreme; next, you shall blunt his industries in the matter of your finances, which seemeth to aim at another place (the office of Lord Treasurer); and, lastly, popular men are no sure mounters for your Majesty's saddle." His Majesty, easily frightened, cherished the warning, while Coke took no pains to disarm suspicion. His triumphs gave him courage, and he went from bad to worse. A question arose as to the power of the king to grant ecclesiastical preferments to be held along with a bishopric. A learned counsel at the bar denied the power. Bacon, the Attorney-General, not caring to defend it, mentioned another power of the king's--viz., his right to prohibit the hearing of any cause in which his prerogative is concerned until he should intimate his pleasure on the matter to his judges; and advised such a prohibition to be issued in the case in question. Coke treated the advice with disdain, proceeded as with an ordinary cause, heard it, and judicially determined it. Bacon could have wished for nothing more suicidal.

Coke was summoned before the Privy Council. It was suddenly discovered that he had been guilty of a breach of duty while Attorney-General, in concealing a bond given to the Crown by Sir Christopher Hatton. He had also misconducted himself in a dispute with the Lord Chancellor respecting injunctions; moreover, he had insulted the king when called before him in the case of _commendams_. In addition, many extravagant and exorbitant opinions had been set down and published in his reports for positive and good law. So heinous an offender could not go unpunished. By royal mandate the delinquent was suspended from his office of Chief Justice. Simple suspension, however, brought no consolation to Bacon, who goaded the king to downright persecution. On the 16th of November, 1616, the Chief Justice received his dismissal. Lord Campbell pleads for the fallen man, who heard his sentence with "dejection and tears." We must, nevertheless, not forget the weakness when we reflect upon his abject submission to royalty during his days of dependence, and as we approach the more stormy times when the spirit of vengeance incited him to grapple with royalty in the temper of a rebel. Magnanimity is wanting throughout.

As Coke tumbled down Bacon rose to his zenith. While the former was shedding tears for his dismissal, the latter was intoxicated with joy by his elevation to the Chancellorship. The defeated judge, however, was not the man to submit without a struggle to his fate. By his second wife he had a daughter: she had reached a marriageable age and was heiress to a princely fortune. Coke resolved that she should marry Sir John Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham's eldest brother. Sir John was very poor, and the Duke of Buckingham all powerful. The union effected, what should hinder his return to favor? Bacon, terrified at the plot, encouraged mother and daughter to resist the will of the father; but Sir John and the duke were more than a match for the counter-conspirators. After a gallant opposition the ladies yielded, and the marriage was celebrated at Hampton Court, "in the presence of the king and queen and all the chief nobility of England." Sir John was old enough to be his wife's father, but that was a trifle. The results of the match were such as might be expected. Coke was restored to the Privy Council, but received no judicial promotion. Sir John Villiers and his wife never passed a happy day together, and before long the lady eloped with Sir John Howard. "After traveling abroad in man's attire she died young, leaving a son, who, on the ground of illegitimacy, was not allowed to inherit the estate and honors of her husband."

The last blow decided the ex-Chief Justice. Rejected as a friend, he gave himself up to the warfare of relentless enmity. The fame and glory acquired at this juncture by his rival in consequence of the publication of the _Novum Organum_ gave venom to his hate. A Parliament was called in 1620. Coke then in his 70th year, was elected for the borough of Liskeard. Just after his election the office of Lord Treasurer fell vacant. Coke had looked for it, but it was given elsewhere. All things served to fan the fire of his indignation. The Puritans were returned to the House in great numbers. Coke, hitherto a high churchman, placed himself at their head, and prepared for deadly opposition. Opportunities came to him as thick as summer leaves upon a tree. The nation had rare cause for discontent, and no man knew better than he how to turn popular grievances to personal account.

He set to work at once. A motion was made by Mr. Secretary Calvert for a supply. Sir Edward Coke moved as an amendment, "That supply and _grievances_ should be referred together to a committee of the whole House." The amendment was carried, and business forthwith commenced with an attack upon the monopolists. A report was drawn up directed against the king's prerogative, in virtue of which monopolies flourished, and Coke himself carried it to the bar of the Upper House, where Bacon, as Chancellor received him. The second effort must have been a labor of love indeed. The Lord Chancellor himself had been accused of a king bribes. A committee of the House was appointed to investigate the charges, and Coke, with a willing heart, guided its proceedings. The king sent a message to the Commons with the view of saving Bacon from the odium of an inquiry thus vindictively pursued, but Coke had fastened on his prey and was not to be cajoled or frightened off. He besought the Commons not to stand between justice and a huge delinquent, and he procured Bacon's impeachment. The impeachment being voted, Coke, to his intense delight, was ordered to conduct it. Bacon, conscious of the spirit with which his rival would settle to his task, disappointed his vengence by pleading guilty to the charge; but it was the deep humiliation of the chancellor, in the presence of his foe, to hear in one breath both judgement and destruction pronounced. The battle was over. Bacon made restitution to society by withdrawing from public life and devoting himself to the dignified occupations which have since induced his countrymen to forget the failings that compelled the fortunate seclusion. Coke having brought his victim to the dust left him there to linger. He never visited his fallen enemy. The two never met again.

Revenge called for further sacrifice. Coke's fierceness against the Court increased rather than abated with Bacon's removal. The Chancellorship which might have made him a royalist and high churchman again was bestowed upon another. The shortsightedness of monarchs is even more unpardonable than their crimes. After a struggle against adjournment, led on by Coke, Parliament was adjourned in May to meet again in November. In a letter to the Speaker the king desired it to be made known in his name unto the House, "that none therein shall presume henceforth to meddle with any thing concerning our Government or deep matters of state." Coke, leading the opposition, moved "a protestation," which was carried and entered on the journals. The king, with his own hand, tore the protestation out of the Journal Book, and declaring it "an usurpation which the majesty of a king can by no means endure" at once dissolved the Parliament.

Coke for his pains was committed to the Tower, but after a few months' imprisonment was released at the intercession of the Prince of Wales. Before the popular leader was fairly in harness again, that Prince was on the throne. Charles's first Parliament was called in 1625, and Coke was returned for Coventry. A motion for supply being submitted, Coke moved as an amendment for a committee to inquire into the expenditure of the Crown. The amendment was carried, and His Majesty, according to custom in such cases, dissolved the Parliament. Supply being, however, indispensable to monarchs as to meaner men, a new Parliament was summoned, and Coke, now 75 years old, was returned without solicitation for Norfolk. This Parliament fared no better than its predecessor, and upon another attempt being made the king suffered the extreme mortification of seeing his unappeasable pursuer returned for two counties. His Majesty opened the session with a stern rebuke. He did not call it a threatening, "for he scorned to threaten any but his equals, but an admonition from him who by nature and duty has most care of his people's preservation and prosperity." Whatever it might be, whether menace or reproof, it had no effect upon the sturdy veteran. "What a word," exclaimed Coke in his speech upon the usual motion for supply "is that _franchise_! The lord may tax his villein, high or low; but it is against the franchise of the land for freemen to be taxed but by their consent in Parliament;" and the speaker implored his listeners to withhold that consent while there remained one legitimate grievance for the king to remedy. Having made his speech he brought forward and carried resolutions that are memorable in the annals of our constitutional history, and which, indeed, were made the foundation of the Habeas Corpus Act fifty years afterward. His next step was his greatest. He formed the famous _Petition of Right_, the second _Magna Charta_, as it has been aptly called, of the nation's liberties. The petition enumerated all the abuses of prerogative under which the country groaned, and after declaring them all to be contrary to law "assumed the form of an act of the Legislature, and in the most express and stringent terms protected the people in all time to come from similar oppressions." The king attempted to evade the obligation about to be forced upon him, but his adversary was as inflexible as iron, "not that he distrusted the king, but that he could not take his trust save in a Parliamentary way." The lords passed the bill, but loyally introduced a proviso that completely nullified its operation. "This," exclaimed Coke, "turns all about again," and at his instigation the accommodating proviso was at once rejected. The Lords agreed "not to insist upon it," and nothing was left for His Majesty but to resort, under the direction of Buckingham, to fraudulent dealing. The trick did not answer. Buckingham was denounced, the Petition of Right, in spite of the king, received the royal assent in due form, and bonfires throughout London testified to the happiness of the people at the restoration of their liberty. King Charles would never have died on the scaffold had he not violated in later years the solemn pledge he gave on this occasion to his trusting subjects.

With this achievement ended Coke's political career. The _Petition of Right_ was carried in 1628. He was absent from Parliament during the short and violent session of 1629, and before another Parliament was called he had quitted life. He died in 1634, in the eighty-third year of his age and in the full possession of his faculties. What he performed for public liberty is seen; his claims to esteem as a lawyer were recognized in his own time, and are still acknowledged. His publications are the hand-books of our legal men. His general character may be gathered from our short record. It is further to be noted that he had a sublime contempt for science and literature of every kind. Upon the title-page of his copy of the _Novum Organum_, presented to him by the author, he wrote,

"It deserves not to be read in schooles, But to be freighted in the _Ship of Fools_."

Shakspeare and Ben Jonson were _vagrants_, deserving of the stocks; poetry was foolishness; law, politics, and money-making the sole occupations worthy of a masculine and vigorous mind. "For a profound knowledge of the common law of England," says the biographer, "he stands unrivaled. As a judge he was above all suspicion of corruption; yet most men," adds Lord Campbell, "I am afraid, would rather have been Bacon than Coke." We participate in his Lordship's fear. Aware of the lax period in which both flourished, we are willing to attribute many of the faults of both to the age in which their lot was cast. Their virtues and intellectual prowess were all then own; and let us once enter upon a comparison of these, and the lofty, universal genius of Bacon will shine as the noonday sun in the firmament where the duller orb of Coke shall cease to be visible.

[From Household Words.]

FATHER AND SON.

One evening in the month of March, 1798--that dark time in Ireland's annals whose memory (overlooking all minor subsequent _émeutes_) is still preserved among us, as "the year of the rebellion"--a lady and gentleman were seated near a blazing fire in the old-fashioned dining-room of a large, lonely mansion. They had just dined; wine and fruit were on the table, both untouched, while Mr. Hewson and his wife sat silently gazing at the fire, watching its flickering light becoming gradually more vivid as the short spring twilight faded into darkness.

At length the husband poured out a glass of wine, drank it off, and then broke silence, by saying,

"Well, well, Charlotte, these are awful times; there were ten men taken up to-day for burning Cotter's house at Knockane; and Tom Dycer says that every magistrate in the country is a marked man."

Mrs. Hewson cast a frightened glance toward the windows, which opened nearly to the ground, and gave a view of a wide, tree-besprinkled lawn, through whose centre a long straight avenue led to the high-road. There was also a footpath at either side of the house, branching off through close thickets of trees, and reaching the road by a circuitous route.

"Listen, James!" she said, after a pause, "what noise is that?"

"Nothing but the sighing of the wind among the trees. Come, wife, you must not give way to imaginary fears."

"But really I heard something like footsteps on the gravel, round the gable-end--I wish--"

A knock at the parlor door interrupted her.

"Come in."

The door opened, and Tim Gahan, Mr. Hewson's confidential steward and right-hand man, entered, followed by a fair-haired, delicate-looking boy of six years' old, dressed in deep mourning.

"Well, Gahan, what do you want?"

"I ask your honor's pardon for disturbing you and the mistress; but I thought it right to come and tell you the bad news I heard."

"Something about the rebels, I suppose?"

"Yes, sir; I got a whisper just now that there's going to be a great rising entirely, to-morrow; thousands are to gather before daybreak at Kilcrean bog, where I'm told they've a power of pikes hiding; and then they're to march on and sack every house in the country. I'll engage, when I heard it, I didn't let grass grow under my feet, but came off straight to your honor, thinking maybe you'd like to walk over this fine evening to Mr. Warren's, and settle with him what's best to be done."

"Oh, James! I beseech you, don't think of going."

"Make your mind easy, Charlotte; I don't intend it: not that I suppose there would be much risk; but, all things considered, I think I'm just as comfortable at home."

The steward's brow darkened, as he glanced nervously toward the end window, which jutting out in the gable, formed a deep angle in the outer wall.

"Of course, 'tis just as your honor plases, but I'll warrant you there would be no harm in going. Come, Billy," he added, addressing the child, who by this time was standing close to Mrs. Hewson, "make your bow, and bid good-night to master and mistress."

The boy did not stir, and Mrs. Hewson taking his little hand in hers, said,

"You need not go home for half-an-hour, Gahan; stay and have a chat with the servants in the kitchen, and leave little Billy with me--and with the apples and nuts," she added, smiling as she filled the child's hands with fruit.

"Thank you, ma'am," said the steward, hastily. "I can't stop--I'm in a hurry home, where I wanted to leave this brat to-night; but he _would_ follow me. Come, Billy; come this minute, you young rogue."

Still the child looked reluctant, and Mr. Hewson said, peremptorily,

"Don't go yet, Gahan: I want to speak to you by-and-by; and you know the mistress always likes to pet little Billy."

Without replying, the steward left the room; and the next moment his hasty footsteps resounded through the long flagged passage that led to the offices.

"There's something strange about Gahan, since his wife died," remarked Mrs. Hewson. "I suppose 'tis grief for her that makes him look so darkly, and seem almost jealous when any one speaks to his child. Poor little Billy! your mother was a sore loss to you."

The child's blue eyes filled with tears, and pressing closer to the lady's side, he said,

"Old Peggy doesn't wash and dress me as nicely as mammy used."

"But your father is good to you?"

"Oh, yes, ma'am, but he's out all day busy, and I've no one to talk to me as mammy used; for Peggy is quite deaf, and besides she's always busy with the pigs and chickens."

"I wish I had you, Billy, to take care of and to teach, for your poor mother's sake."

"And so you may, Charlotte," said her husband. "I'm sure Gahan, with all his odd ways, is too sensible a fellow not to know how much it would be for his child's benefit to be brought up and educated by us, and the boy would be an amusement to us in this lonely house. I'll speak to him about it before he goes home. Billy, my fine fellow, come here," he continued, "jump up on my knee, and tell me if you'd like to live here always and learn to read and write."

"I would, sir, if I could be with father, too."

"So you shall; and what about old Peggy?"

The child paused.

"I like to give her a pen'north of snuff and a piece of tobacco every week, for she said the other day that _that_ would make her quite happy."

Mr. Hewson laughed, and Billy prattled on, still seated on his knee; when a noise of footsteps on the ground, mingled with low suppressed talking, was heard outside.

"James, listen! there's the noise again."

It was now nearly dark, but Mr. Hewson, still holding the boy in his arms, walked toward the window and looked out.

"I can see nothing," he said; "stay, there are figures moving off among the trees, and a man running round to the back of the house--very like Gahan he is, too."

Seizing the bell-rope, he rang it loudly, and said to the servant who answered his summons,

"Fasten the shutters and put up the bars, Connell; and then tell Gahan I want to see him."

The man obeyed; candles were brought, and Gahan entered the room.

Mr. Hewson remarked that, though his cheeks were flushed, his lips were very white, and his bold dark eyes were cast on the ground.

"What took you round the house just now, Tim?" asked his master, in a careless manner.

"What took me round the house, is it? Why, then, nothing in life, sir, but that just as I went outside the kitchen door to take a smoke, I saw the pigs, that Shaneen forgot to put up in their stye, making right for the mistress's flower-garden; so I just put my _dudheen_, lighted as it was, into my pocket, and ran after them. I caught them on the grand walk under the end window, and, indeed, ma'am, I had my own share of work turning them back to their proper spear."

Gahan spoke with unusual volubility, but without raising his eyes from the ground.

"Who were the people," asked his master, "whom I saw moving through the western grove?"

"People! your honor--not a sign of any people moving there, I'll be bound, barring the pigs."

"Then," said Mr. Hewson, smiling, to his wife, "the miracle of Circe must have been reversed, and swine turned into men; for, undoubtedly, the dark figures I saw were human beings."

"Come, Billy," said Gahan, anxious to turn the conversation, "will you come home with me now? I am sure 'twas very good of the mistress to give you all them fine apples."

Mrs. Hewson was going to propose Billy's remaining, but her husband whispered, "Wait till to-morrow." So Gahan and his child were allowed to depart.

Next morning the magistrates of the district were on the alert, and several suspicious-looking men found lurking about, were taken up. A hat which fitted one of them was picked up in Mr. Hewson's grove; the gravel under the end window bore many signs of trampling feet; and there were marks on the wall as if guns had rested against it. Gahan's information touching the intended meeting at Kilerean bog proved to be totally without foundation; and after a careful search, not a single pike or weapon of any description could be found there. All these circumstances combined certainly looked suspicious; but, after a prolonged investigation, as no guilt could be actually brought home to Gahan, he was dismissed. One of his examiners, however, said privately, "I advise you take care of that fellow, Hewson. If I were in your place, I'd just trust him as far as I could throw him, and not an inch beyond."

An indolent, hospitable Irish country gentleman, such as Mr. Hewson, is never without an always shrewd and often roguish prime minister, who saves his master the trouble of looking after his own affairs, and manages every thing that is to be done in both the home and foreign departments--from putting a new door on the pig-stye, to letting a farm of an hundred acres on lease. Now in this, or rather these capacities, Gahan had long served Mr. Hewson; and some seven years previous to the evening on which our story commences, he had strengthened the tie and increased his influence considerably by marrying Mrs. Hewson's favorite and faithful maid. One child was the result of this union; and Mrs. Hewson, who had no family of her own, took much interest in little Billy--more especially after the death of his mother, who, poor thing! the neighbors said, was not very happy, and would gladly, if she dared, have exchanged her lonely cottage for the easy service of her former mistress.

Thus, though for a time Mr. and Mrs. Hewson regarded Gahan with some doubt, the feeling gradually wore away, and the steward regained his former influence.

After the lapse of a few stormy months, the rebellion was quelled: all the prisoners taken up were severally disposed of by hanging, transportation, or acquittal, according to the nature and amount of the evidence brought against them; and the country became as peaceful as it is in the volcanic nature of our Irish soil ever to be.

The Hewsons' kindness toward Gahan's child was steady and unchanged. They took him into their house, and gave him a plain but solid education; so that William, while yet a boy, was enabled to be of some use to his patron, and daily enjoyed more and more of his confidence.

* * * * *

Another evening, the twentieth anniversary of that with which this narrative commenced, came round. Mr. and Mrs. Hewson were still hale and active, dwelling in their hospitable home. About eight o'clock at night, Tim Gahan, now a stooping, gray-haired man, entered Mr. Hewson's kitchen, and took his seat on the corner of the settle next the fire.

The cook, directing a silent, significant glance of compassion toward her fellow-servants, said,

"Would you like a drink of cider, Tim, or will you wait and take a cup of tay with myself and Kitty?"

The old man's eyes were fixed on the fire, and a wrinkled hand was planted firmly on each knee, as if to check their involuntary trembling. "I'll not drink any thing this night, thank you kindly, Nelly," he said, in a slow, musing manner, dwelling long on each word.

"Where's Billy?" he asked, after a pause, in a quick, hurried tone, looking up suddenly at the cook, with an expression in his eyes which, as she afterward said, took away her breath.

"Oh, never heed Billy! I suppose he's busy with the master."

"Where's the use, Nelly," said the coachman, "in hiding it from him? Sure, sooner or later, he must know it. Tim," he continued, "God knows 'tis sorrow to my heart this blessed night to make yours sore--but the truth is, that William has done what he oughtn't to do to the man that was all one as a father to him."

"What has he done? what will you _dar_ say again my boy?"

"Taken money, then," replied the coachman, "that the master had marked and put by in his desk; for he suspected this some time past that gold was missing. This morning 'twas gone; a search was made, and the marked guineas were found with your son William."

The old man covered his face with his hands, and rocked himself to and fro.

"Where is he now?" at length he asked, in a hoarse voice.

"Locked up safe in the inner store-room; the master intends sending him to jail early to-morrow morning."

"He will not," said Gahan, slowly. "Kill the boy that saved his life!--no, no."

"Poor fellow! the grief is setting his mind astray--and sure no wonder!" said the cook, compassionately.

"I'm not astray!" cried the old man, fiercely. "Where's the master?--take me to him."

"Come with me," said the butler, "and I'll ask him will he see you."

With faltering steps the father complied: and when they reached the parlor, he trembled exceedingly, and leant against the wall for support, while the butler opened the door, and said,

"Gahan is here, sir, and wants to know will you let him speak to you for a minute."

"Tell him to come in," said Mr. Hewson, in a solemn tone of sorrow, very different from his ordinary cheerful voice.

"Sir," said the steward, advancing, "they tell me you are going to send my boy to prison--is it true?"

"Too true, indeed, Gahan. The lad who was reared in my house, whom my wife watched over in health, and nursed in sickness--whom we loved almost as if he were our own, has _robbed_ us, and that not once or twice, but many times. He is silent and sullen, too, and refuses to tell why he stole the money, which was never withheld from him when he wanted it. I can make nothing of him, and must only give him up to justice in the morning."

"No, sir, no. The boy saved your life; you can't take his."

"You're raving, Gahan."

"Listen to me, sir, and you won't say so. You remember this, night twenty years? I came here with my motherless child, and yourself and the mistress pitied us, and spoke loving words to him. Well for us all you did so! That night--little you thought it!--I was banded with them that were sworn to take your life. They were watching you outside the window, and I was sent to inveigle you out, that they might shoot you. A faint heart I had for the bloody business, for you were ever and always a good master to me; but I was under an oath to them that I darn't break, supposing they ordered me to shoot my own mother. Well! the hand of God was over you, and you wouldn't come with me. I ran out to them, and I said, 'Boys, if you want to shoot him, you must do it through the window,' thinking they'd be afeard of that; but they weren't--they were daring fellows, and one of them, sheltered by the angle of the window, took deadly aim at you. That very moment you took Billy on your knee, and I saw his fair head in a line with the musket. I don't know exactly then what I said or did, but I remember I caught the man's band, threw it up, and pointed to the child. Knowing I was a determined man. I believe they didn't wish to provoke me; so they watched you for a while, and when you didn't put him down, they got daunted, hearing the sound of soldiers riding by the road, and they stole away through the grove. Most of that gang swung on the gallows, but the last of them died this morning quietly in his bed. Up to yesterday he used to make me give him money--sums of money to buy his silence--and it was for that I made my boy a thief. It was wearing out his very life. Often he went down on his knees to me, and said, 'Father, I'd die myself sooner than rob my master, but I can't see _you_ disgraced. Oh, let us fly the country!' Now, sir, I have told you all--do what you like with me--send me to jail, I deserve it, but spare my poor, deluded, innocent boy!"

It would be difficult to describe Mr. Hewson's feelings, but his wife's first impulse was to hasten to liberate the prisoner. With a few incoherent words of explanation, she led him into the presence of his master, who, looking at him sorrowfully but kindly, said,

"William, you have erred deeply, but not so deeply as I supposed. Your father has told me every thing. I forgive him freely, and you also."

The young man covered his face with his hands, and wept tears more bitter and abundant than he had ever shed since the day when he followed his mother to the grave. He could say little, but he knelt on the ground, and clasping the kind hand of her who had supplied to him that mother's place, he murmured,

"Will _you_ tell him I would rather die than sin again?"

Old Gahan died two years afterward, truly penitent, invoking blessings on his son and on his benefactors; and the young man's conduct, now no longer under evil influence, was so steady and so upright, that his adopted parents felt that their pious work was rewarded, and that, in William Gahan, they had indeed a son.

[From Fraser's Magazine.]

DIPLOMACY--LORD CHESTERFIELD.

The qualifications required for the diplomatic career, we need hardly say, are many and various. To a perfect knowledge of history and the law of nations should be united a knowledge of the privileges and duties of diplomatic agents, an acquaintance with the conduct and management of negotiations, the physical and moral statistics, the political, military, and social history of the powers with which the embasssador's nation comes into most frequent intercommunication. To this varied knowledge, it is needless to state, the negotiator should join moderation, dexterity, temper, and tact. An embassador should be a man of learning and a man of the world; a man of books and a man of men, a man of the drawing-room and a man of the counting-house; a _preux chevalieur_, and a man of labor and of business. He should possess quick faculties, active powers of observation, and that which military men call the _coup d'oeil_. He should be of urbane, pleasant, and affable manners; of cheerful temper, of good humor, and of good sense. He should know when and where to yield, to retreat, or to advance; when to press his suit strongly, or when merely gently to insinuate it indirectly, and, as it were, by inuendo. He should know how to unbend and how to uphold his dignity, or rather the dignity of his sovereign; for it his business, in whatever quarter of the world he may be placed, to maintain the rights and dignities of his sovereign with vigor and effect. It is the union of these diverse, and yet not repugnant qualities, that gives to an embassador _prestige_, ascendency, and power over the minds of others, that acquires for him that reputation of wisdom, straightforwardness, and sagacity, which is the rarest and most valuable gift of a statesman. One part of the science of diplomacy may be, by even a dull man, mastered without any wonderful difficulties. It is that positive, fundamental, and juridical portion of the study which may be found in books, in treatises; in the history of treaties and of wars; in treatises on international law; in memoirs, letters, and negotiations of embassadors; in historical and statistical works concerning the states of Europe, the balance of power, and the science of politics generally.

But the abstract, hypothetical, and variable portions of the craft--or, if you will, of the science--depending on ten thousand varying and variable circumstances--depending on persons, passions, fancies, whims; caprices royal, national, parliamentary, and personal, is above theory, and beyond the reach of books; and can only be learned by experience, by practice, and by the most perfect and intuitive tact. The traditional political maxims, the character of the loading sovereigns, statesmen, and public men in any given court, as well as the conduct of negotiations, may be acquired by study, by observation, by a residence as secretary, as _attaché_; but who, unless a man of real genius for his art--who, unless a man of real ability and talent, shall seize on, fix, and turn to his purpose, the ever-mobile, the ever-varying phases of courts, of camps, of councils, of senators, of parliaments, and of public bodies? No doubt there are certain great cardinal and leading principles with which the mind of every aspirant should be stored. But the mere knowledge of principles, and of the history of the science can never alone make a great embassador, any more than the reading of treatises on the art of war can make a great commander.

An embassador at a first-rate court should, indeed, be the minister of foreign affairs for his country on a small scale; and we know well enough that the duties devolving on a minister for foreign affairs are grave, are delicate, are all important.

The functions appertaining to the ministry for foreign affairs have been in England during the last two years, and certainly also were from 1793 to 1815, the most important and the most difficult connected with the public administration. A man to fill such a post properly, requires not merely elevation and uprightness of character, but experience, tried discretion, the highest capacity, the most extensive and varied knowledge and accomplishments. Yet how few embassadors (we can scarcely name one) have been in our day, or, indeed, for the last century, elevated into Principal Secretaries of State for Foreign Affairs! Such promotions in France have been matters of every-day occurrence since and previous to 1792. Dumouriez, Talleyrand, Reinhard, Champagny, Maret, Bignon, Montmorency, Chauteaubriand, Polignac, Sebastiani, De Broglie, Guizot, Soult, had all been embassadors before they were elevated into the higher, the more responsible, and the more onerous office. In England, since the accession of George I., we can scarcely cite, speaking off-hand, above four instances.

In 1716 there was Paul Methuen, who had been embassador to Portugal in the reign of Queen Anne, named Secretary of State, for a short time, in the absence of Earl Stanhope; there was Philip Dormer, earl of Chesterfield, in 1746; there was John, duke of Bedford, who succeeded Lord Chesterfield in 1748, and who had previously been embassador to Paris; and there was Sir Thomas Robinson in 1754, who had been an embassador to Vienna. In our own day there is scarcely an instance. For though George Canning was embassador for a short time to Lisbon, and the Marquis of Wellesley to Spain; though the Duke of Wellington was embassador to Paris, was charged with a special mission to Russia, was plenipotentiary at Verona, yet none of these noblemen and gentlemen ever regularly belonged to the diplomatic corps. The most illustrious and striking instance of an embassador raised into a Secretary of State is the case of Philip Dormer Stanhope, earl of Chesterfield The character of no man within a century and a half has been so misrepresented and misunderstood. Lord John Russell, in the _Bedford Correspondence_, which he edited, charges this nobleman with conducting the French nobility to the guillotine and to emigration. But Lord Chesterfield died on the 24th March, 1773, sixteen years before 1789, and nineteen years before 1792. To any man of reading and research--to any man of a decent acquaintance with literature, it is unnecessary now to vindicate the character of the Earl of Chesterfield. He was unequaled in his time for the solidity and variety of his attainments; for the brilliancy of his wit; for the graces of his conversation, and the polish of his style. His embassy to Holland marks his skill, his dexterity, and his address, as an able negotiator; and his administration of Ireland indicates his integrity, his vigilance, and his sound policy as a statesman and as a politician. He was at once the most accomplished, the most learned, and the most far-seeing of the men of his day; and in our own, these is not one public man to compare with him. He foresaw and foretold, in 1756, that French Revolution whose outbreak he did not live to witness. In 1744 he was admitted into the cabinet, on his own terms, and was soon after intrusted with a second embassy to Holland, in which his skill and dexterity were universally admitted. He was not more remarkable for a quick insight into the temper of others, than for a command of his own. In history, in literature, in foreign languages, he was equally a proficient. With classical literature he had been from his boyhood familiar. He wrote Latin prose with correctness, ease, and purity; and spoke that tongue with a fluency and facility of the rarest among Englishmen, and not very common even among foreigners. In the House of Lords his speeches were more admired and extolled than any others of the day. Horace Walpole had heard his own father, had heard Pitt, had heard Pulteney, had heard Wyndham, had heard Carteret; yet he in 1743 declared, as is recorded by Lord Mahon, that the finest speech he had ever listened to was one from Chesterfield.

For the diplomatic career, Chesterfield prepared himself in a manner not often practiced in his own, and never practiced by Englishmen in our day. Not content, as an undergraduate of Cambridge, with assiduously attending a course of lectures on civil law at Trinity Hall, he applied--as the laws and customs of other countries, and the general law of Europe, were not comprehended in that course--to Vitriarius, a celebrated professor of the University of Leyden and, at the recommendation of the professor, took into his house a gentleman qualified to instruct him. Instead of pirouetting it in the _coulisses_ of the opera, or in the Redouten Saal of Vienna, instead of graduating at the Jardin Mabille, or the Salle Ventadour, instead of breakfasting at the Café Anglais, instead of dining at the Café de Paris, or swallowing his ices, after the Italiens or Académie Royale, at Tortoni's, instead of attending a _funcion_ or bull-fight at Madrid, or spending his mornings and evenings at Jägers's Unter den Linden at Berlin, instead of swallowing Beaune for a bet against Russian Boyars at Petersburgh or Moscow, at Andrieux's French Restaurant, or spending his nights at the San Carlos at Naples, or the Scala at Milan, Chesterfield, eschewing _prima donnas_, and the delights of French cookery, and the charms of French vaudevilles, set himself down in the town, and in the university in which Joseph Scaliger was a professor, and from whence those famous Elzevir editions of classical works issued, to learn the public law of Europe. These are the arts by which to attain the eminence of a Walsingham and a Burghley, of a D'Ossat and a Jeannin, of a Temple and a De Witt.

Qui cupit optatam cursu contingere metam, Multa tulit fecitque puer, sudavit et alsit.

[From the Dublin University Magazine.]

THOMAS MOORE.

How many associations rise to the mind at the name of MOORE! The brilliant wit, the elegant scholar, the most charming poet of _sentiment_ our literature possesses! His vivacity and versatility were quite as remarkable as his fancy and command of melody. He has been admitted, by rare judges of personal merit, to have been, with the single exception of the late Chief Justice Bushe, the most attractive of companions. An attempt has, in some quarters, we have heard, been made to represent Moore as sacrificing to society talents meant for graver pursuits than convivial enjoyments; and it has been insinuated that he wanted that manly sternness of character, without which there can be no personal dignity or political consistency. The facts of Moore's life overthrow, of themselves, such insinuations. It would be difficult, indeed, to point to any literary character who has, during the vicissitudes of an eventful age, more honorably and steadfastly adhered to the same standard of opinion--_qualis ab incepto_. His honorable conduct, when compelled to pay several thousand pounds, incurred by the error of his deputy at Bermuda (for whose acts he was _legally_ responsible), exhibits the manliness of his nature. He determined, by honest labor, to pay off the vast demand upon him, even though it made him a beggar! Several of the Whig party came forward and offered in a manner most creditable to them, to effect a subscription for the purpose of paying off the poet's debt. Foremost among them was a delicate young nobleman, with sunken cheek and intellectual aspect, who, while traveling for his health on the Continent, had met Moore, with whom he journeyed for a considerable time, and from whom he parted with an intense admiration of the poet's genius and manly character. The young nobleman--then far from being a rich man--headed the list with eleven hundred pounds. The fact deserves to be recorded to the honor of that young nobleman, who, by slow and sure degrees, has risen to be prime minister of England--Lord John Russell.

Of the fact of Moore's steadfastly refusing to accept the subscription offered to be raised for him by his aristocratic Whig friends, there can be no doubt whatever; and the matter is more creditable to him when the fact is remembered that it was not he himself who committed the error by which he was rendered liable to the judgment given against him. He might also have sheltered himself under the example of Charles James Fox, who consented to accept a provision made for him by the leaders of his party. But Moore detested all eleemosynary aid. He speaks in one of his most vigorous poems with contempt of that class of "_patriots_" (to what vile uses can language be profaned!),

"Who hawk their country's wrongs as beggars do their sores."

While sojourning at Paris upon that occasion Moore received a very remarkable offer. Barnes, the editor of the _Times_, became severely ill, and was obliged to recruit his health by a year's rest, and the editorship of the _Times_ was actually offered to Moore, who, in telling the story to a brilliant living Irishman, said, "I had great difficulty in refusing. The offer was so tempting--_to be the Times for a twelvemonth!_" The offering him the editorship of "the daily miracle" (as Mr. Justice Talfourd called it) might, however, have been only a _ruse de guerre_ of his aristocratic and political friends to bring him back to London, where, for a variety of reasons social and political, his company was then very desirable.

There is a very interesting circumstance connected with the birth of Moore, which deserves record. The fact of the birth, as every one knows, took place at Aungier-street, and its occasion was at a moment singularly appropriate for the lyric poet being ushered into the world. Jerry Keller, the wit and humorist, rented apartments in the house of Moore's brother, in Aungier-street, and had a dinner-party on the very day of the poet's birth. Just as the guests were assembled, and the dinner on the table, it was announced to them that Mrs. Moore's _accouchement_ had taken place, and that she was in a precarious state, the physicians particularly enjoining that no noise should be made in the house: a difficult matter, when Keller, Lysaght, and other convivial spirits were assembled. What was to be done? One of the company, who lodged near him, solved the difficulty by proposing that the feast should be adjourned to his house close by, and that the viands and wine should be transferred thither. "Ay!" cried Jerry Keller, "be it so; let us adjourn _pro re nata."_ Thus, in the hour of feasting, just as Keller dropped one of his best witticisms, was Moore's birth registered by a classic pun.

Moore had few friends whom he loved more than Mr. Corry, and he has left upon record an exquisite proof of his friendship in the following lines, which are very affecting to read at the present time.

On one occasion, Moore and Corry were ordered, by medical advice, to drink port wine, while they were sojourning for their health at Brighton. The _idem velle atque idem nolle_ was perfectly applicable to their friendship, and they detested port wine with perfect antipathy. However, they were under advice which required obedience. Moore got the port-wine from his wine-merchant, Ewart; but in traveling from London it had been shaken about so much, and was so muddy, that it required a strainer. Mr. Corry bought a very handsome wine-strainer, prettily ornamented with Bacchanalian emblems, and presented it, with a friendly inscription, to Moore, who wrote in reply, the following lines, never, we believe, before printed:

TO JAMES CORRY, ESQ.,

ON HIS MAKING ME A PRESENT OF A WINE-STRAINER.

This life, dear Corry, who can doubt, Resembles much friend Ewart's wine-- When first the rosy drops come out, How beautiful, how clear they shine! And thus, a while they keep their tint So free from even a shade with some, That they would smile, did you but hint, That darker drops would ever come.

But soon the ruby tide runs short, Each moment makes the sad truth plainer-- Till life, like old and crusty port, When near its close, requires a strainer.

_This_ friendship can alone confer, Alone can teach the drops to pass-- If not as bright as once they were, At least unclouded through the glass. Nor, Corry, could a boon be mine, Of which my heart were fonder, vainer, Than thus, if life grew like old wine, To have _thy_ friendship for its strainer!

THOMAS MOORE. Brighton, June, 1825.

[From Household Words.]

THE APPETITE FOR NEWS.

The last great work of that great philosopher and friend of the modern housewife, Monsieur Alexis Soyer, is remarkable for a curious omission. Although the author--a foreigner--has abundantly proved his extensive knowledge of the weakness of his adopted nation; yet there is one of our peculiarities which he has not probed. Had he left out all mention of cold punch in connection with turtle; had his receipt for curry contained no cayenne; had he forgotten to send up tongues with asparagus, or to order a service of artichokes without napkins, he would have been thought forgetful; but when--with the unction of a gastronome, and the thoughtful skill of an artist--he marshals forth all the luxuries of the British breakfast-table, and forgets to mention its first necessity, he shows a sort of ignorance. We put it to his already extensive knowledge of English character, whether he thinks it possible for any English subject whose means bring him under the screw of the income-tax, to break his fast without--a newspaper.

The city clerk emerging through folding doors from bed to sitting-room, though thirsting for tea, and hungering for toast, darts upon that morning's journal with an eagerness, and unfolds it with a satisfaction, which show that all his wants are gratified at once. Exactly at the same hour, his master, the M.P., crosses the hall of his mansion. As he enters the breakfast parlor, he fixes his eye on the fender, where he knows his favorite damp sheet will be hung up to dry. When the noble lord first rings his bell, does not his valet know that, however tardy the still-room-maid may be with the early coffee, he dares not appear before his lordship without the "Morning Post?" Would the minister of state presume to commence the day in town till he has opened the "Times," or in the country till he has perused the "Globe?" Could the oppressed farmer handle the massive spoon for his first sip out of his Sèvres cup till he has read of ruin in the "Herald" or "Standard?" Might the juvenile Conservative open his lips to imbibe old English fare or to utter Young England opinions, till he has glanced over the "Chronicle?" Can the financial reformer know breakfast-table happiness till he has digested the "Daily News," or skimmed the "Express?" And how would it be possible for mine host to commence the day without keeping his customers waiting till he has perused the "Advertiser" or the "Sun?"

In like manner the provinces can not--once a week at least--satisfy their digestive organs till their local organ has satisfied their minds.

Else, what became of the 67,476,768 newspaper stamps which were issued in 1848 (the latest year of which a return has been made) to the 150 London and the 238 provincial English journals: of the 7,497,064 stamps impressed on the corners of the 97 Scottish, and of the 7,028,956 which adorned the 117 Irish newspapers? A professor of the new science of literary mensuration has applied his foot-rule to this mass of print, and publishes the result in "Bentley's Miscellany." According to him, the press sent forth, in daily papers alone, a printed surface amounting in twelve months to 349,308,000 superficial feet. If to these are added all the papers printed weekly and fortnightly in London and the provinces the whole amounts to 1,446,150,000 square feet of printed surface, which was, in 1849, placed before the comprehensive vision of John Bull. The area of a single morning paper--the Times say--is more than nineteen and a half square feet, or nearly five feet by four, compared with an ordinary octavo volume, the quantity of matter daily issued is equal to three hundred pages. There are four morning papers whose superficies are nearly as great, without supplements, which they seldom publish. A fifth is only half the size. We may reckon, therefore, that the constant craving of Londoners for news is supplied every morning with as much as would fill about twelve hundred pages of an ordinary novel; or not less than five volumes.

These acres of print sown broad-cast, produce a daily crop to suit every appetite and every taste. It has winged its way from every spot on the earth's surface, and at last settled down and arranged itself into intelligible meaning, made instinct with ink. Now it tells of a next-door neighbor; then of dwellers in the utter-most corners of the earth. The black side of this black and white daily history, consists of battle, murder, and sudden death; of lightning and tempest; of plague, pestilence, and famine; of sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebellion; of false doctrine, heresy, and schism; of all other crimes, casualities, and falsities, which we are enjoined to pray to be defended from. The white side chronicles heroism, charitableness, high purpose, and lofty deeds; it advocates the truest doctrines, and the practice of the most exalted virtue: it records the spread of commerce, religion, and science; it expresses the wisdom of the few sages and shows the ignorance of the neglected many--in fine, good and evil, as broadly defined or as inextricably mixed in the newspapers, as they are over the great globe itself.

With this variety of temptation for all tastes, it is no wonder that those who have the power have also the will to read newspapers. The former are not very many in this country where, among the great bulk of the population, reading still remains an accomplishment. It was so in Addison's time. "There is no humor of my countrymen," says the Spectator, "which I am more inclined to wonder at, than their great thirst for news." This was written at the time of imposition of the tax on newspapers, when the indulgence in the appetite received a check from increased costliness. From that date (1712) the statistical history of the public appetite for news is written in the Stamp Office. For half a century from the days of the Spectator, the number of British and Irish newspapers was few. In 1782 there were only seventy-nine, but in the succeeding eight years they increased rapidly. There was "great news" stirring in the world in that interval--the American War, the French Revolution; beside which, the practice had sprung up of giving domestic occurrences in fuller detail than heretofore, and journals became more interesting from that cause. In 1790 they had nearly doubled in number, having reached one hundred and forty six. This augmentation took place partly in consequence of the establishment of weekly papers--which originated in that year--and of which thirty-two had been commenced before the end of it. In 1809, twenty-nine and a half millions of stamps were issued to newspapers in Great Britain. The circulation of journals naturally depends upon the materials existing to fill them. While wars and rumors of wars were rife they were extensively read, but with the peace their sale fell off. Hence we find, that in 1821 no more than twenty-four millions of newspapers were disposed of. Since then the spread of education--slow as it has been--has increased the productiveness of journalism. During the succeeding eight-and-twenty years, the increase may be judged of by reference to the figures we have already jotted down; the sum of which is, that during the year 1848 there were issued, for English, Irish, and Scotch newspapers, eighty-two millions of stamps--more than thrice as many as were paid for in 1821. The cause of this increase was chiefly the reduction of the duty from an average of three-pence to one penny per stamp.

A curious comparison of the quantity of news devoured by an Englishman and a Frenchman, was made in 1819, in the _Edinburgh Review_--"thirty-four thousand papers," says the writer, are "dispatched daily from Paris to the departments, among a population of about twenty-six millions, making one journal among 776 persons. By this, the number of newspaper readers in England would be to those in France as twenty to one. But the number and circulation of country papers in England are so much greater than in France, that they raise the proportion of English readers to about twenty-five to one, and our papers contain about three times as much letter-press as a French paper. The result of all this is that an Englishman reads about seventy-five times as much of the newspapers of his country in a given time, as a Frenchman does of his. But in the towns of England, most of the papers are distributed by means of porters, not by post; on the other hand, on account of the number of coffee-houses, public gardens, and other modes of communication, less usual in England, it is possible that each French paper may be read, or listened to, by a greater number of persons, and thus the English mode of distribution may be compensated. To be quite within bounds, however, the final result is, that every Englishman reads daily fifty times as much as the Frenchman does, of the newspapers of his country."

From this it might be inferred that the craving for news is peculiarly English. But the above comparison is chiefly affected by the restrictions put upon the French press, which, in 1819, were very great. In this country, the only restrictions were of a fiscal character; for opinion and news there was, as now, perfect liberty. It is proved, at the present day, that Frenchmen love news as much as the English; for now that all restriction is nominally taken off, there are as many newspapers circulated in France in proportion to its population, as there are in England.

The appetite for news is, in truth, universal; but is naturally disappointed, rather than bounded, by the ability to read. Hence it is that the circulation of newspapers is proportioned in various countries to the spread of letters; and if their sale is proportionately less in this empire, than it is among better taught populations, it is because there exist among us fewer persons who are able to read them;--either at all, or so imperfectly, that attempts to spell them give the tyro more pain than pleasure. In America, where a system of national education has made a nation of readers (whose taste is perhaps susceptible of vast improvement, but who are readers still) the sale of newspapers greatly exceeds that of Great Britain. All over the continent there are also more newspaper _readers_, in proportion to the number of people, though perhaps, fewer buyers, from the facilities afforded by coffee-houses and reading-rooms, which all frequent. In support of this fact, we need go no farther than the three kingdoms. Scotland--where national education has largely given the ability to read--a population of three millions demands yearly from the Stamp Office seven and a half millions of stamps; while in Ireland, where national education has had no time for development, eight millions of people take half a million of stamps _less_ than Scotland.

Although it can not be said that the appetite for mere news is one of an elevated character; yet as we have before hinted, the dissemination of news takes place side by side with some of the most sound, practical, and ennobling sentiments and precepts that issue from any other channels of the press. As an engine of public liberty, the newspaper press is more effectual than the Magna Charta, because its powers are wielded with more ease, and exercised with more promptitude and adaptiveness to each particular case.

Mr. F. K. Hunt in his "Fourth Estate" remarks, "The moral of the history of the press seems to be, that when any large proportion of a people have been taught to read, and when upon this possession of the tools of knowledge, there has grown up a habit of perusing public prints, the state is virtually powerless if it attempts to check the press. James the Second in old times, and Charles the Tenth, and Louis Philippe, more recently, tried to trample down the Newspapers, and everybody knows how the attempt resulted. The prevalence or scarcity of newspapers in a country affords a sort of index to its social state. Where journals are numerous, the people have power, intelligence, and wealth; where journals are few, the many are in reality mere slaves. In the United States every village has its newspaper, and every city a dozen of these organs of popular sentiment. In England we know how numerous and how influential for good the papers are; while in France they have perhaps still greater power. Turn to Russia, where newspapers are comparatively unknown, and we see the people sold with the earth they are compelled to till. Austria, Italy, Spain, occupy positions between the extremes--the rule holding good in all, that in proportion to the freedom of the press is the freedom and prosperity of the people."

[From Sharpe's Magazine]

A FEW WORDS ON CORALS.

It is the object of the following papers to illustrate the natural history of the ocean, and to introduce to the reader a few of the forms of life which the naturalist meets with in the deep sea. The sea that bathes the globe contains as countless multitudes of living beings as does the land we tread, and each possesses an organization as interesting and as peculiar to itself, as any of the higher forms of the animal creation. But the interest does not cease here, for these marine invertebrata play an important part in the vast economy of nature, some living but to afford food for the larger kinds, others devouring all matter devoid of vitality, and so removing all putrescent materials, with which the sea would otherwise be surcharged; while others, again, living in large communities, surely and slowly, by their gradual growth, so alter the physical construction of the globe as to render seas and harbors unnavigable, and in many eases even to give rise in course of ages to those islands, apparently of spontaneous growth, which are so common in the Southern Seas.

Corals and Madrepores first claim our attention, because they occupy the lowest place, with the exception of sponges, in the animal scale! Indeed, so low is their organization, that former naturalists denied their animal character, and from superficial examination of their external appearance, placed them among the wonders of the vegetable world. And from the arborescent and plant-like form assumed by many kinds, in the Flustra and others, in which the resemblance to sea-weeds is so strong as generally to cause them to be confounded together under the same group, and being fixed to submarine rocks, or marine shells, observers might easily have been led to the mistake, had not modern research rectified the error. Corals and Madrepores, as they are known to us, consist but of the stony skeletons of the animals themselves, for in the living state, while dwelling in the ocean, each portion of the stony framework was covered with an animal coating of gelatinous matter, which, closely investing it, was the living portion of the animal. But the structure of the animal is not simply this, for attached to different portions of it in the living state are to be found a countless number of little cells, which, armed with tentacles of great prehensile and tactile powers, are the apertures through which the particles of food are conveyed for the sustenance of the animal These bodies as they may be called, are the analogues of that simple polyp, the common hydra, which, abounding in almost every pond, has been long known to naturalists. It consists of a single dilated gelatinous vesicle, which is terminated at one extremity by a sucker, and at the other by a number of contractile filaments, which serve as the tentaculæ, by which it seizes its prey. This is all that represents the animal, the dilated portion of the tube being the part in which the process of digestion is carried on, and where the food is assimilated to the wants of the little creature. These hydrae live singly, each animal being independent of another, and each possesses the power of self-reparation; so that, should it happen that a tentacle is lost, another sprouts to supply its place, or should the naturalist by way of experiment divide it in half, each portion immediately reproduces the wanting section. Such, then, is briefly the structure of the simple fresh-water hydra, a polyp of common occurrence, and from this description the reader will gain some idea of the polyps of the Coral family before us; but he must remember that in the case now under discussion, the polyps are aggregated together, a number on one common stem, each possessing independent life, but all ministering to the support of the compound animal.

The hydra, then, of the Coral and Madrepore, thus explained, would appear to be the parts through which food is absorbed for the general nourishment of the body, which, as before observed, consists simply of a gelatinous film of animal matter, possessing but little evidence of vitality. Here, then, is a community of nourishment, and with it also a community of sensation, for if one portion be irritated, contiguous portions of the animal are apt to sympathize. When the Coral polyps are not in an active state, or in other words, when they are not in want of food, these hydra-form polyps may not be visible, but being retracted into cells found as depressions in the skeletons of the Madrepores, they are lost to observation, and it is only when in quest of food and nourishment that their contractile tentacles are expanded, and distinctly prominent.

The physiology of the growth of the skeleton, both in the Madrepores and the Coral, is the same. The entire skeleton, however ramified it may be, or whatever form it may assume, is secreted by the living matter with which it is invested, the materials for its formation being derived from the element in which it lives; and as its deposition takes place at different times, the central stem of some corals is apt to assume a beautiful concentric arrangement of laminæ. But the material deposited or secreted need not necessarily be hard or calcareous, but even may partake of the character of horn or other flexible materials, as is the case with some of the coral family. In other cases there is an alternation of each material; and the necessity of this change in the character of the skeleton will now demand our attention.

The common coral of the Mediterranean, possessing a stony skeleton, is found in situations where its stunted form and its extreme hardness sufficiently preserve it from the violence of the waves; but place a coral under other circumstances, and expose it to the storms of the Indian Ocean, where the waves rage with fury, dashing on and uprooting all things within their power, and the structure of the simple coralium would fail to withstand their violence. Here, then, under such circumstances, in the case of the Gorgonia, nature has provided a horny and flexible skeleton, which, spreading majestically in the sea, shall be capable of bending beneath the weight of the superincumbent waves, and so yielding to the storms. Nature has thus adapted herself to each contingent circumstance.

The next point to which we shall advert will be coral formations, which form so interesting a study to the naturalist and geologist. When we consider that we have at hand only a soft, gelatinous covering, stretched on a hard, stony frame-work--that the material on which this animal substance exists is furnished by the sea in which it lives--we can not but be surprised at the smallness of the means which nature uses for the execution of her great designs. But time compensates for the insignificance of the means employed, and the continued activity of nature's architects, during continuous ages, accomplishes these stupendous results, which have at various times excited the wonder of the navigator, and aroused the attention of the naturalist. Many examples of these are to be found in the Pacific Archipelago. Seas and shallows, once navigable, become in the process of time so filled by these living animals, as to become impassable, their stony skeletons forming hard, massy rocks and impenetrable barriers, which, rising from the bottom of the sea and shallows, constitute solid masonry of living stones.

But besides thus aggregating in the neighborhood of land and continents, formations similarly produced are constantly met with during the circumnavigation of the globe. Not only barriers and reefs owe their origin to these humble means, but large lands, stretching for miles in the centre of the ocean, rise gradually from beneath the surface of the sea, and, becoming clothed with verdure and vegetation, at last offer a resting-place for the daring seafarer. But now occurs the interesting question, How happens it that these islands are found in situations where the sea is too deep to allow of any animal life to exist? And yet these corals must have grown upward from some resting-place. The researches of Darwin have shown that the greatest depth in which corals live, is between thirty and forty fathoms beneath the surface of the sea; hence it is absolutely certain that for every island some foundation must exist in the sea for these reef-building animals to attach themselves to. Such foundation, from the observation of Darwin, would appear to be provided by submarine mountains which have gradually subsided into the sea, having originally existed above its surface. Upon these foundations the reef-building saxigenous corals have become attached, and slowly accumulating in large numbers, and gradually depositing their carbonate of lime, during the lapse of ages, by degrees construct these large piles, which, at last emerging from the ocean's bosom, appear as newly-formed continents and islands. Once above the surface, the work of the corals is at an end; no longer exposed to the salt water, the emerged portion dies, and then new agencies are called into play, before its surface can be clothed with vegetable life. The storms of the ocean and the rising waves gradually deposit on its surface the sand and mud torn up from the bottom of the sea, and the sea-weed, too, that is cast upon its tenantless shores soon crumbles into mould, and unites with the debris of the former polyps. At last, some seeds from the neighboring lands are driven to its strand, and there finding a soil united for their growth, soon sprout, under the influence of a tropical sun, into fresh life, and clothe the ocean isle with verdure and vegetation.

Then, _last_, man comes, and taking possession of the land, erects him a house to dwell in, and cultivating the soil he finds, soon converts the ocean-rescued land into cultivated plains. Islands thus formed are constantly increased in circumference by the same means as those that gave them birth; the same agency is ever at work, adding particle on particle to the rising land. But is it not strange that such simple means can resist the ever-flowing and roaring ocean--that such simple animals can uprear a masonry which shall resist the violence of the waves and defy the power of the breakers? Is it not strange that a single polyp can form a structure in the bosom of the ocean, which shall stand, a victorious antagonist to the storm when works of man and other "inanimate works of nature" would have crumbled into nothing before the relentless fury of a disturbed ocean? "Let the hurricane tear up its thousand huge fragments, yet what will that tell against the accumulated labor of myriads of architects at work day and night, month after month?" for here organic force is opposed to the raging elements, and opposing, is victorious.

[From the Dublin University Magazine]

A NIGHT IN THE BELL INN.

Though few men are themselves on visiting terms with their ancestors, most are furnished with one or two decently-authenticated ghost stories. I myself am a firm believer in spectral phenomena, for reasons which I may, perhaps, be tempted to give to the public whenever the custom of printing in folio shall have been happily revived; meanwhile, as they will not bear compression, I keep them by me, and content myself with now and then stating a fact saving the theory to suggest itself. Now it has always appeared to me that the apostles of spectres (if the phrase will be allowed me) have, like other men with a mission, been, perhaps, a little precipitate in assuming their facts, and sometimes find "true ghosts" upon evidence much too slender to satisfy the hard-hearted and unbelieving generation we live in. They have thus brought scandal not only upon the useful class to which they belong, but upon the world of spirits itself--causing ghosts to be so generally discredited, that fifty visits made in their usual private and confidential way, will now hardly make a single convert beyond the individual favored with the interview; and, in order to reinstate themselves in their former position, they will be obliged henceforward to appear at noon-day, and in places of public resort.

The reader will perceive, then, that I am convinced of the equal impolicy and impropriety of resting the claims of my clients (ghosts in general) upon facts which will not stand the test of an impartial, and even a skeptical scrutiny. And, perhaps, I can not give a happier illustration of the temper of my philosophy, at once candid and cautious, than is afforded by the following relation, for every tittle of which I solemnly pledge my character at once as a gentleman and as a metaphysician.

There is a very agreeable book by Mrs. Crowe, entitled "The Night Side of Nature," and which among a _dubia cæna_ of authentic tales of terror, contains several which go to show the very trivial causes which have from time to time caused the reappearance of departed spirits in this grosser world. A certain German professor, who, for instance, actually _persecuted_ an old college friend with preternatural visitations for no other purpose, as it turned out, than to procure a settlement of some small six-and-eightpenny accounts, which he owed among his trades-people at the time of his death. I could multiply, from my own notes, cases still odder, in which sensible and rather indolent men, too, have been at the trouble to re-cross the awful interval between us and the invisible, for purposes apparently still less important--so trivial, indeed, that for the present I had rather not mention them, lest I should expose their memories to the ridicule of the unreflecting. I shall now proceed to my narrative, with the repeated assurance, that the reader will no where find in it a single syllable that is not most accurately and positively true.

About four-and-thirty years ago I was traveling through Denbighshire upon a mission which needed dispatch. I had, in fact, in my charge, some papers which were required for the legal preliminaries to a marriage, which was about to take place in a family of consideration, upon the borders of that county.

The season was winter, but the weather delightful--that is to say, clear and frosty; and, even without foliage, the country through which I posted was beautiful. The subject of my journey was a pleasant one. I anticipated an agreeable visit, and a cordial welcome; and the weather and scenery were precisely of the sort to second the cheerful associations with which my excursion had been undertaken. Let no one, therefore, suggest that I was predisposed for the reception of gloomy or horrible impressions. When the sun set we had a splendid moon, at once soft and brilliant; and I pleased myself with watching the altered, and, if possible, more beautiful effects of the scenery through which we were smoothly rolling. I was to put up for the night at the little town of ----; and on reaching the hill--over which the approach to it is conducted, about a short mile from its quaint little street--I dismounted, and directing the postillion to walk his jaded horses leisurely up the winding road, I trod on before him in the pleasant moonlight, and sharp, bracing air. A little by-path led directly up the steep acclivity, while the carriage-road more gradually ascended by a wide sweep--this little path, leading through fields and hedgerows, I followed, intending to anticipate the arrival of my conveyance at the summit of the hill.

I had not proceeded very far when I found myself close to a pretty old church, whose ivied tower, and countless diamond window panes, were glittering in the moonbeams--a high, irregular hedge, overtopped by tall and ancient trees inclosed it; and rows of funereal yews showed black and mournful among the wan array of headstones that kept watch over the village dead. I was so struck with the glimpse I had caught of the old church-yard, that I could not forbear mounting the little stile that commanded it--no scene could be imagined more still and solitary. Not a human habitation was near--every sign and sound of life was reverently remote; and this old church, with its silent congregation of the dead marshaled under its walls, seemed to have spread round it a circle of stillness and desertion that pleased, while it thrilled me.

No sound was here audible but the softened rush of waters, and that sweet note of home and safety, the distant baying of the watch-dog, now and then broken by the sharper rattle of the carriage-wheels upon the dry road. But while I looked upon the sad and solemn scene before me, these sounds were interrupted by one which startled, and, indeed, for a moment, froze me with horror. The sound was a cry, or rather a howl of despairing terror, such as I have never heard before or since uttered by human voice. It broke from the stillness of the church-yard; but I saw no figure from which it proceeded--though this circumstance, indeed, was scarcely wonderful, as the broken ground, the trees, tall weeds, and tomb-stones afforded abundant cover for any person who might have sought concealment. This cry of unspeakable agony was succeeded by a silence; and, I confess, my heart throbbed strangely, when the same voice articulated, in the same tone of agony,

"Why will you trouble the dead? Who can torment us before the time? I will come to you in my flesh, though after my skin worms destroy this body--and you shall speak to me, lace to face."

This strange address was followed by another cry of despair, which died away as suddenly as it was raised.

I never could tell why it was I was not more horror-stricken than I really was by this mysterious, and, all things considered, even terrible interpellation. It was not until the silence had again returned, and the faint rustling of the frosty breeze among the crisp weeds crept toward me like the stealthy approach of some unearthly influence, that I felt a superstitious terror gradually inspire me, which hurried me at an accelerated pace from the place. A few minutes, and I heard the friendly voice of my charioteer hallooing to me from the summit of the hill.

Reassured, as I approached him, I abated my speed.

"I saw you standing on the stile, sir, by the church-yard," he said, as I drew near, "and I ask your pardon for not giving you the hint before, but they say it is not lucky; and I called to you loud and lusty to come away, sir; but I see you are nothing the worse of it."

"Why, what is there to be afraid of there, my good fellow?" I asked, affecting as much indifference as I was able.

"Why, sir," said the man, throwing an uneasy look in the direction, "they do say there's a bad spirit haunts it; and nobody in these parts would go near it after dark for love or money."

"Haunted!" I repeated; "and how does the spirit show himself?" I asked.

"Oh! lawk, sir, in all sorts of shapes--sometimes like an old woman almost doubled in two with years," he answered, "sometimes like a little child agoing along a full foot high above the grass of the graves; and sometimes like a big black ram, strutting on his hind legs, and with a pair of eyes like live coals; and some have seen him in the shape of a man, with his arm raised up toward the sky, and his head hanging down, as if his neck was broke. I can't think of half the shapes he has took at different times; but they're all bad: the very child, they say, when he comes in that shape, has the face of Satan--God bless us! and nobody's ever the same again that sees him once."

By this time I was again seated in my vehicle, and some six or eight minutes' quick driving whirled us into the old-fashioned street, and brought the chaise to a full stop before the open door and well-lighted hall of the Bell Inn. To me there has always been an air of indescribable cheer and comfort about a substantial country hostelrie, especially when one arrives, as I did, upon a keen winter's night, with an appetite as sharp, and something of that sense of adventure and excitement which, before the days of down-trains and tickets, always in a greater or less degree, gave a zest to traveling. Greeted with that warmest of welcomes for which inns, alas! are celebrated, I had soon satisfied the importunities of a keen appetite; and having for some hours taken mine ease in a comfortable parlor before a blazing fire, I began to feel sleepy, and betook myself to my no less comfortable bed-chamber.

It is not to be supposed that the adventure of the church-yard had been obliterated from my recollection by the suppressed bustle and good cheer of the "Bell." On the contrary, it had occupied me almost incessantly during my solitary ruminations; and as the night advanced, and the stillness of repose and desertion stole over the old mansion, the sensations with which this train of remembrance and speculation was accompanied became any thing but purely pleasant.

I felt, I confess, fidgety and queer--I searched the corners and recesses of the oddly-shaped and roomy old apartment--I turned the face of the looking-glass to the wall--I poked the fire into a roaring blaze--I looked behind the window-curtains, with a vague anxiety, to assure myself that nothing could be lurking there. The shutter was a little open, and the ivied tower of the little church, and the tufted tops of the trees that surrounded it, were visible over the slope of the intervening hill. I hastily shut out the unwelcome object, and in a mood of mind, I must confess, favorable enough to any freak my nerves might please to play me, I hurried through my dispositions for the night, humming a gay air all the time, to re-assure myself, and plunged into bed, extinguishing the candle, and--shall I acknowledge the weakness? nearly burying my head under the blankets.

I lay awake some time, as men will do under such circumstances, but at length fatigue overcame me, and I fell into a profound sleep. From this repose I was, however, aroused in the manner I am about to describe. A very considerable interval must have intervened. There was a cold air in the room very unlike the comfortable atmosphere in which I had composed myself to sleep. The fire, though much lower than when I had gone to bed, was still emitting flame enough to throw a flickering light over the chamber. My curtains were, however, closely drawn, and I could not see beyond the narrow tent in which I lay.

There had been as I awaked a clanking among the fire-irons, as if a palsied hand was striving to arrange the fire, and this rather unaccountable noise continued for some seconds after I had become completely awake.

Under the impression that I was subjected to an accidental intrusion, I called out, first in a gentle and afterward in a sharper tone,

"Who's there?"

At the second summons the sound ceased, and I heard instead the tread of naked feet, as it seemed to me, upon the floor, pacing to and fro, between the hearth and the bed in which I lay. A superstitious terror, which I could not combat, stole over me; with an effort I repeated my question, and drawing myself upright in the bed, expected the answer with a strange sort of trepidation. It came in terms and accompanied with accessories which I shall not soon forget.

The very same tones which had so startled me in the church-yard the evening before, the very sounds which I had heard then and there, were now filling my ears, and spoken in the chamber where I lay.

"Why will you trouble the dead? Who can torment us before the time? I will come to you in my flesh, 'though after my skin worms destroy this body,' and you shall speak with me face to face."

As I live. I can swear the words and the voice were the very same I had heard on the occasion I have mentioned, but (and mark this) repeated to _no one_. With feelings which I shall not attempt to describe, I heard the speaker approach the bed--a hand parted the bed-curtains and drew them open, revealing a form more horrible than my fancy had ever seen--an almost gigantic figure--naked, except for what might well have been the rotten remnant of a shroud--stood close beside my bed--livid and cadaverous--grimed as it seemed with the dust of the grave, and staring on me with a gaze of despair, malignity, and fury, too intense almost for human endurance.

I can not say whether I spoke or not, but this infernal spectre answered me as if I had.

"I am dead and yet alive," it said, "the child of perdition--in the grave I am a murderer, but here I am APOLLYON. Fall down and worship me."

Having thus spoken, it stood for a moment at the bedside, and then turned away with a shuddering moan, and I lost sight of it, but after a few seconds it came again to the bedside as before.

"When I died they put me under Mervyn's tombstone, and they did not bury me. My feet lie toward the _west_--turn them to the east and I will rest--maybe I will rest--I will rest--rest--rest."

Again the figure was gone, and once again it returned, and said,

"I am your master--I am your resurrection and your life, and therefore, fall down and worship me."

It made a motion to mount upon the bed, but what further passed I know not, for I fainted.

I must have lain in this state for a long time, for when I became conscious the fire was almost extinct. For hours that seemed interminable I lay, scarcely daring to breathe, and afraid to get up lest I should encounter the hideous apparition, for aught I knew, lurking close beside me. I lay, therefore, in an agony of expectation such as I will not attempt to describe, awaiting the appearance of the daylight.

Gradually it came, and with it the cheerful and reassuring sounds of life and occupation. At length I mustered courage to reach the bell-rope, and having rung lustily, I plunged again into bed.

"Draw the window-curtains--open the shutters," I exclaimed as the man entered, and, these orders executed, "look about the room," I added, "and see whether a cat or any other animal has got in."

There was nothing of the sort; and satisfied that my visitant was no longer in the chamber, I dismissed the man, and hurried through my toilet with breathless precipitation.

Hastening from the hated scene of my terrors, I escaped to the parlor, whither I instantly summoned the proprietor of "the Bell" in _propria persona_. I suppose I looked scared and haggard enough, for mine host looked upon me with an expression of surprise and inquiry.

"Shut the door," said I.

It was done.

"I have had an uneasy night in the room you assigned me, sir; I may say indeed, a _miserable_ night," I said.

"Pray," resumed I, interrupting his apologetic expressions of surprise, "has any person but myself ever complained of--of being _disturbed_ in that room?"

"Never," he assured me.

I had suspected the ghastly old practical joke, so often played off by landlords in story-books, and fancied I might have been deliberately exposed to the chances of a "haunted chamber." But there was no acting in the frank look and honest denial of mine host.

"It is a very strange thing," said I hesitating; and "I do not see why I should not tell you what has occurred. And as I could swear, if necessary, to the perfect reality of the entire scene, it behoves you, I think, to sift the matter carefully. For myself, I can not entertain a doubt as to the nature of the truly terrible visitation to which I have been subjected; and, were I in your position, I should transfer my establishment at once to some other house as well suited to the purpose, and free from the dreadful liabilities of this."

I proceeded to detail the particulars of the occurence of the past night, to which he listened with nearly as much horror as I recited them with.

"Mervyn's tomb!" he repeated after me; "why that's down there in L----r: the churchyard you can see from the window of the room you slept in."

"Let us go there instantly," I exclaimed, with an almost feverish anxiety to ascertain whether we should discover in the place indicated any thing corroborative of the authenticity of my vision.

"Well, I shan't say no," said he, obviously bracing himself for an effort of courage; "but we'll take Faukes, and James the helper, with us; and please, sir, you'll not mention the circumstance as has occurred to either on 'em."

I gave him the assurance he asked for, and in a few minutes our little party were in full march upon the point of interest.

There had been an intense black frost, and the ground, reverberating to our tread with the hollow sound of a vault, emitted the only noise that accompanied our rapid advance. I and my host were too much preoccupied for conversation, and our attendants maintained a respectful silence. A few minutes brought us to the low, gray walls and bleak hedgerows that surrounded the pretty old church, and all its melancholy and picturesque memorials.

"Mervyn's tomb lies there, I think, sir," he said, pointing to a corner of the church-yard, in which piles of rubbish, withered weeds, and brambles were thickly accumulated under the solemn, though imperfect shelter of the wintry trees.

He exchanged some sentences with our attendants in Welsh.

"Yes, sir, that's the place," he added, turning to me.

And as we all approached it, I bethought me that the direction in which, as I stood upon the stile, I had heard the voice on the night preceding, corresponded accurately with that indicated by my guides. The tomb in question was a huge slab of black marble, supported, as was made apparent when the surrounding brambles were removed, upon six pillars, little more than two feet high each. There was ample room for a human body to lie inside this funeral penthouse; and, on stooping to look beneath, I was unspeakably shocked to see that something like a human figure was actually extended there.

It was, indeed, a corpse, and, what is more, corresponded in every trait with the infernal phantom which, on the preceding night, had visited and appalled me.

The body, though miserably emaciated, was that of a large-boned, athletic man, of fully six feet four in height; and it was, therefore, no easy task to withdraw it from the receptacle where it had been deposited, and lay it, as our assistants did, upon the tombstone which had covered it. Strange to say, moreover, the feet of the body, as we found it, had been placed toward the west.

As I looked upon this corpse, and recognized, but too surely, in its proportions and lineaments, every trait of the apparition that had stood at my bed-side, with a countenance animated by the despair and malignity of the damned, my heart fluttered and sank within me, and I recoiled from the effigy of the demon with terror; second only to that which had thrilled me on the night preceding.

* * * * *

Now, reader--_honest_ reader--I appeal to your own appreciation of testimony, and ask you, having these facts in evidence, and upon the deposition of an eye and ear witness, whose veracity, through a long life, has never once been compromised or questioned, have you, or have you not, in the foregoing story, a well-authenticated ghost story?

Before you answer the above question, however, it may be convenient to let you know certain other facts which were clearly established upon the inquest that was very properly held upon the body which in so strange a manner we had discovered.

I purposely avoid details, and without assigning the depositions respectively to the witnesses who made them, shall restrict myself to a naked outline of the evidence as it appeared.

The body I have described was identified as that of Abraham Smith, an unfortunate lunatic, who had, upon the day but one preceding, made his escape from the neighboring parish workhouse, where he had been for many years confined. His hallucination was a strange, but not by any means an unprecedented one. He fancied that he had died, and was condemned; and, as these ideas alternately predominated, sometimes spoke of himself as an "evil spirit," and sometimes importuned his keepers to "bury him;" using habitually certain phrases, which I had no difficulty in recognizing as among those which he had addressed to me. He had been traced to the neighborhood where his body was found, and had been seen and relieved scarcely half a mile from it, about two hours before my visit to the church-yard! There were, further, unmistakable evidences of some person's having climbed up the trellis-work to my window on the previous night, the shutter of which had been left unbarred, and, as the window might have been easily opened with a push, the cold which I experienced, as an accompaniment of the nocturnal visit, was easily accounted for. There was a mark of blood upon the window-stool, and a scrape upon the knee of the body corresponded with it. A multiplicity of other slight circumstances, and the positive assertion of the chamber-maid that the window had been opened, and was but imperfectly closed again, came in support of the conclusion, which was to my mind satisfactorily settled by the concurrent evidence of the medical men, to the effect that the unhappy man could not have been many hours dead when the body was found.

Taken in the mass, the evidence convinced me; and though I might still have clung to the preternatural theory, which, in the opinion of some persons, the facts of the case might still have sustained, I candidly decided with the weight of evidence, "gave up the ghost," and accepted the natural, but still somewhat horrible explanation of the occurrence. For this candor I take credit to myself. I might have stopped short at the discovery of the corpse, but I am no friend to "spurious gospels;" let our faith, whatever it is, be founded in honest fact. For my part, I steadfastly believe in ghosts, and have dozens of stories to support that belief; but this is not among them. Should I ever come, therefore, to tell you one, pray remember that you have to deal with a candid narrator.

DEATH OF CROMWELL.

The flowers of autumn, withering fast. Before the bitter Northern blast; The earth with hoary frost o'erspread, And Nature's leafy mantle shed, Proclaimed abroad through earth and sky That winter's gloomy reign drew nigh.

And he, whose hand, with mighty stroke, Oppression's chains had often broke, Whose patriot heart and fearless voice Had made oppression's slaves rejoice, Like autumn's beauty, day by day, Was passing rapidly away.

Life's spring had brought him hopes and fears, Its summer many toils and cares; Autumn had brought him power and fame, But autumn passed--life's winter came; And then, like nature, seeking rest, His head a dying pillow pressed.

A furious storm, with dreadful roar, Shook Britain's isle from shore to shore, The raging sea, with thundering sound, Spread ruin, fear, and death around; And seem'd to tell throughout the land Some dire event was near at hand.

Surrounded by the howling blast, His tide of life was ebbing fast; But he was calm as evening air, And raised on high a voice of prayer, For neither storm nor death's fierce dart Could shake the faith that nerv'd his heart.

He knew the hand that kept his life Throughout a long, protracted strife, Could never fail or know decay, Though earth itself should pass away; And as the stormy night rolled on, His spirit hasted to be gone.

But morning dawn'd at length, and brought That day's[C] return on which he fought So often--till the evening sun Set o'er the mighty victories won: And darkness, like the warrior's shield, Spread o'er the bloody battle-field.

That day brought victory no more; His earthly triumphs then were o'er: The battle of his life had pass'd, And Death claim'd Victory at last; For when the evening shades came down His wearied spirit thence had flown.

WILLIAM ILOTT.

FOOTNOTES:

[C] 3d September, the anniversary of his greatest victories.

[From Household Words.]

MY WONDERFUL ADVENTURES IN SKITZLAND.

CHAPTER THE FIRST.

THE BEGINNING IS A BORE--I FALL INTO MISFORTUNE.

I am fond of gardening. I like to dig. If among the operations of the garden any need for such a work can be at any time discovered or invented, I like to dig a hole. On the third of March, 1848, I began a hole behind the kitchen wall, whereinto it was originally intended to transplant a plum-tree. The exercise was so much to my taste, that a strange humor impelled me to dig on. A fascination held me to the task. I neglected my business. I disappeared from the earth's surface. A boy who worked a basket by means of a rope and pulley, aided me; so aided, I confined my whole attention to spade labor. The centripetal force seemed to have made me its especial victim. I dug on until autumn. In the beginning of November I observed that, upon percussion, the sound given by the floor of my pit was resonant. I did not intermit my labor, urged as I was by a mysterious instinct downward. On applying my ear, I occasionally heard a subdued sort of rattle, which caused me to form a theory that the centre of the earth might be composed of mucus. In November, the ground broke beneath me into a hollow and I fell a considerable distance. I alighted on the box-seat of a four-horse coach, which happened to be running at that time immediately underneath. The coachman took no notice whatever of my sudden arrival by his side. He was so completely muffled up, that I could observe only the skillful way in which he manipulated reins and whip. The horses were yellow. I had seen no more than this, when the guard's horn blew, and presently we pulled up at an inn. A waiter came out, and appeared to collect four bags from the passengers inside the coach. He then came round to me.

"Dine here, sir?"

"Yes, certainly," said I. I like to dine--not the sole point of resemblance between myself and the great Johnson.

"Trouble you for your stomach, sir."

While the waiter was looking up with a polite stare into my puzzled face, my neighbor, the coachman, put one hand within his outer coat, as if to feel for money in his waistcoat-pocket. Directly afterward his fingers come again to light, and pulled forth an enormous sack. Notwithstanding that is was abnormally enlarged, I knew by observation of its form and texture that this was a stomach, with the oesophagus attached. This, then, the waiter caught as it was thrown down to him, and hung it carelessly over his arm, together with the four smaller bags (which I now knew to be also stomachs) collected from the passengers within the coach. I started up, and as I happened to look round, observed a skeleton face upon the shoulders of a gentleman who sat immediately behind my back. My own features were noticed at the same time by the guard, who now came forward, touching his hat.

"Beg your pardon, sir, but you've been and done it."

"Done what?"

"Why, sir, you should have booked your place, and not come up in this clandestine way. However, you've been and done it!"

"My good man, what have I done?"

"Why, sir, the Baron Terroro's eyes had the box-seat, and I strongly suspect you've been and sat upon them."

I looked involuntarily to see whether I had been sitting upon any thing except the simple cushion. Truly enough, there was an eye, which I had crushed and flattened.

"Only one," I said.

"Worse for you, and better for him. The other eye had time to escape, and it will know you again, that's certain. Well, it's no business of mine. Of course you've no appetite now for dinner? Better pay your fare, sir. To the Green Hippopotamus and Spectacles, where we put up, it's ten-and-six."

"Is there room inside?" I inquired. It was advisable to shrink from observation.

"Yes, sir. The inside passengers are mostly skeleton. There's room for three, sir. Inside, one-pound-one."

I paid the money, and became an inside passenger.

CHAPTER THE SECOND.

OF DIVISIONS WHICH OCCUR IN SKITZLAND--I AM TAKEN UP

Professor Essig's Lectures on Anatomy had so fortified me, that I did not shrink from entering the Skitzton coach. It contained living limbs, loose or attached to skeletons in other respects bare, except that they were clothed with broadcloth garments, cut after the English fashion. One passenger only had a complete face of flesh, he had also one living hand; the other hand I guessed was bony, because it was concealed in a glove obviously padded. By observing the fit of his clothes, I came to a conclusion that this gentleman was stuffed throughout; that all his limbs, except the head and hand, were artificial. Two pairs of Legs, in woolen stockings, and a pair of Ears, were in a corner of the coach, and in another corner there were nineteen or twenty Scalps.

I thought it well to look astonished at nothing, and, having pointed in a careless manner to the scalps, asked what might be their destination? The person with the Face and Hand replied to me; and although evidently himself a gentleman, he addressed me with a tone of unconcealed respect.

"They are going to Skitzton, sir, to the hair dresser's."

"Yes, to be sure," I said. "They are to make Natural Skin Wigs. I might have known."

"I beg your pardon, sir. There is a ball to-morrow night at Culmsey. But the gentry do not like to employ village barbers, and therefore many of the better class of people send their hair to Skitzton, and receive it back by the return coach, properly cut and curled."

"Oh," said I. "Ah! Oh, indeed!"

"Dinners, gentlemen!" said a voice at the window, and the waiter handed in four stomachs, now tolerably well filled. Each passenger received his property, and pulling open his chest with as much composure as if he were unbuttoning his waistcoat, restored his stomach, with a dinner in it, to the right position. Then the reckonings were paid, and the coach started.

I thought of my garden, and much wished that somebody could throw Professor Essig down the hole that I had dug. A few things were to be met with in Skitzland which would rather puzzle him. They puzzled me; but I took refuge in silence, and so fortified, protected my ignorance from an exposure.

"You are going to Court, sir, I presume?" said my Face and Hand friend, after a short pause. His was the only mouth in the coach, excepting mine, so that he was the only passenger able to enter into conversation.

"My dear sir," I replied, "let me be frank with you. I have arrived here unexpectedly out of another world. Of the manners and customs, nay, of the very nature of the people who inhabit this country, I know nothing. For any information you can give me, I shall be very grateful."

My friend smiled incredulity, and said,

"Whatever you are pleased to profess, I will believe. What you are pleased to feign a wish for, I am proud to furnish. In Skitzland, the inhabitants, until they come of age, retain that illustrious appearance which you have been so fortunate as never to have lost. During the night of his twenty-first birthday, each Skitzlander loses the limbs which up to that period have received from him no care, no education. Of those neglected parts the skeletons alone remain, but all those organs which he has employed sufficiently continue unimpaired. I, for example, devoted to the study of the law, forgot all occupation but to think, to use my senses, and to write. I rarely used my legs, and therefore Nature has deprived me of them."

"But," I observed, "it seems that in Skitzland you are able to take yourselves to pieces."

"No one has that power, sir, more largely than yourself. What organs we have we can detach on any service. When dispersed, a simple force of Nature directs all corresponding members whither to fly that they may re-assemble."

"If they can fly," I asked, "why are they sent in coaches? There were a pair of eyes on the box seat."

"Simply for safety against accidents. Eyes flying alone are likely to be seized by birds, and incur many dangers. They are sent, therefore, usually under protection, like any other valuable parcel."

"Do many accidents occur?"

"Very few. For mutual protection, and also because a single member is often all that has been left existing of a fellow Skitzlander, our laws, as you, sir, know much better than myself, estimate the destruction of any part absent on duty from its skeleton as a crime equivalent to murder--"

After this I held my tongue. Presently my friend again inquired whether I was going up to Court?

"Why should I go to Court?"

"Oh, sir, it pleases you to be facetious. You must be aware that any Skitzlander who has been left by nature in possession of every limb, sits in the Assembly of the Perfect, or the Upper House, and receives many state emoluments and dignities."

"Are there many members of that Upper Assembly?"

"Sir, there were forty-two. But if you are now traveling to claim your seat, the number will be raised to forty-three."

"The Baron Terroro--" I hinted.

"My brother, sir. His eyes are on the box-seat under my care. Undoubtedly he is a member of the Upper House."

I was now anxious to get out of the coach as soon as possible. My wish was fulfilled after the next pause. One eye, followed by six pairs of arms, with strong hard hands belonging to them, flew in at the window. I was collared; the door was opened, and all hands were at work to drag me out and away. The twelve hands wisked me through the air, while the one eye sailed before us, like an old bird, leader of the flight.

CHAPTER THE THIRD.

MY IMPRISONMENT AND TRIAL FOR MURDER.

What sort of sky have they in Skitzland? Our earth overarches them, and, as the sunlight filters through, it causes a subdued illumination with very pure rays. Skitzland is situated nearly in the centre of our globe, it hangs there like a shrunken kernel in the middle of a nutshell. The height from Skitzland to the over-arching canopy is great; so great, that if I had not fallen personally from above the firmament, I should have considered it to be a blue sky similar to ours. At night it is quite dark; but during the day there is an appearance in the heaven of white spots; their glistening reminded me of stars. I noticed them as I was being conveyed to prison by the strong arms of justice, for it was by a detachment of members from the Skitzton police that I was now hurried along. The air was very warm, and corroborated the common observation of an increase of heat as you get into the pith of our planet. The theory of central fire, however, is, you perceive, quite overturned by my experience.

We alighted near the outskirts of a large and busy town. Through its streets I was dragged publicly, much stared at and much staring. The street life was one busy nightmare of disjointed limbs. Professor Essig, could he have been dragged through Skitzton, would have delivered his farewell lecture upon his return. "Gentlemen--Fuit Ilium, Fuit Ischium, Fuit Sacrum, anatomy has lost her seat among the sciences. My occupation's gone." Professor Owen's book "On the Nature of Limbs," must contain, in the next edition, an Appendix "Upon Limbs in Skitzland." I was dragged through the streets, and all that I saw there, in the present age of little faith, I dare not tell you. I was dragged through the streets to prison, and there duly chained, after having been subjected to the scrutiny of about fifty couples of eyes drawn up in a line within the prison door. I was chained in a dark cell, a cell so dark that I could very faintly perceive the figure of some being who was my companion. Whether this individual had ears wherewith to hear, and mouth wherewith to answer me, I could not see, but at a venture I addressed him. My thirst for information was unconquerable; I began, therefore, immediately with a question:

"Friend, what are those stars which we see shining in the sky at mid-day?"

An awful groan being an unsatisfactory reply, I asked again.

"Man, do not mock at misery. You will yourself be one of them."

"The teachers shall shine like stars in the firmament." I had a propensity for teaching, but was puzzled to discover how I could give so practical an illustration of the text of Fichte.

"Believe me," I said, "I am strangely ignorant. Explain yourself."

He answered with a hollow voice:

"Murderers are shot up out of mortars into the sky, and stick there. Those white, glistening specks, they are their skeletons."

Justice is prompt in Skitland. I was tried incredibly fast by a jury of twelve men, who had absolutely heads. The judges had nothing but brain, mouth, and ear. Three powerful tongues defended me, but as they were not suffered to talk nonsense, they had little to say. The whole case was too clear to be talked into cloudiness. Baron Terroro, in person, deposed that he had sent his eyes to see a friend at Culmsey, and that they were returning on the Skitzton coach, when I, illegally, came with my whole bulk upon the box-seat, which he occupied. That one of his eyes was, in that manner, totally destroyed, but that the other eye, having escaped, identified me, and brought to his brain intelligence of the calamity which had befallen. He deposed further, that having received this information, he dispatched his uncrushed eye with arms from the police-office, and accompanied with several members of the detective force to capture the offender, and to procure the full proofs of my crime. A sub-inspector of Skitzton police then deposed that he sent three of his faculties, with his mouth, eye, and ear, to meet the coach. That the driver, consisting only of a stomach and hands, had been unable to observe what passed. That the guard, on the contrary, had taxed me with my deed, that he had seen me rise from my seat upon the murdered eye, and that he had heard me make confession of my guilt. The guard was brought next into court, and told his tale. Then I was called upon for my defense. If a man wearing a cloth coat and trowsers, and talking excellent English, were to plead at the Old Bailey that he had broken into some citizen's premises accidentally by falling from the moon, his tale would be received in London as mine was in Skitzton. I was severely reprimanded for my levity, and ordered to be silent. The judge summed up, and the jury found me guilty. The judge, who had put on the black cap before the verdict was pronounced, held out no hope of mercy, and straightway sentenced me to death, according to the laws and usage of the realm.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH.

THE LAST HOURS OF THE CONDEMNED IN SKITZLAND--I AM EXECUTED.

The period which intervenes between the sentence and execution of a criminal in Skitzland, is not longer than three hours. In order to increase the terror of death by contrast, the condemned man is suffered to taste at the table of life from which he is banished, the most luscious viands. All the attainable enjoyment that his wit can ask for, he is allowed to have, during the three hours before he is shot like rubbish off the fields of Skitzland.

Under guard, of course, I was now to be led whithersoever I desired.

Several churches were open. They never are all shut in Skitzton. I was taken into one. A man with heart and life was preaching. People with hearts were in some pews; people with brains, in others; people with ears only, in some. In a neighboring church, there was a popular preacher, a skeleton with life. His congregation was a crowd of ears, and nothing more.

There was a day-performance at the Opera I went to that. Fine lungs and mouths possessed the stage, and afterward there was a great bewilderment with legs. I was surprised to notice that many of the most beautiful ladies were carried in and out, and lifted about like dolls. My guides sneered at my pretense of ignorance, when I asked why this was. But they were bound to please me in all practicable ways, so they informed me, although somewhat pettishly. It seems that in Skitzland, ladies who possess and have cultivated only their good looks, lose at the age of twenty-one all other endowments. So they become literally dolls, but dolls of a superior kind; for they can not only open and shut their eyes, but also sigh; wag slowly with their heads, and sometimes take a pocket handkerchief out of a bag, and drop it. But as their limbs are powerless, they have to be lifted and dragged about after the fashion that excited my astonishment.

I said then, "Let me see the poor." They took me to a Workhouse. The men, there, were all yellow; and they wore a dress which looked as though it were composed of asphalte; it also had a smell like that of pitch. I asked for explanation of these things.

A Superintendent of Police remarked that I was losing opportunities of real enjoyment for the idle purpose of persisting in my fable of having dropped down from the sky. However, I compelled him to explain to me what was the reason of these things. The information I obtained was briefly this: that Nature, in Skitzland, never removes the stomach. Every man has to feed himself; and the necessity for finding food, joined to the necessity for buying clothes, is a mainspring whereby the whole clockwork of civilized life is kept in motion. Now, if a man positively can not feed and clothe himself, he becomes a pauper. He then goes to the Workhouse, where he has his stomach filled with a cement. That stopping lasts a life-time, and he thereafter needs no food. His body, however, becomes yellow by the superfluity of bile. The yellow-boy, which is the Skitzland epithet for pauper, is at the same time provided with a suit of clothes. The clothes are of a material so tough that they can be worn unrepaired for more than eighty years. The pauper is now freed from care, but were he in this state cast loose upon society, since he has not that stimulus to labor which excites industry in other men, he would become an element of danger in the state. Nature no longer compelling him to work, the law compels him. The remainder of his life is forfeit to the uses of his country. He labors at the workhouse, costing nothing more than the expense of lodging, after the first inconsiderable outlay for cement wherewith to plug his stomach, and for the one suit of apparel.

When we came out of the workhouse, all the bells in the town were tolling. The superintendent told me that I had sadly frittered away time, for I had now no more than half an hour to live. Upon that I leaned my back against a post, and asked him to prepare me for my part in the impending ceremony by giving me a little information on the subject of executions.

I found that it was usual for a man to be executed with great ceremony upon the spot whereon his crime had been committed. That in case of rebellions or tumults in the provinces, when large numbers were not unfrequently condemned to death, the sentence of the law was carried out in the chief towns of the disturbed districts. That large numbers of people were thus sometimes discharged from a single market-place, and that the repeated strokes appeared to shake, or crack, or pierce in some degree that portion of the sky toward which the artillery had been directed. I here at once saw that I had discovered the true cause of earthquakes and volcanoes; and this shows how great light may be thrown upon theories concerning the hidden constitution of this earth, by going more deeply into the matter of it than had been done by any one before I dug my hole. Our volcanoes, it is now proved, are situated over the market-places of various provincial towns in Skitzland. When a revolution happens, the rebels are shot up--discharged from mortars by means of an explosive material evidently far more powerful than our gun-powder or gun-cotton; and they are pulverized by the friction in grinding their way through the earth. How simple and easy truth appears, when we have once arrived at it.

The sound of muffled drums approached us, and a long procession turned the corner of a street. I was placed in the middle of it--Baron Terroro by my side. All then began to float so rapidly away, that I was nearly left alone, when forty arms came back and collared me. It was considered to be a proof of my refractory disposition, that I would make no use of my innate power, of flight. I was therefore dragged in this procession swiftly through the air, drums playing, fifes lamenting.

We alighted on the spot where I had fallen, and the hole through which I had come I saw above me. It was very small, but the light from above shining more vividly through it made it look, with its rough edges, like a crumpled moon. A quantity of some explosive liquid was poured into a large mortar, which had been erected (under the eye of Baron Terroro) exactly where my misfortune happened. I was then thrust in, the baron ramming me down, and pounding with a long stock or pestle upon my head in a noticeably vicious manner. The baron then cried "Fire!" and as I shot out, in the midst of a blaze, I saw him looking upward.

CHAPTER THE FIFTH.

MY REVENGE ON THE SKITZLANDERS.

By great good fortune, they had planted their artillery so well, that I was fired up through my hole again, and alighted in my own garden, just a little singed. My first thought was to run to an adjoining bed of vegetable marrows. Thirty vegetable marrows and two pumpkins I rained down to astonish the Skitzlanders, and I fervently hope that one of them may have knocked out the remaining eye of my vindictive enemy, the baron. I then went into the pantry, and obtained a basket full of eggs, and having rained these down upon the Skitzlanders, I left them.

It was after breakfast when I went down to Skitzland, and I came back while the dinner bell was ringing.

[From the People's Journal.]

CHARLOTTE CORDAY.

Perhaps the event that lingers longest in the memory, among all the appalling episodes and startling passages of the French Revolution, is the assassination of the tyrant Marat, by Charlotte Corday. With the blood of old Corneille running in her veins, and possessing something of his stern and masculine love of liberty, this simple child of nature hears in her distant home that her friends, the Girondists, are proscribed, and that a hated triumvirate in Paris, tramples on the feelings and liberties of the people. Full of one idea, she purchases a knife, and, without a single confidant, sets out for the metropolis, where, procuring an interview with Marat, she stabs him to the heart, and with one blow accomplishes her revenge, and what she vainly supposed to be the people's redemption.

In Miss Julia Kavanagh's charming volumes she gives us a pretty faithful memoir of this extraordinary woman. Among the women of the French Revolution, there is one, says the gifted authoress, who stands essentially apart: a solitary episode of the eventful story. She appears for a moment, performs a deed--heroic as to the intention, criminal as to the means--and disappears forever; lost in the shadow of time--an unfathomed mystery.

The greatest portion of the youth of Charlotte Corday--to give her the name by which she is generally known--was spent in the calm obscurity of her convent solitude. Many high visions, many burning dreams and lofty aspirations, already haunted her imaginative and enthusiastic mind, as she slowly paced the silent cloisters, or rested, lost in thought, beneath the shadow of the ancient elms. It is said that, like Madame Roland, she contemplated secluding herself for ever from the world in her monastic retreat; but, affected by the skepticism of the age, which penetrated even beyond convent walls, she gave up the project....

All the austerity and republican enthusiasm of her illustrious ancestor, Pierre Corneille, seemed to have come down to his young descendant. Even Rousseau and Raynal, the apostles of democracy, had no pages that could absorb her so deeply as those of ancient history, with its stirring deeds and immortal recollections. Often, like Manon Philipon in the recess of her father's workshop, might Charlotte Corday be seen in her convent cell, thoughtfully bending over an open volume of Plutarch, that powerful and eloquent historian of all heroic sacrifices.

When the Abbaye aux Dames was closed, in consequence of the Revolution, Charlotte was in her twentieth year, in the prime of life, and of wonderful beauty; and never, perhaps, did a vision of more dazzling loveliness step forth from beneath the dark convent portal into the light of the free and open world. She was rather tall, but admirably proportioned, with a figure full of native grace and dignity: her hands, arms, and shoulders were models of pure sculptural beauty. An expression of singular gentleness and serenity characterized her fair, oval countenance and regular features. Her open forehead, dark and well-arched eyebrows, and eyes of a gray so deep that it was often mistaken for blue, added to her natural grave and meditative appearance; her nose was straight and well formed, her mouth serious but exquisitely beautiful.

On leaving the convent in which she had been educated, Charlotte Corday went to reside with her aunt, Madame Coutellier de Bretteville Gouville, an old royalist lady, who inhabited an ancient-looking house in one of the principal streets of Caën. There the young girl, who had inherited a little property, spent several years, chiefly engaged in watching the progress of the Revolution.

A silent reserve characterized this epoch of Charlotte Corday's life; her enthusiasm was not external but inward; she listened to the discussions which were carried on around her without taking a part in them herself. She seemed to feel instinctively that great thoughts are always better nursed in the heart's solitude: that they can only lose their native depth and intensity by being revealed too freely before the indifferent gaze of the world. Those with whom she then occasionally conversed took little heed of the substance of her discourse, and could remember nothing of it when she afterward became celebrated; but all recollected well her voice, and spoke with strange enthusiasm of its pure, silvery sound.

The fall of the Girondists, on the 31st of May, first suggested to Charlotte Corday the possibility of giving an active shape to her hitherto passive feelings. She watched with intense, though still silent interest, the progress of events, concealing her secret indignation and thoughts of vengeance under her habitually calm aspect. Those feelings were heightened in her soul by the presence of the fugitive Girondists, who had found a refuge in Caën, and were urging the Normans to raise an army to march on Paris. She found a pretense to call upon Barbaroux, then with his friends at the Intendance. She came twice, accompanied by an old servant, and protected by her own modest dignity. Péthion saw her in the hall, where she was waiting for the handsome Girondist, and observed with a smile, "So the beautiful aristocrat is come to see republicans." "Citizen Péthion," she replied, "you now judge me without knowing me, but a time will come when you shall learn who I am." With Barbaroux, Charlotte chiefly conversed of the imprisoned Girondists; of Madame Roland and Marat. The name of this man had long haunted her with a mingled feeling of dread and horror. To Marat she ascribed the proscription of the Girondists, the woes of the Republic, and on him she resolved to avenge her ill-fated country. Charlotte was not aware that Marat was but the tool of Danton and Robespierre. "If such actions could be counseled," afterward said Barbaroux, "it is not Marat whom we would have advised her to strike."

While this deadly thought was daily strengthening itself in Charlotte's mind, she received several offers of marriage. She declined them, on the plea of wishing to remain free: but strange indeed must have seemed to her, at that moment, those proposals of earthly love. One of those whom her beauty had enamored, M. de Franquelin, a young volunteer in the cause of the Girondists, died of grief on learning her fate; his last request was, that her portrait, and a few letters he had formerly received from her, might be buried with him in his grave.

For several days after her last interview with Barbaroux, Charlotte brooded silently over her great thought; often meditating on the history of Judith. Her aunt subsequently remembered that, on entering her room one morning, she found an old Bible open on her bed: the verse in which it is recorded that "the Lord had gifted Judith with a special beauty and fairness," for the deliverance of Israel, was underlined with a pencil.

On another occasion Madame de Bretteville found her niece weeping alone; she inquired into the cause of her tears. "They flow," replied Charlotte, "for the misfortunes of my country." Heroic and devoted as she was, she then also wept, perchance, over her own youth and beauty, so soon to be sacrificed forever. No personal considerations altered her resolve: she procured a passport, provided herself with money, and paid a farewell visit to her father, to inform him that, considering the unsettled condition of France, she thought it best to retire to England. He approved of her intention, and bade her adieu. On returning to Caën, Charlotte told the same tale to Madame de Bretteville, left a secret provision for an old nurse, and distributed the little property she possessed among her friends.

It was on the morning of the 9th of July, 1793, that she left the house of her aunt, without trusting herself with a last farewell. Her most earnest wish was, when her deed should have been accomplished, to perish, wholly unknown, by the hands of an infuriated multitude. The woman who could contemplate such a fate, and calmly devote herself to it, without one selfish thought of future renown, had indeed the heroic soul of a martyr.

Her journey to Paris was marked by no other event than the unwelcome attentions of some Jacobins with whom she traveled. One of them, struck by her modest and gentle beauty, made her a very serious proposal of marriage: she playfully evaded his request, but promised that he should learn who and what she was at some future period. On entering Paris, she proceeded immediately to the Hotel de la Providence, Rue ties Vieux Augustins, not far from Marat's dwelling. Here she rested for two days before calling on her intended victim. Nothing can mark more forcibly the singular calmness of her mind: she felt no hurry to accomplish the deed for which she had journeyed so far, and over which she had meditated so deeply: her soul remained serene and undaunted to the last. The room which she occupied, and which has often been pointed out to inquiring strangers, was a dark and wretched attic, into which light scarcely ever penetrated. There she read again the volume of Plutarch she had brought with her--unwilling to part from her favorite author, even in her last hours--and probably composed that energetic address to the people which was found upon her after her apprehension.

Charlotte perceived that to call on Marat was the only means by which she might accomplish her purpose. She did so on the morning of the 13th of July, having first purchased a knife in the Palais Royal, and written him a note, in which she requested an interview. She was refused admittance. She then wrote him a second note, more pressing than the first, and in which she represented herself as persecuted for the cause of freedom. Without waiting to see what effect this note might produce, she called again at half-past seven the same evening.

Marat then resided in the Rue des Cordeliers, in a gloomy-looking house, which has since been demolished. His constant fears of assassination were shared by those around him; the porter seeing a strange woman pass by his lodge, without pausing to make any inquiry, ran out and called her back. She did not heed his remonstrance, but swiftly ascended the old stone staircase, until she had reached the door of Marat's apartment. It was cautiously opened by Albertine, a woman with whom Marat cohabited, and who passed for his wife. Recognizing the same young and handsome girl who had already called on her husband, and animated, perhaps by a feeling of jealous mistrust, Albertine refused to admit her; Charlotte insisted with great earnestness. The sound of their altercation reached Marat: he immediately ordered his wife to admit the stranger, whom he recognized as the author of the two letters he had received in the course of the day. Albertine obeyed reluctantly; she allowed Charlotte to enter; and after crossing with her an ante chamber, where she had been occupied with a man named Laurent Basse in folding some numbers of the "Ami du Peuple," she ushered her through two other rooms, until they came to a narrow closet where Marat was then in a bath. He gave a look at Charlotte, and ordered his wife to leave them alone: she complied, but allowed the door of the closet to remain half open, and kept within call.

According to his usual custom, Marat wore a soiled handkerchief bound round his head, increasing his natural hideousness. A coarse covering was thrown across the bath; a board, likewise, placed transversely, supported his papers. Laying down his pen, he asked Charlotte the purport of her visit. The closet was so narrow that she touched the bath near which she stood. She gazed on him with ill-disguised horror and disgust, but answered as composedly as she could, that she had come from Caën, in order to give him correct intelligence concerning the proceedings of the Girondists there. He listened, questioned her eagerly, wrote down the names of the Girondists, then added, with a smile of triumph: "Before a week they shall have perished on the guillotine." "These words," afterward said Charlotte, "sealed his fate." Drawing from beneath the handkerchief which covered her bosom the knife she had kept there all along, she plunged it to the hilt in Marat's heart. He gave one loud, expiring cry for help, and sank back dead, in the bath. By an instinctive impulse, Charlotte had instantly drawn out the knife from the breast of her victim, but she did not strike again; casting it down at his feet, she left the closet, and sat down in the neighboring room, thoughtfully passing her hand across her brow: her task was done.

The wife of Marat had rushed to his aid on hearing his cry for help. Laurent Basse, seeing that all was over, turned round toward Charlotte, and, with a blow of a chair, felled her to the floor; while the infuriated Albertine trampled her under her feet. The tumult aroused the other tenants of the house; the alarm spread, and a crowd gathered in the apartment, who learned with stupor that Marat, the Friend of the People, had been murdered. Deeper still was their wonder when they gazed on the murderess. She stood there before them with still disordered garments, and her disheveled hair, loosely bound by a broad green ribbon falling around her; but so calm, so serenely lovely, that those who most abhorred her crime gazed on her with involuntary admiration. "Was she then so beautiful?" was the question addressed, many years afterward, to an old man, one of the few remaining witnesses of this scene. "Beautiful!" he echoed, enthusiastically; adding, with the eternal regrets of old age: "Ay, there are none such now!"

On the morning of the 17th, she was led before her judges. She was dressed with care, and had never looked more lovely. Her bearing was so imposing and dignified, that the spectators and the judges seemed to stand arraigned before her. She interrupted the first witness, by declaring that it was she who had killed Marat. "Who inspired you with so much hatred against him?" asked the President.

"I needed not the hatred of others, I had enough of my own," she energetically replied; "besides, we do not execute well that which we have not ourselves conceived."

"What, then, did you hate in Marat?"

"His crimes."

"Do you think that you have assassinated all the Marats?"

"No; but now that he is dead, the rest may fear."

She answered other questions with equal firmness and laconism. Her project, she declared, had been formed since the 31st of May. "She had killed one man to save a hundred thousand She was a republican long before the Revolution, and had never failed in energy."

"What do you understand by energy?" asked the President.

"That feeling," she replied, "which induces us to east aside selfish considerations, and sacrifice ourselves for our country."

Fouquier Tinville here observed, alluding to the sure blow she had given, that she must be well practiced in crime. "The monster takes me for an assassin!" she exclaimed, in a tone thrilling with indignation. This closed the debates, and her defender rose. It was not Doulcet de Pontécoulant--who had not received her letter--but Chauveau de la Garde, chosen by the President. Charlotte gave him an anxious look, as though she feared he might seek to save her at the expense of honor. He spoke, and she perceived that her apprehensions were unfounded. Without excusing her crime, or attributing it to insanity, he pleaded for the fervor of her conviction; which he had the courage to call sublime. The appeal proved unavailing. Charlotte Corday was condemned. Without deigning to answer the President, who asked her if she had aught to object to the penalty of death being carried out against her, she rose, and walking up to her defender, thanked him gracefully. "These gentlemen," said she, pointing to the judges, "have just informed me that the whole of my property is confiscated. I owe something in the prison: as a proof of my friendship and esteem, I request you to pay this little debt."

On returning to the conciergerie, she found an artist, named Hauër, waiting for her, to finish her portrait, which he had begun at the tribunal. They conversed freely together, until the executioner, carrying the red chemise destined for assassins, and the scissors with which he was to cut her hair off, made his appearance. "What, so soon!" exclaimed Charlotte Corday, slightly turning pale; but rallying her courage, she resumed her composure, and presented a look of her hair to M. Hauër, as the only reward in her power to offer. A priest came to offer her his ministry. She thanked him and the persons by whom he had been sent, but declined his spiritual aid. The executioner cut her hair, bound her hands, and threw the red chemise over her. M. Hauër was struck with the almost unearthly loveliness which the crimson hue of this garment imparted to the ill-fated maiden. "This toilet of death, though performed by rude hands, leads to immortality," said Charlotte, with a smile.

A heavy storm broke forth as the car of the condemned left the conciergerie for the Place de la Revolution. An immense crowd lined every street through which Charlotte Corday passed. Hootings and execrations at first rose on her path; but as her pure and serene beauty dawned on the multitude, as the exquisite loveliness of her countenance and the sculptural beauty of her figure became more fully revealed, pity and admiration superseded every other feeling. Her bearing was so admirably calm and dignified, as to rouse sympathy in the breasts of those who detested not only her crime, but the cause for which it had been committed. Many men of every party took off their hats and bowed as the cart passed before them. Among those who waited its approach, was a young German, normed Adam Luz, who stood at the entrance of the Rue Saint Honoré, and followed Charlotte to the scaffold. He gazed on the lovely and heroic maiden with all the enthusiasm of his imaginative race. A love, unexampled perhaps in the history of the human heart, took possession of his soul.

Unconscious of the passionate love she had awakened, Charlotte now stood near the guillotine. She turned pale on first beholding it, but soon resumed her serenity. A deep blush suffused her face when the executioner removed the handkerchief that covered her neck and shoulders, but she calmly laid her head upon the block. The executioner touched a spring and the ax came down. One of Samson's assistants immediately stepped forward, and holding up the lifeless head to the gaze of the crowd, struck it on either cheek. The brutal act only excited a feeling of horror; and it is said that--as though even in death her indignant spirit protested against this outrage--an angry and crimson flush passed over the features of Charlotte Corday.

[From Household Words.]

GREENWICH WEATHER-WISDOM.

In England every body notices the weather, and talks about the weather, and suffers by the weather, yet very few of us _know_ any thing about it. The changes of our climate have given us a constant and an insatiable national disease--consumption; the density of our winter fog has gained an European celebrity; while the general haziness of our atmosphere induces an Italian or an American to doubt whether we are ever indulged with a real blue sky. "Good day" has become the national salutation; umbrellas, water-proof clothes, and cough mixtures are almost necessities of English life; yet, despite these daily and hourly proofs of the importance of the weather to each and all of us, it is only within the last ten years that any effectual steps have been taken in England to watch the weather and the proximate elements which regulate its course and variations.

Yet, in those ten years positive wonders have been done, and good hope established that a continuance of patient inquiry will be rewarded by still further discoveries. To take a single result, it may be mentioned, that a careful study of the thermometer has shown that a descent of the temperature of London from forty-five to thirty-two degrees, generally kills about 300 persons. They may not all die in the very week when the loss of warmth takes place, but the number of deaths is found to increase to that extent over the previous average within a short period after the change. The fall of temperature, in truth, kills them as certainly as a well-aimed cannon-shot. Our changing climate, or deficient food and shelter, has prepared them for the final stroke, but they actually die at last of the weather.

Before 1838, several European states, less apt than ourselves to talk about the weather, had taken it up as a study, and had made various contributions to the general knowledge of the subject; but in that year England began to act. The officials who now and then emerge from the Admiralty under the title of the "Board of Visitors," to see what is in progress at the Greenwich Observatory, were reminded by Mr. Airy, the astronomer royal, that much good might be done by pursuing a course of magnetic and meteorological observations. The officials "listened and believed."

The following year saw a wooden fence pushed out behind the Observatory walls, in the direction of Blackheath, and soon afterward a few low-roofed, unpainted, wooden buildings were dotted over the inclosure. These structures are small enough and humble enough to outward view, yet they contain some most beautifully-constructed instruments, and have been the scene of a series of observations and discoveries of the greatest interest and value. The stray holiday visitor to Greenwich Park, who feels tempted to look over the wooden paling, sees only a series of deal sheds, upon a rough grass-plat; a mast some eighty feet high, steadied by ropes, and having a lantern at the top, and a windlass below; and if he looks closer, he perceives a small inner inclosure, surrounded by a dwarf fence; an upright stand, with a movable top, sheltering a collection of thermometers; and here and there a pile of planks and unused partitioning, that helps to give the place an appearance of temporary expediency, an aspect something between a collection of emigrants' cottages and the yard of a dealer in second-hand building materials. But--as was said when speaking of the Astronomical Observatory--Greenwich is a practical place, and not one prepared for show. Science, like virtue, does not require a palace for a dwelling-place. In this collection of deal houses, during the last ten years, Nature has been constantly watched, and interrogated with the zeal and patience which alone can glean a knowledge of her secrets. And the results of those watches, kept at all hours, and in all weathers, are curious in the extreme; but before we ask what they are, let us cross the barrier, and see with what tools the weather-students work.

The main building is built in the form of a cross, with its chief front to the magnetic north. It is formed of wood, all iron and other metals being carefully excluded; for its purpose is to contain three large magnets, which have to be isolated from all influence likely to interfere with their truthful action. In three arms of the cross these magnets are suspended by bands of unwrought, untwisted silk. In the fourth arm is a sort of double window, filled with apparatus for receiving the electricity collected at the top of the mast which stands close by. Thus, in this wooden shed, we find one portion devoted to; electricity--to the detection and registry of the stray lightning of the atmosphere--and the other three to a set of instruments that feel the influence and register the variations of the magnetic changes in the conditions of the air. "True as the needle to the pole," is the burden of an old song, which now shows how little our forefathers knew about this same needle, which, in truth, has a much steadier character than it deserves. Let all who still have faith in the legend go to the magnet-house, and when they have seen the vagaries there displayed, they will have but a poor idea of Mr. Charles Dibdin's sea-heroes, whose constancy is declared to have been as true as their compasses were to the north.

Upon entering the magnet-house, the first object that attracts attention are the jars to which the electricity is brought down. The fluid is collected, as just stated, by a conductor running from the top of the mast outside. In order that not the slightest portion may be lost in its progress down, a lamp is kept constantly burning near the top of the pole, the light of which keeps warm and dry a body of glass that cuts off all communication between the conductor and the machinery which supports it. Another light, for the purpose of collecting the electricity by its flame, is placed above the top of the pole. This light, burning at night, has given rise to many a strange supposition in the neighborhood. It is too high up to be serviceable as a lantern to those below. Besides, who walks in Greenwich Park after the gates are closed? It can light only the birds or the deer. "Then, surely," says another popular legend, "it is to guide the ships on the river, when on their way up at night; a sort of landmark to tell where-abouts the Observatory is when the moon and stars are clouded, and refuse to show where their watchers are."

All these speculations are idle, for the lights burn when the sun is shining, as well as at night; and the object of the lower one is that no trace of moisture, and no approach of cold, shall give the electricity a chance of slipping down the mast, or the ropes, to the earth, but shall leave it no way of escape from the wise men below, who want it, and will have it, whether it likes or no, in their jars, that they may measure its quantity and its quality, and write both down in their journals. It is thus that electricity comes down the wires into those jars on our right as we enter. If very slight, its presence there is indicated by tiny morsels of pendent gold-leaf; if stronger, the divergence of two straws show it; if stronger still, the third jar holds its greater force, while neighboring instruments measure the length of the electric sparks, or mark the amount of the electric force. At the desk, close by, sits the observer, who jots down the successive indications. In his book he registers from day to day, throughout the year, how much electricity has been in the air, and what was its character, even to such particulars as to whether its sparks were blue, violet, or purple in color. At times, however, he has to exercise great care, and it is not always that he even then escapes receiving severe shocks.

Passing on, we approach the magnets. They are three in number; of large size, and differently suspended, to show the various ways in which such bodies are acted upon. All hang by bands of unwrought silk. If the silk were twisted, it would twist the magnets, and the accuracy of their position would be disturbed. Magnets, like telescopes, must be true in their adjustment to the hundredth part of a hair's breadth. One magnet hangs north and south; another east and west; and a third, like a scale-beam, is balanced on knife-edges and agate planes, so beautifully, that when once adjusted and inclosed in its case, it is opened only once a year, lest one grain of dust, or one small spider, should destroy its truth; for spiders are as troublesome to the weather-student as to the astronomer. These insects like the perfect quiet that reigns about the instruments of the philosopher, and with heroic perseverance persist in spinning their fine threads among his machines. Indeed, spiders occasionally betray the magnetic observer into very odd behavior At times he may be seen bowing in the sunshine, like a Persian fire-worshiper; now stooping in this direction, now dodging in that, but always gazing through the sun's rays up toward that luminary. He seems demented, staring at nothing. At last he lifts his hand; he snatches apparently at vacancy to pull nothing down In truth his eye had at last caught the gleam of light reflected from an almost invisible spider line running from the electrical wire to the neighboring planks. The spider who had ventured on the charged wire paid the penalty of such daring with his life long ago, but he had left his web behind him, and that beautifully minute thread has been carrying off to the earth a portion of the electric fluid, before it had been received, and tested, and registered by the mechanism below. Such facts show the exceeding delicacy of the observations.

For seven years, the magnets suspended in this building were constantly watched every two hours--every even hour--day and night, except on Sundays, the object being that some light might be thrown upon the laws regulating the movements of the mariner's compass; hence, that while men became wiser, navigation might be rendered safer. The chief observer--the _genius loci_--is Mr. Glaisher, whose name figures in the reports of the Register-General. He, with two assistants, from year to year, went on making these tedious examinations of the variations of the magnets, by means of small telescopes, fixed with great precision upon pedestals of masonry or wood fixed on the earth, and unconnected with the floor of the building, occupying a position exactly between the three magnets. This mode of proceeding had continued for some years with almost unerring regularity, and certain large quarto volumes full of figures were the results, when an ingenious medical man, Mr. Brooke, hit upon a photographic plan for removing the necessity for this perpetual watchfulness. Now, in the magnet-house, we see light and chemistry doing the tasks before performed by human labor; and doing them more faithfully than even the most vigilant of human eyes and hands. Around the magnets are cases of zinc, so perfect that they exclude all light from without. Inside those cases, in one place, is a lamp giving a single ray of prepared light, which, falling upon a mirror soldered to the magnet, moves with its motions. This wandering ray, directed toward a sheet of sensitive photographic paper, records the magnet's slightest motion! The paper moves on by clock-work, and once in four-and-twenty hours an assistant, having closed the shutters of the building, lights a lantern of _yellow glass_, opens the magnet-boxes, removes the paper on which the magnets have been enabled to record their own motions, and then, having put in a fresh sheet of sensitive paper, he shuts it securely in, winds up the clock-work, puts out his yellow light, and lets in the sunshine. His lantern glass is yellow, because the yellow rays are the only ones which can be safely allowed to fall upon the photographic paper during its removal from the instrument, to the dish in which its magnetic picture is to be _fixed_ by a further chemical process. It is the blue ray of the light that gives the daguerrotypic likeness--as most persons who have had their heads off, under the hands of M. Claudet, or Mr. Beard, or any of their numerous competitors in the art of preparing sun-pictures, well know.

Since the apparatus of Mr. Brooke for the self-registration of the magnetic changes has been in operation at Greenwich, the time of Mr. Glaisher and his assistants has been more at liberty for other branches of their duties. These are numerous enough. Thermometers and barometers have to be watched as well as magnets. To these instruments the same ingenious photographic contrivance is applied.

The wooden building next to the magnet-house on the southwest contains a modification of Mr. Brooke's ingenious plan, by which the rise and fall of the temperature of the air is self-registered. Outside the building are the bulbs of thermometers freely exposed to the weather. Their shafts run through a zinc case, and as the mercury rises or falls, it moves a float having a projecting arm. Across this arm is thrown the ray of prepared light which falls then upon the sensitive paper. Thus we see the variations of the needle and the variations in heat and cold both recording their own story, within these humble-looking wooden sheds, as completely as the wind and the rain are made to do the same thing, on the top of the towers of the Observatory. The reward given to the inventor of this ingenious mode of self-registration has been recently revealed in a parliamentary paper, thus: "To Mr. Charles Brooke for his invention and establishment at the Royal Observatory, of the apparatus for the self-registration of magnetical and meteorological phenomena, £500." Every year the invention will save fully £500 worth of human toil; and the reward seems small when we see every year millions voted for warlike, sinecure, and other worse than useless purposes.

Photography, however, can not do all the work. Its records have to be cheeked by independent observations every day, and then both have to be brought to their practical value by comparison with certain tables which test their accuracy, and make them available for disclosing certain scientific results. The preparation of such tables is one of the practical triumphs of Greenwich. Many a quiet country gentleman amuses his leisure by noting day by day the variations of his thermometer and barometer. Heretofore such observations were isolated and of no general value, but now, by the tables completed by Mr. Glaisher, and published by the Royal Society, they may all be converted into scientific values, and be made available for the increase of our weather-wisdom. For nearly seventy years the Royal Society had observations made at Somerset House, but they were a dead letter--mere long columns of figures--till these tables gave them significance. And the same tables now knit into one scientific whole, the observations taken by forty scientific volunteers, who, from day to day, record for the Registrar-General of births and deaths, the temperature, moisture, &c., of their different localities, which vary from Glasgow to Guernsey, and from Cornwall to Norwich.

What the Rosetta stone is to the history of the Pharaohs, these Greenwich tables have been to the weather-hieroglyphics. They have afforded something like a key to the language in which the secrets are written; and it remains for industrious observation and scientific zeal to complete the modern victory over ancient ignorance. Already the results of the Greenwich studies of the weather have given us a number of curious morsels of knowledge. The wholesale destruction of human life induced by a fall in the temperature of London has just been noticed. Besides the manifestation of that fact, we are shown, that instead of a warm summer being followed by a cold winter, the tendency of the law of the weather is to group warm seasons together, and cold seasons together. Mr. Glaisher has made out, that the character of the weather seems to follow certain curves, so to speak, each extending over periods of fifteen years. During the first half of each of these periods, the seasons become warmer and warmer, till they reach their warmest point, and then they sink again, becoming colder and colder, till they reach the lowest point, whence they rise again. His tables range over the last seventy-nine years--from 1771 to 1849. Periods shown to be the coldest, were years memorable for high-priced food, increased mortality, popular discontent, and political changes. In his diagrams, the warm years are tinted brown, and the cold years gray, and as the sheets are turned over and the dates scanned, the fact suggest itself that a gray period saw Lord George Gordon's riots; a gray period was marked by the Reform Bill excitement; and a gray period saw the Corn Laws repealed.

A few more morsels culled from the experience of these weather-seers, and we have done.

Those seasons have been best which have enjoyed an average temperature--not too hot nor too cold.

The indications are that the climate of England is becoming warmer, and, consequently, healthier; a fact to be partly accounted for by the improved drainage and the removal of an excess of timber from the land.

The intensity of cholera was found greatest in those places where the air was stagnant; and, therefore, any means for causing its motion, as lighting fires and improving ventilation, are thus proved to be of the utmost consequence.

Some day near the 20th of January--the lucky guess, in 1838, of Murphy's Weather Almanac--will, upon the average of years, be found to be the coldest of the whole year.

In the middle of May there are generally some days of cold, so severe as to be unexplainable. Humboldt mentions this fact in his Cosmos; and various authors have tried to account for it--at present in vain. The favorite notion, perhaps, is that which attributes this period of cold to the loosening of the icebergs of the north. Another weather eccentricity is the usual advent of some warm days at the beginning of November.

Certain experiments in progress to test the difference between the temperature of the Thames, and of the surrounding atmosphere, are expected to show the cause of the famous London fog. During the night the Thames is often from ten to seventeen degrees warmer, and in the day time from eight to ten degrees colder than the air above it.

If the theory of weather-cycles holds good, we are to have seasons colder than the average from this time till 1853, when warmth will begin again to predominate over cold. A chilly prophecy this to close with, and therefore, rather let an anecdote complete this chapter on the Weather-Watchers of Greenwich.

Among other experiments going on some time ago in the observatory inclosure, were some by which Mr. Glaisher sought to discover how much warmth the earth lost during the hours of night, and how much moisture the air would take up in a day from a given surface. Upon the long grass, within the dwarf fence already mentioned were placed all sorts of odd substances, in little distinct qualities. Ashes wood, leather, linen, cotton, glass, lead, copper and stone, among other things, were there to show how each affected the question of radiation. Close by upon a post was a dish six inches across, in which every day there was punctually poured one ounce of water, and at the same hour next day, as punctually was this fluid remeasured to see what had been lost by evaporation. For three years this latter experiment had been going on, and the results were posted up in a book; but the figures gave most contradictory results. There was either something very irregular in the air, or something very wrong in the apparatus. It was watched for leakage, but none was found, when one day Mr. Glaisher stepped out of the magnet-house, and looking toward the stand, the mystery was revealed. The evaporating dish of the philosopher was being used as a bath by an irreverent bird! a sparrow was scattering from his wings the water left to be drunk by the winds of Heaven. Only one thing remained to be done; and the next minute saw a pen run through the tables that had taken three years to compile. The labor was lost--the work had to be begun again.

DOING.

Oh, friend, whoe'er thou art, who dost rejoice In the sweet tones of thy melodious voice; Which to thy fancy are so rich and clear, Falling like music, on the list'ning ear, Of thee I ask, What hast thou done of that thou hast to do? Art silent? Then I say, Until thy deeds are many let thy words be few.

Oh, man, whoe'er thou art, within whose breast The glowing thoughts disdain ignoble rest; Whose soul is laboring with a monstrous birth Of winged words, to scatter through the earth Of thee I ask, What hast thou done of that thou hast to do? Art silent? Then I say, Until thy deeds are many let thy words be few.

Oh, brother mine, who would'st reform mankind Purging the dross, and leaving all refined; Preaching of sinless love, sobriety, Of goodness, endless peace, and charity, Of thee I ask, What hast thou done of that thou hast to do? Art silent? Then I say, Until thy deeds are many let thy words be few.

Speech without action is a moral dearth, And to advance the world is little worth: Let us think much, say little, and much do, If to ourselves and God we will be true; And ask within, What have I done of that I have to do? Is conscience silent--say, Oh! let my deeds be many and my words be few.

J. G. L. BULLEID.

[From Household Words.]

YOUNG RUSSIA.

Certain social theorists have, of late years, proclaimed themselves to the puzzled public under the name and signification of "Young." Young France, Young Germany, and Young England have had their day, and having now grown older, and by consequence wiser, are comparatively mute. In accordance with what seems a natural law, it is only when a fashion is being forgotten where it originated--in the west--that is reaches Russia, which rigidly keeps a century or so behind the rest of the Continent. It is only recently, therefore, that we hear of "Young Russia."

The main principles of all these national youths are alike. They are pleasingly picturesque--simperingly amiable; with a pretty and piquant dash of paradox. What they propose is not new birth, or dashing out into new systems, and taking advantage of new ideas; but reverting to old systems, and furbishing them up so as to look as good as new. Re-juvenescence is their aim; the middle ages their motto. Young England, to wit, desires to replace things as they were in the days of the pack-horse, the thumb-screw, the monastery, the ducking-stool, the knight errant, trial by battle, and the donjon-keep. To these he wishes to apply all possible modern improvements, to adapt them to present ideas, and to present events. Though he would have no objection to his mailed knight traveling per first-class railway, he would abolish luggage-trains to encourage intestine trade and the breed of that noble animal the pack-horse. He has, indeed, done something in this monastic line; but his efforts for the dissemination of superstition, and his denunciations of a certain sort of witchcraft, have signally failed. In truth, the task he has set himself--that of re-constructing society anew out of old materials--though highly archæological, historical, and poetic, has the fatal disadvantage of being simply impossible. It is telling the people of the nineteenth century to carry their minds, habits, and sentiments back, so as to become people of the thirteenth century; it is trying to make new muslin out of mummy cloth, or razors out of rusty nails.

"Young Russia" is an equal absurdity, but from a precisely opposite cause; for, indeed, this sort of youth out of age is a series of paradoxes. The Russian of the present day _is_ the Russian of past ages. He exists by rule--the rule of despotism--which is as old as the Medes and Persians; and which forces him into an iron mould that shapes his appearance, his mind, and his actions to one pattern, from one generation to another Hence every thing that lives and breathes in Russia being antique, there is no appreciable antiquity. The new school, therefore--even if amateur politics were allowable in Russia, which they are not, as a large population of exiles in Siberia can testify--has no materials to work upon. Stagnation is the political law, and "Young Russia" dies in its babyhood for want of sustenance. What goes by the name of civilization, is no advance in wealth, morals, or social happiness. It is merely a tinsel coating over the rottenness and rust with which Russian life is "sicklied o'er." It has nothing to do with a single soul below the rank of a noble; and with him it means Champagne, bad pictures, Parisian tailors, operas, gaming, and other expenses and elegancies imported from the West. Hundreds of provincial noblemen are ruined every year in St. Petersburg, in undergoing this process of civilization. The fortunes thus wasted are enormous; yet there is only one railroad now in operation throughout the whole empire, and that belongs to the Emperor, and leads to one of his palaces a few miles from the capital. Such is Russian civilization. What then is "Young Russia" to do? Ask one of its youngest apostles, Ivan Vassilievitsch.

This young gentleman--for an introduction to whom we are indebted to Count Sollogub--was, not long ago, parading the Iverskoy boulevard--one of the thirteen which half encircle Moscow--when he met a neighbor from the province of Kazan. Ivan had lately returned from abroad. He was a perfect specimen of the new school, inside and out. Within, he had imbibed all the ideas of the juvenile or verdant schools of Germany, France, and England. Without, he displayed a London macintosh; his coat and trowsers had been designed and executed by Parisian artists; his hair was cut in the style of the middle ages; and his chin showed the remnants of a Vandyke beard. He also resembled the new school in another respect: he had spent all his money, yet he was separated from home by the distance of a long--a Russian--journey.

To meet with a neighbor--which he did--who traveled in his own carriage, in which he offered a seat, was the height of good fortune. The more so, as Ivan wished to see as much of Russian life on the road as possible, and to note down his _impressions_ in a journal, whose white leaves were as yet unsullied with ink. From the information he intended to collect, he intended to commence helping to re-construct Russian society after the order of the new Russiaites.

The vehicle in which this great mission was to be performed, was a humble family affair called a _Tarantas_. After a series of adventures--but which did not furnish Ivan a single _impression_ for his note-book--they arrive at Vladimir, the capital of a province or "government." Here the younger traveler meets with a friend, to whom he confides his intention of visiting all the other Government towns for "Young Russia" purposes. His friend's reply is dispiriting to the last degree.

"There is no difference between our government towns. See one, and you'll know them all!"

"Is it possible?"

"It is so, I assure you. Every one has a High-street one principal shop, where the country gentlemen buy silks for their wives, and Champagne for themselves; then there are the Courts of Justice, the assembly-rooms, an apothecary's shop, a river, a square, a bazaar, two or three street-lamps, sentry-boxes for the watchmen, and the governor's house."

"The society, however, in the government towns must be different?"

"On the contrary. The society is still more uniform than the buildings."

"You astonish me: how is that?"

"Listen. There is, of course, in every government town a governor. These do not always resemble each other; but as soon as any one of them appears, police and secretaries immediately become active, merchants and tradesmen bow, and the gentry draw themselves up, with, however, some little awe. Wherever the governor goes, he is sure to find Champagne, the wine so much patronized in the province, and every body drinks a bumper to the health of the '_father of the province_.' Governors generally are well-bred, and sometimes very proud. They like to give dinner-parties, and benevolently condescend to play a game of whist with rich brandy-contractors and landowners."

"That's a common thing," remarked Ivan Vassilievitsch.

"Do not interrupt me. Besides the governor, there is in nearly every government town the governor's lady. She is rather a peculiar personage; generally brought up in one of the two capitals, and spoiled with the cringing attentions of her company. On her husband's first entry into office, she is polite and affable; later, she begins to feel weary of the ordinary provincial intrigues and gossips; she gets accustomed to the slavish attentions she receives, and lays claim to them. At this period she surrounds herself with a parasitical suite; she quarrels with the lady of the vice-governor; she brags of St. Petersburg; speaks with disdain of her provincial circle, and finally draws upon herself the utmost universal ill-feeling, which is kept up till the day of her departure, when all goes into oblivion, every thing is pardoned, and every body bids her farewell with tears."

"Two persons do not form the whole society of a town," interrupted again Ivan Vassilievitsch.

"Patience, brother, patience! Certainly there are other persons besides the two I have just spoken of: there is the vice-governor and his lady; several presidents, with their respective ladies, and an innumerable crowd of functionaries serving under their leadership. The ladies are ever quarreling in words, while their husbands do the same thing upon foolscap. The presidents, for the most part, are men of advanced age and business-like habits, with great crosses hanging from their necks, and are, during the day time, to be seen out of their courts only on holidays. The government attorney is generally a single man, and an enviable match. The superior officer of the _gens-d'armes_ is a 'good fellow.' The nobility-marshal a great sportsman. Besides the government and the local officers, there live in a government town stingy landowners, or those who have squandered away their property; they gamble from evening to morning, nay, from morning to evening too, without getting the least bit tired of their exercise."

"Now, about their mode of living?" asked Ivan Vassilievitsch.

"The mode of living is a very dull one. At exchange of ceremonious visits. Intrigues, cards--cards, intrigues. Now and then, perchance, you may meet with a kind, hospitable family, but such a case is very rare; you much oftener find a ludicrous affectation to imitate the manners of an imaginary high life. There are no public amusements in a government town. During winter a series of balls are announced to take place at the Assembly-rooms; however from an absurd primness, these balls are little frequented, because no one wants to be the first in the room. The '_bon genre_' remains at home and plays whist. In general, I have remarked, that on arriving in a government town, it seems as if you were too early or too late for some extraordinary event. You are ever welcomed: 'What a pity you were not here yesterday!' or, 'You should stay here till to-morrow.'"

In process of time Ivan Vassilievitsch and his good-natured fat companion, Vassily Ivanovitsch, reach a borough town, where the Tarantas breaks down. There is a tavern, and here is a description of it.

"The tavern was like any other tavern--a large wooden hut, with the usual out-buildings. At the entrance stood an empty cart. The staircase was crooked and shaky, and at the top of it, like a moving candelabrum, stood a waiter with a tallow candle in his hand. To the right was the tap-room, painted from time immemorial to imitate a grove. Tumblers, tea-pots, decanters, three silver and a great number of pewter spoons, adorned the shelves of a cup-board; a couple of lads in chintz shirts, with dirty napkins over their shoulders, busied themselves at the bar. Through an open door you saw in the next room a billiard-table, and a hen gravely promenading upon it.

"Our travelers were conducted into the principal room of this elegant establishment, where they found, seated round a boiling tea-urn, three merchants--one gray-haired, one red-haired, and one dark-haired. Each of these was armed with a steaming tumbler; each of them sipped, smacked his lips, stroked his beard, and sipped again the fragrant beverage.

"The red-haired man was saying,

"'I made, last summer, a splendid bargain. I had bought from a company of Samara-Tartars, some five hundred bags of prime quality, which I purchased from a nobleman who was in want of money, but such dreadful stuff it was, that if it had not been for the very low price, I would never have thought of looking at it. What did I do? I mixed these two cargoes and sold the whole lot to a brandy-contractor at Ribna, for prime quality.'

"'It was a clever speculation,' remarked the dark-haired.

"'A commercial trick!' added the gray-haired.

"While this conversation was proceeding, Vassily Ivanovitsch and Ivan Vassilievitsch had taken seats at a separate little table; they had ordered their tea, and were listening to what the three merchants were saying.

"A poor-looking fellow came in, and took from his breast-pocket an incredibly dirty sheet of paper, in which were wrapped up bank-notes and some gold, and handed it over to the gray-haired merchant, who, having counted them over, said,

"'Five thousand two hundred and seventeen roubles. Is it right?'

"'Quite right, sir.'

"'It shall be delivered according to your wish.'

"'Ivan asked why the sender had not taken a receipt?'

"The red and dark-haired merchants burst out laughing; the gray-haired got into a passion.

"'A receipt!' he cried out, furiously, 'a receipt! I would have broken his jaw with his own money, had he dared to ask me for a receipt. I have been a merchant now more than fifty years, and I have never yet been insulted by being asked to give a receipt.'

"'You see, sir,' said the red-haired merchant, it is only with noblemen that such things as receipts and bills of exchange exist. We commercial people do not make use of them. Our simple word suffices. We have no time to spare for writing. For instance, sir: here is Sidor Avdeivitsch, who has millions of roubles in his trade, and his whole writing consists of a few scraps of paper, for memory's sake, sir.'

"'I don't understand that,' interrupted Ivan Vassilievitsch.

"'How could you, sir? It is mere commercial business, without plan or _façade_. We ourselves learn it from our childhood: first as errand boys, then as clerks, till we become partners in the business. I confess it is hard work.'"

Upon this text Ivan preaches a "Young Russia discourse."

"'Allow me a few words,' he said with fervor. 'It appears to me that we have in Russia a great number of persons buying and selling, but yet, I must say, we have no systematic commerce. For commerce, science, and learning, are indispensable; a conflux of civilized men, clever mathematical calculations--but not, as seems to be the case with you, dependence upon mere chance. You earn millions, because you convert the consumer into a victim, against whom every kind of cheat is pardonable, and then you lay by farthing by farthing, refusing yourselves not only all the enjoyments of life, but even the most necessary comforts.... You brag of your threadbare clothes; but surely this extreme parsimony is a thousand times more blamable than the opposite prodigality of those of your comrades who spend their time among gipsies, and their money in feasting. You boast of your ignorance, because you do not know what civilization is. Civilization, according to your notions, consists in shorter laps of a coat, foreign furniture, bronzes, and champagne--in a word, in outward trifles and silly customs. Trust me, not such is civilization.... Unite yourselves! Be it your vocation to lay open all the hidden riches of our great country; to diffuse life and vigor into all its veins; to take the whole management of its material interests into your hands. Unite your endeavors in this beautiful deed, and you may be certain of success! Why should Russia be worse than England? Comprehend only your calling; let the beam of civilization fall upon you, and your love for your fatherland will strengthen such a union; and you will see that not only the whole of Russia, but even the whole world will be in your hands.'

"At this eloquent conclusion, the red and the dark-haired merchants opened wide their eyes. They, of course, did not understand a single word of Ivan Vassilievitsch's speech.

"'Alas, for Young Russia!' Ivan dolefully remarks in another place:

"I thought to study life in the provinces: there is no life in the provinces; every one there is said to be of the same cut. Life in the capitals is not a Russian life, but a weak imitation of the petty perfections and gross vices of modern civilization. Where am I then to find Russia? In the lower classes, perhaps, in the every-day life of the Russian peasant? But have I not been now for five days chiefly among this class? I prick up my ears and listen; I open wide my eyes and look, and do what I may, I find not the least trifle worth noting in my '_Impressions_.' The country is dead; there is nothing but land, land, land; so much land, indeed, that my eyes get tired of looking at it: a dreadful road, wagons of goods, swearing carriers, drunken stage inspectors; beetles creeping on every wall; soups with the smell of tallow candles! How is it possible for any respectable person to occupy himself with such nasty stuff? And what is yet more provoking, is the doleful uniformity which tires you so much, and affords you no rest whatever. Nothing new, nothing unexpected! To-morrow what has been to-day; to-day what has been yesterday. Here, a post-stage, there a post-stage, and further the same post-stage again; here, a village elder asking for drink-money, and again to infinity village elders all asking for drink-money. What can I write? I begin to agree with Vassily Ivanovitsch; he is right in saying that we do not travel, and that there is no traveling in Russia. We simply are going to Mordassy. Alas! for my '_Impressions_.'"

Whoever wants to know more of this amusing Young Russian, must consult "The _Tarantas_." We can assure the reader that the book is fraught with a store of amusement--chiefly descriptions of town and country life in Russia--not often compressed into the modest and inexpensive compass of a thin duodecimo.

[From Household Words.]

THE ORPHAN'S VOYAGE HOME.

The men could hardly keep the deck, So bitter was the night; Keen northeast winds sang through the shrouds, The deck was frosty white; While overhead the glistening stars Put forth their points of light.

On deck, behind a bale of goods, Two orphans crouch'd, to sleep; But 'twas so cold, the youngest boy In vain tried not to weep: They were so poor, they had no right Near cabin doors to creep.

The elder round the younger wrapt His little ragged cloak, To shield him from the freezing sleet, And surf that o'er them broke; Then drew him closer to his side, And softly to him spoke:

"The night will not be long"--he said, "And if the cold winds blow, We shall the sooner reach our home, And see the peat-fire glow; But now the stars are beautiful-- Oh, do not tremble so!

"Come closer!--sleep--forget the frost-- Think of the morning red-- Our father and our mother soon Will take us to their bed; And in their warm arms we shall sleep." He knew not they were dead.

For them no father to the ship Shall with the morning come; For them no mother's loving arms Are spread to take them home: Meanwhile the cabin passengers In dreams of pleasure roam.

At length the orphans sank to sleep All on the freezing deck; Close huddled side to side--each arm Clasp'd round the other's neck. With heads bent down, they dream'd the earth Was fading to a speck.

The steerage passengers have all Been taken down below, And round the stove they warm their limbs Into a drowsy glow; And soon within their berths forget The icy wind and snow.

Now morning dawns: the land in sight Smiles beam on every face! The pale and qualmy passengers Begin the deck to pace, Seeking along the sun-lit cliffs Some well known spot to trace.

Only the orphans do not stir, Of all this bustling train: They reached their _home_ this starry night! They will not stir again! The winter's breath proved kind to them, And ended all their pain.

But in their deep and freezing sleep, Clasp'd rigid to each other, In dreams they cried, "The bright morn breaks, Home! home! is here, my brother! The Angel Death has been our friend-- We come! dear Father! Mother!"

[From the Autobiography of Leigh Hunt.]

LORD BYRON, WORDSWORTH, AND CHARLES LAMB.

In this house, Lord Byron continued the visits which he made me in prison. Unfortunately, I was too ill to return them. He pressed me very much to go to the theatre with him; but illness, and the dread of committing my critical independence, alike prevented me. His lordship was one of a management that governed Drury-lane Theatre at that time, and that were not successful. He got nothing by it, but petty vexations and a good deal of scandal.

Lord Byron's appearance at that time was the finest I ever saw it. He was fatter than before his marriage, but only just enough so to complete the elegance of his person; and the turn of his head and countenance had a spirit and elevation in it, which, though not unmixed with disquiet, gave him altogether a very noble look. His dress, which was black, with white trowsers, and which he wore buttoned close over the body, completed the succinctness and gentlemanliness of his appearance. I remember one day, as he stood looking out of the window, he resembled in a lively manner the portrait of him by Phillips, by far the best that has appeared; I mean the best of him at his best time of life, and the most like him in features as well as expression. He sat one morning so long, that Lady Byron sent up twice to let him know she was waiting. Her ladyship used to go on in the carriage to Henderson's nursery ground, to get flowers. I had not the honor of knowing her, nor ever saw her but once, when I caught a glimpse of her at the door. I thought she had a pretty, earnest look, with her "pippin" face; an epithet by which she playfully designated herself.

* * * * *

It was here also I had the honor of a visit from Mr. Wordsworth. He came to thank me for the zeal I had shown in advocating the cause of his genius. I had the pleasure of showing him his book on my shelves by the side of Milton; a sight which must have been the more agreeable, inasmuch as the visit was unexpected. He favored me, in return, with giving his opinion of some of the poets his contemporaries, who would assuredly not have paid him a visit on the same grounds on which he was pleased to honor myself. Nor do I believe, that from that day to this, he thought it becoming in him to reciprocate the least part of any benefit which a word in good season may have done for him. Lord Byron, in resentment for my having called him the "prince of the bards of his time," would not allow him to be even the "one-eyed monarch of the blind." He said he was the "blind monarch of the one-eyed." I must still differ with his lordship on that point; but I must own, that, after all which I have seen and read, posterity, in my opinion, will differ not a little with one person respecting the amount of merit to be ascribed to Mr. Wordsworth; though who that one person is, I shall leave the reader to discover.

Mr. Wordsworth, whom Mr. Hazlitt designated as one who would have had the wide circle of his humanities made still wider, and a good deal more pleasant, by dividing a little more of his time between his lakes in Westmoreland and the hotels of the metropolis, had a dignified manner, with a deep and roughish, but not unpleasing voice, and an exalted mode of speaking. He had a habit of keeping his left hand in the bosom of his waistcoat; and in this attitude, except when he turned round to take one of the subjects of his criticism from the shelves (for his contemporaries were there also), he sat dealing forth his eloquent but hardly catholic judgments. In his "fathers house," there were not "many mansions." He was as skeptical on the merits of all kinds of poetry but one, as Richardson was on those of the novels of Fielding.

Under the study in which my visitor and I were sitting was an archway, leading to a nursery-ground; a cart happened to go through it while I was inquiring whether he would take any refreshment; and he uttered, in so lofty a voice, the words, "Any thing which is _going forward_," that I felt inclined to ask him whether he would take a piece of the cart. Lamb would certainly have done it. But this was a levity which would neither have been so proper on my part, after so short an acquaintance, nor very intelligible perhaps, in any sense of the word, to the serious poet. There are good-humored warrants for smiling, which lie deeper even than Mr. Wordsworth's thoughts for tears.

I did not see this distinguished person again till thirty years afterward; when, I should venture to say, his manner was greatly superior to what it was in the former instance; indeed, quite natural and noble, with a cheerful air of animal as well as spiritual confidence; a gallant bearing, curiously reminding one of a certain illustrious duke, as I have seen him walking some dozen years ago by a lady's side, with no unbecoming oblivion of his time of life. I observed, also, that he no longer committed himself in scornful criticisms, or, indeed, in any criticisms whatever, at least as far as I knew. He had found out that he could, at least, afford to be silent. Indeed, he spoke very little of any thing.

Walter Scott said, that the eyes of Burns were the finest he ever saw. I can not say the same of Mr. Wordsworth; that is, not in the sense of the beautiful, or even of the profound. But certainly I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired or supernatural. They were like fires half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of two caverns. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes.

* * * * *

Charles Lamb had a head worthy of Aristotle, with as fine a heart as ever beat in human bosom, and limbs very fragile to sustain it. There was a caricature of him sold in the shops, which pretended to be a likeness. Procter went into the shop in a passion, and asked the man what he meant by putting forth such a libel. The man apologized, and said that the artist meant no offense. There never was a true portrait of Lamb. His features were strongly yet delicately cut: he had a fine eye as well as forehead; and no face carried in it greater marks of thought and feeling. It resembled that of Bacon, with less worldly vigor and more sensibility.

As his frame, so was his genius. It was as fit for thought as could be, and equally as unfit for action; and this rendered him melancholy, apprehensive, humorous, and willing to make the best of every thing as it was, both from tenderness of heart and abhorrence of alteration. His understanding was too great to admit an absurdity; his frame was not strong enough to deliver it from a fear. His sensibility to strong contrasts was the foundation of his humor, which was that of a wit at once melancholy and willing to be pleased. He would beard a superstition, and shudder at the old phantasm while he did it. One could have imagined him cracking a jest in the teeth of a ghost, and then melting into thin air himself, out of a sympathy with the awful. His humor and his knowledge both, were those of Hamlet, of Molière, of Carlin, who shook a city with laughter, and, in order to divert his melancholy, was recommended to go and hear himself. Yet he extracted a real pleasure out of his jokes, because good-heartedness retains that privilege when it fails in every thing else. I should say he condescended to be a punster, if condescension had been a word befitting wisdom like his. Being told that somebody had lampooned him, he said, "Very well, I'll Lamb-pun him." His puns were admirable, and often contained as deep things as the wisdom of some who have greater names; such a man, for instance, as Nicole the Frenchman, who was a baby to him. He would have cracked a score of jokes at him, worth his whole book of sentences; pelted his head with pearls. Nicole would not have understood him, but Rochefoucault would, and Pascal, too; and some of our old Englishmen would have understood him still better. He would have been worthy of hearing Shakspeare read one of his scenes to him, hot from the brain. Commonplace found a great comforter in him as long as it was good-natured; it was to the ill-natured or the dictatorial only that he was startling. Willing to see society go on as it did, because he despaired of seeing it otherwise, but not at all agreeing in his interior with the common notions of crime and punishment, he "_dumb-founded_" a long tirade one evening, by taking the pipe out of his mouth, and asking the speaker, "Whether he meant to say that a thief was not a good man?" To a person abusing Voltaire, and indiscreetly opposing his character to that of Jesus Christ, he said admirably well (though he by no means overrated Voltaire, nor wanted reverence in the other quarter), that "Voltaire was a very good Jesus Christ _for the French_." He liked to see the church-goers continue to go to church, and wrote a tale in his sister's admirable little book (_Mrs. Leicester's School_) to encourage the rising generation to do so; but to a conscientious deist he had nothing to object; and if an atheist had found every other door shut against him, he would assuredly not have found his. I believe he would have had the world remain precisely as it was, provided it innovated no farther; but this spirit in him was any thing but a worldly one, or for his own interest. He hardly contemplated with patience the new buildings in the Regent's Park: and, privately speaking, he had a grudge against _official_ heaven-expounders, or clergymen. He would rather, however, have been with a crowd that he disliked, than felt himself alone. He said to me one day, with a face of great solemnity, "What must have been that man's feelings, who thought himself _the first deist_?" Finding no footing in certainty, he delighted to confound the borders of theoretical truth and falsehood. He was fond of telling wild stories to children, engrafted on things about them; wrote letters to people abroad, telling them that a friend of theirs had come out in genteel comedy; and persuaded George Dyer that _Lord Castlereagh_ was the author of Waverley! The same excellent person walking one evening out of his friend's house into the New River, Lamb (who was from home at the time) wrote a paper under his signature of Elia, stating, that common friends would have stood dallying on the bank, have sent for neighbors, &c., but that _he_, in his magnanimity, jumped in, and rescued his friend after the old noble fashion. He wrote in the same magazine two lives of Liston and Munden, which the public took for serious, and which exhibit an extraordinary jumble of imaginary facts and truth of by-painting. Munden he made born at "Stoke Pogeis:" the very sound of which was like the actor speaking and digging his words. He knew how many false conclusions and pretensions are made by men who profess to be guided by facts only, as if facts could not be misconceived, or figments taken for them; and, therefore, one day, when somebody was speaking of a person who valued himself on being a matter-of-fact man, "Now," said he, "I value myself on being a matter-of-lie man." This did not hinder his being a man of the greatest veracity, in the ordinary sense of the word; but "Truth," he said, "was precious, and not to be wasted on every body."

Lamb had seen strange faces of calamity; but they did not make him love those of his fellow-creatures the less. Few persons guessed what he had suffered in the course of his life, till his friend Talfourd wrote an account of it, and showed the hapless warping that disease had given to the fine brain of his sister.

AMERICAN VANITY.

We are not at all surprised at what in this country is most foolishly called the conceit and vanity of the Americans. What people in the world have so fine, so magnificent a country? Besides that, they have some reason to be proud of themselves. We have given the chief features of their eastern and inland territory; if the reader has any imagination for ideas of this kind, let him picture to himself what will be the aspect of things when the tide of population has crossed the long range of the Rocky Mountains, and, occupying the valleys of the western coast, has built other Bostons and New Yorks in the harbors of Oregon and California. This tide of population is now advancing along a line of more than a thousand miles, at the rate of eighteen miles a year; and each year, as the population behind becomes larger, the number of new settlers is increased, and the rate of advance is accelerated. This vast crowd of ever-onward-pressing settlers is not formed of the same materials as the inhabitants of an European province: that is, there are not at its head a few intelligent, but delicately-brought-up men of capital, while all the rest are ignorant laborers; but every one of these pioneers of civilization can handle the ax and the rifle, and can "calculate." If ever these magnificent dreams of the American people are realized--and all that is wanted for their realization is that things should only go on as they have been going on for the last two centuries--there will be seated upon that vast continent a population greater than that of all Europe, all speaking the same language, all active-minded, intelligent, and well off. They will stand, as it were, the centre of the world, between the two great oceans, with Europe on one hand and Asia on the other. With such a future before him, we must pardon the Yankee if we find a little dash of self-complacency in his composition; and bear with the surprise and annoyance which he expresses at finding that we know so little of himself or of his country. Our humble opinion is that we ought to know better.

Great as is the influence which America has already had upon Europe, we conceive that this is a mere intimation of the influence which it is destined to have upon the world.--_Frazer's Mag._

MONTHLY RECORD OF CURRENT EVENTS.

The domestic events of the month (which, in accordance with requests from many quarters, this Magazine will hereafter regularly record) have not been numerous or very important. The _Invasion of Cuba_, by a force collected, organized, armed, officered, and disciplined within the United States, and the successful repulse of that invasion, have been the leading topic of comment. The expedition, 300 in number, left New Orleans, under command of General LOPEZ, on the 25th of April and the 2d of May, and landed at Cardenas on the morning of the 19th of May. A brief struggle ensued between the invaders and the troops, in which the latter were repulsed, the governor captured, his palace plundered, and a large quantity of public money seized. The invaders had counted upon accessions to their ranks from the Spanish army, and from the disaffected inhabitants. In this, however, they were entirely disappointed, and LOPEZ accordingly re-embarked on the steamer which had taken him thither, and with a few of his followers, made his escape to the United States, leaving the great body of his adherents to the tender mercies of the authorities of Cuba. Lopez has been arrested at New Orleans, and awaits trial on charge of having violated the United States neutrality act of 1818: and a good deal of interest is felt in the disposition which the Cuban authorities will make of the prisoners who have fallen into their hands. It seems that a Spanish steamer captured two vessels in the Mexican waters, laden with men whom they suspected of having intended to join the invading expedition, and took them into Havana. The President of the United States has made a peremptory demand for the release of these prisoners, and declares that a clear distinction must be made between those proved guilty of actual participation, and those suspected of an intention to join, in the invasion. The result of this demand is not yet known. It is not believed, however, that the Cuban authorities will pursue a course of unnecessary or unjust rigor, as it could scarcely fail to involve them in serious difficulties with the United States.

Both Houses of CONGRESS are still engaged in debating the various questions growing out of slavery. In the House a bill for the immediate admission of California is pending, and debate upon it has been closed; but a decisive vote is evaded from day to day. Whenever that can be reached, there will probably be found to be a majority in favor of the bill. In the Senate a bill is pending which provides: 1. For the admission of California; 2. For organizing territorial governments for New Mexico and Utah, without any provision on the subject of slavery; and 3. For paying Texas a sum not specified, for relinquishing her claim to a part of New Mexico. The bill has been very fully and very ably discussed, and votes have been taken upon a great number of amendments to it, the most important of which was one prohibiting slavery forever from these territories. This was offered by Senator Seward of New York, and rejected, 33 to 23. It is believed that the final vote will be taken upon the hill before many days: the chances are in favor of its passage.

The attention of Congress has been so thoroughly occupied with these bills, that no other business of any importance has been transacted or even entertained. The general subject of slavery, which gives to them all their interest, has entered largely into the public discussions of the month. Mr. WEBSTER has written a letter to the citizens of Newburyport, Mass., upon the wrong done to the South by refusing to surrender their fugitive slaves, urging the necessity for a more stringent law, and expressing the opinion, that there is nothing, either in the spirit or the letter of the Constitution, requiring a jury trial to determine the question of slavery, when an alleged fugitive is seized. This letter has elicited a reply from Hon. HORACE MANN, of the House, also from Massachusetts, which enforces the contrary opinion, with abundant and vehement rhetoric and cogent argument. Prof. STUART, of Andover, has also published a pamphlet in support of Mr. Webster's views on the general subject.--The convention of delegates intended to represent the slave-holding states, called some months since, met at Nashville, Tenn., on the 3d of June, and adjourned after a session of ten days. Judge SHARKEY, of Mississippi, presided. The attendance was thin, delegates being present from less than half the districts interested, and they having been elected by less than a tenth of the popular vote. Resolutions were adopted, affirming the claims of the slave-holding states, and the convention adjourned to meet again six weeks after the adjournment of Congress, then to take such action as the legislation of the present session may render necessary.--A new paper called "The Southern Press" has been established at Washington, for the express purpose of advocating the interests of slavery. It is under the patronage of 57 southern members of Congress, and is intended to abstain from partisan discussions.--The subject of slavery also influences the action of the State Legislatures, which are in session, to a great extent. In the Connecticut Senate, resolutions approving of the bill pending in the U.S. Senate were rejected, 16 to 6. The Legislature has made two unsuccessful efforts to elect a U. S. Senator, in place of Mr. Baldwin, whose term expires with this session.--Senator DICKINSON, of New York, received from his political friends the compliment of a public dinner in the city of New York, on the 17th ult.--Hon. EDWARD GILBERT, Member of Congress elect from California, attended a public dinner at Albany, the place of his early residence, on the 4th. In an eloquent speech which he made upon that occasion, he expressed the ardent attachment of California to the Union, and the determination of her people not to permit slavery to be introduced within her limits.--A convention in Ohio, to revise the Constitution of that state, is now in session. The tendency of its action, so far as it is developed, has been toward greater equality and democratic freedom.--A similar convention is also in session in Michigan.--Gov. CRITTENDEN of Kentucky, recently visited Indiana by special invitation of Gov. Wright, of that state. The two being political opponents, and the visit being in some sense of an official character, the circumstance has attracted a good deal of attention. The reception of Gov. Crittenden was public, and very happy greetings were exchanged on both sides. Gov. C. made a very eloquent speech, expressing the value of the American Union and the devotion of the American people to its preservation.--The anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill was celebrated with great _éclat_ at Boston, on the 17th. The Oration was delivered by the Hon. Edward Everett, and was one of his most finished and eloquent efforts.--The treaty between Great Britain and the United States, negotiated at Washington, has been ratified by the Senate. It is highly honorable to both countries, and advantageous to the interests of commerce throughout the world. The neutrality of the Isthmus, in case of war, is mutually guaranteed.--The war between Faustin and the Dominicans is still continued: a vessel fitted out at New York, and laden with cannon and munitions of war, for the emperor, has been seized by the U. S. authorities, and detained for violation of the neutrality act of 1818.

* * * * *

Our intelligence from CALIFORNIA is to the 1st of May. Trade was dull but was receiving an impulse from the reopening of the season for mining. The Legislature had adjourned after passing a large number of bills. One of its most important acts was one imposing a tax of $25 per month upon every foreigner who should dig for gold in the mines. The measure was vindicated on grounds of justice as well as from the necessities of the state treasury: difficulty was apprehended in some quarters in attempting to carry it out.--Public meetings had been held in regard to the unjust delay to which the application of the state for admission into the Union, is subjected by Congress. Intimations were thrown out that the state would withdraw her application and maintain her independence, unless action should be had: but they do not express any thing like the general sentiment of the people.--New veins of gold had been discovered--new towns commenced, and emigrants continued to arrive. Several heavy failures had occurred, but business generally was good.

From the Isthmus of Panama we have news to the 1st of June. A serious riot had occurred there between the emigrants and the natives in which two or three were killed on each side. It grew out of the arrest of a negro boy on charge of theft, and a supposition on the part of the natives that the Americans intended to hang him. Such an incident, however, indicates an unpleasant state of feeling between the parties. Quiet, however, had been restored.

* * * * *

Of LITERARY and SCIENTIFIC Intelligence there is not much. Notices of the most important books published during the month will be found in another department of this Magazine. The question of the _Unity of the Human Race_ has been recently revived by some incidental remarks made at Charleston, S. C., by Prof. Agassiz of Harvard, which were opposed to that theory. Dr. Smyth, a learned divine of that city, wrote a book in refutation of the Professor; and we observe that the latter has pursued the matter still farther in a lecture subsequently delivered at Boston. He does not enter, however, into any full discussion of the subject, but takes occasion to disavow the intention imputed to him, of designing to question the authenticity or authority of the Mosaic Record.

Prof. LEWIS, of Union College, has published an Address delivered there some months since, in which he reviews with great ability the theories and schemes so abundant at the present day, of which Nature, Progress, and Ideas are the common watchwords. He treats them all as branches of _Naturalism_ and as in direct hostility to the Scriptural doctrine of the Divine government. The discourse is marked by the scholarship, vigor, and clear analysis which characterize all the productions of this distinguished writer.--Bishop HUGHES has also entered the lists against the prevalent Socialism of the day; not, however, in an original work but by causing to be reprinted the French work of the Abbé Martinet, entitled "Religion in Society," and by writing an introduction to it.--A new book on _California_, by Rev. WALTER COLTON, is soon to be issued. Even in the multiplicity of books upon this subject that have recently been given to the public, one from Mr. Colton's pen can hardly fail to attract and reward attention.--A work on the _Logic and Utility of Mathematics_, by Prof. DAVIES, is announced by Barnes & Co. Prof. D. is singularly happy in presenting mathematical truth clearly and attractively to the mind, and we anticipate, in this new work upon the characteristic advantages of his favorite studies, a production that will be widely useful, in promoting juster views of Education and better modes for its successful prosecution.--Prof. BARTLETT of the West Point Academy, announces a new work on _Natural Philosophy_, for the use of Colleges, which will be of value.--Mr. E. D. MANSFIELD of Cincinnati, a clear, strong and judicious writer, has also in press, a Treatise on _American Education_, which will be pretty certain to contain a good many practical suggestions worthy of attention.--The Reader of the opening article in this number of the New Monthly Magazine, will be glad to learn that an edition of the writings of DE QUINCEY is soon to be issued from the Boston press of Ticknor, Reed and Fields. No living English writer equals De Quincey in his peculiar department; in acute analytical power, and in the precision with which he uses language. He does not write for the masses--but to literary men, persons of cultivated taste and a critical habit, an edition of his Essays and multifarious sketches will be exceedingly acceptable. We presume, however, that nothing like a complete collection of his writings can be made.--An illustrated Edition of LONGFELLOW'S _Evangeline_ is also announced, and a new volume of Poems by JOHN G. WHITTIER, one of the most vigorous and masculine of living poets. Like other poets of the day, Mr. Whittier addicts himself somewhat overmuch to hobbies, and his present volume is to be mainly made up of Poems upon Labor.--LOWELL, also, has a new Poem in press, called _The Nooning_.--A new volume by Rev. HENRY GILES, entitled _Christian Thoughts on Life_, is announced. Mr. Giles is an exceedingly fluent, vigorous and brilliant writer.--A spicy controversy has grown out of a needless fling at the memory of John Jacob Astor, in a lecture delivered some months since by the Hon. Horace Mann. Mr. C. A. Bristed, grandson of the deceased Mr. Astor, has replied to it in a pungent letter, vindicating his kinsman's character and assailing with a good degree of vigor and success some of the radical theories propounded by Mr. Mann.--A new play, entitled _The Very Age_, by E. S. GOULD, is in press, and will soon be issued by the Appletons. It is said to be a sharp and successful hit at sundry follies which have too mush currency in society.--A good deal of public interest has been excited by the announcement of an alleged scientific discovery made by Mr. HENRY M. PAINE, of Massachusetts. He claims to have established the positions that Water is a simple substance: that hydrogen gas is produced by the combination of positive electricity, and oxygen by the combination of negative electricity, with water; and that by passing the hydrogen thus obtained through spirits of turpentine in its natural state, it becomes carbonized and will support combustion. The practical result claimed from the discovery is the ability to furnish _light_ and _heat_ indefinitely at a merely nominal expense. The importance of it, if it prove to be real, can not well be overrated. The possibility of the thing, however, is peremptorily denied by scientific men, and it must be evident to all that it directly contradicts scientific principles that have been regarded as fundamental. Practical experiment alone, made under proper restrictions and scientific supervision, can determine its reality. If established the revolution it would produce in the economy of life would not be greater than that which would result from it in the received theories of science.

* * * * *

THE FOREIGN events of the past month have not been of striking interest or importance. A diplomatic quarrel between England and France is the only incident which has attracted any general attention. This misunderstanding has grown out of the demands of British subjects, supported by their government, against the government of Greece, for losses sustained through its agency; but it is so entirely a matter of form that no serious result can well be apprehended. For some years past the English government has been pressing King Otho to an adjustment of these claims. One of the most important of them is that of Mr. George Finlay, who, when the Turks were leaving Greece on the formation of the Hellenic Kingdom, purchased certain portions of land from some of these emigrants. This was as long ago as in 1830, and his right to the property thus purchased and paid for was never disputed. But six years afterward King Otho seized upon these lands in order to inclose them in the royal gardens, and he has never paid for the property to this day. Another claim is that of Mr. Pacifico, a British subject, born at Gibraltar, and occupying at Athens the office of Portuguese Consul. It has been the custom for some years at Athens, on Easter-day, to burn an effigy of Judas Iscariot; but, in 1847, in consequence of the presence of Baron Rothschild, the government prevented the ceremony. The idle and reckless portion of the people, to whom such public spectacles are always matters of most interest, spread the report that Mr. Pacifico, being a Jew, had occasioned the discontinuance of this custom. A mob was soon raised by this report, which went to the house of the obnoxious consul, beat in the door, plundered the house of money to the amount of 9800 drachmas, and destroyed papers proving claims upon the Portuguese government to the amount of £21,295. For these losses Mr. Pacifico claimed restitution, and invoked the protection and aid of the British government in securing it.

These are the leading claims which have given occasion to the pending difficulties. The British government took up the subject and pressed the Greek authorities for payment of the claims. This was refused, and force was resorted to. The ports of Greece were blockaded and a bombardment threatened. This led France to offer her mediation, and Baron Gros was dispatched by the French government to Athens to arrange the dispute with Mr. Wyse, the British agent. The British government, for a long time, refused to allow the intervention of France, as the question in controversy was one which did not require or allow such interference But M. Drouyn de Lhuys being sent to London, a negotiation was prosecuted for three or four months, which resulted in an agreement between the two governments. Meantime Baron Gros at Athens, having interrupted proceedings there, Mr. Wyse resumes his demands upon the government of Greece, and, by strenuous coercion, secures all he had demanded. And Lord Palmerston decided that his proceedings must hold good. The French government was, of course, indignant at this disregard of the London convention, and withdrew her Minister from London. The dispute, at the latest dates, had not been settled, but it is not likely to lead to any thing more serious than a temporary estrangement between the two nations. It is generally believed that the quarrel is kept open by the French government, because it serves to divert public attention somewhat from the unpopular and unconstitutional abridgment of the suffrage, and because it has created an excitement favorable to the views and purposes of Louis Napoleon.

Not the least important result of this controversy has been the new position which it has induced Russia and Austria to take, in regard to the rights of British subjects residing within their dominions. The sympathies of these two nations, as well as of France, are, of course, with Greece: and the attempt of England to extend full protection to its subjects residing at Athens, has led the Emperor of Russia to address a note to Lord Palmerston, stating that he utterly rejects the principle on which British subjects or any other foreign residents in his own states, or those of any other government, had a right to be treated more favorably than the native subjects of such state; and he added, that for his part, he should expect such strangers, the moment they came to reside in his dominions, to conform themselves to the laws and usages practiced by Russians. An old law or custom had existed in Russia to this effect; it had long fallen into desuetude; but on the present occasion it has been revived by the emperor, and is now in force. The note of the Emperor of Austria is to the same effect; and though separate from that of Russia, runs concurrently with it. Lord Palmerston replied to this note, and received an answer couched in still stronger language and concluding in the following emphatic clause: "As the manner in which Lord Palmerston understands the protection due to English subjects in foreign countries carries with it such serious inconvenience, Russia and Austria will not henceforth grant the liberty of residence to English subjects, except on condition of their renouncing the protection of their Government." These documents have not been published, but their substance is given, on the authority of the London Times.

The doings of the British Parliament have not been of special importance, though they have involved the discussion of important measures. The misunderstanding with France gave rise to repeated demands on the part of Lord Brougham and others, and explanations by the ministers, in which the latter have been vehemently, and with apparent justice, charged with prevarication and concealment.--The Subject of University Reform has been incidentally discussed in the House of Lords but without decisive results.

In the House of Commons attention was called to the case of the black steward of a British vessel who had been taken out of the ship at Charleston, S. C. and imprisoned for two months simply because he was _a Man of Color_.--LORD PALMERSTON said that the case was not new; that such a law as that mentioned existed in the State of Carolina; and that the British government had remonstrated against it as a violation of the principles of international law, as well as of the treaty of 1815: but the reply had been that the Federal government was unable to revoke the law, and that, if England insisted, the American government would be compelled to terminate the treaty of 1815. The English government, therefore, had not thought it expedient to press the matter further; but it should be remembered that the law is known, and that those who go there expose themselves to it voluntarily. This acquiescence of the British government in a law and practice of one of the United States, directly in violation of the rights of British subjects, has not escaped severe animadversion.

The subject of a sinecure office in the Archdiocese of Canterbury has attracted some attention. It seems that the emoluments of the office of Register of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, have been from £9000 to £12,000 per annum, and that the office itself is a sinecure. The usage has been, that the archbishop for the time being should nominate the incumbent of the office and two successors. Archbishop Moore appointed his two sons, and they in succession held the office. Dr. Manners Sutton appointed his grandson, the present Lord Canterbury, to the reversion of the office--that grandson being then ten or twelve years old. The late Dr. Howley made a communication to the government, that, in the conscientious fulfillment of his duty he could not fill up the reversion of this sinecure when it became vacant in 1845; and it remained vacant at his death. When Dr. Sumner, the present archbishop, succeeded, he found the reversion of the office vacant, and immediately filled it up, by appointing his son, a young gentleman studying in the Temple. Lord John Russell stated that the matter was under inquiry and that the office would either be abolished or greatly altered.--The general subject of reducing the salaries and wages paid in every department of the public service, has also been discussed. The general sentiment seemed to be that the servants of government were not overpaid, and the motion for an address upon the subject was negatived.

While the bill for the government of the Australian Colonies was up, an amendment was submitted to deprive the Colonial office of all interference with the local administration of the colonies, and to give them the uncontrolled management of their own affairs. Sir W. Molesworth, who moved the amendment, closed a speech in support of it by saying that there was a striking analogy between the government of the United States and that which ought to be the system of government in their colonial empire. "For," he said, "the United States form a system of states clustered round a central republic; our colonial empire ought to be a system of colonies clustered round the hereditary monarchy of England. The hereditary monarchy should possess the powers of government, with the exception of that of taxation, which the central republic possesses. If it possessed less, the empire would cease to be one body politic; if it continue to possess more, the colonies will be discontented at the want of self-government, and on the first occasion will imitate their brethren in America." The motion was negatived by 165 to 42. This vote is important as an indication of the sentiment of Parliament in regard to Colonial government.--A motion to form an ecclesiastical Constitution for the Australian Colonies was defeated.

The bill reducing the franchise required to constitute a Parliamentary voter in Ireland to £8, has been passed. The discussion of this bill, and the action upon it, is important as showing the tendency of public sentiment in England toward a greater infusion of the democratic element into the government. The bill was opposed expressly upon the ground of its democratic tendencies by Lord Bernard, Mr. Napier, Lord Jocelyn, Mr. Disraeli, and others, and its principal supporters were Mr. Shell, Sir James Graham, and Lord John Russell. Sir JAMES GRAHAM'S speech was remarkable for the broad ground on which he supported the measure; alluding to the objection that the bill would unduly enlarge the constituent body, he said, "I do not object to it on that ground. I must say, considering the increase of the democratic element in our institutions, that I see the greatest danger in erecting an immense superstructure upon a narrow electoral basis. Sir, if that superstructure can not stand upon an extended electoral basis, I am sure that a narrow basis can not long sustain it. On principle, therefore, I can not object to this bill as it extends that basis. Allusion has been made to what has lately been witnessed elsewhere, and I think it is not good policy to neglect examples which are patent and before our eyes. If I were to mention what in my humble judgment was the immediate cause of the fall of the kingly power of Louis Philippe, it would be, that he attempted to maintain the semblance of representative government with a constituent body, which, as compared with the great bulk of the population, was dangerously narrow, and utterly inadequate. What was the consequence? A tumult arose in the metropolis, and the government was overthrown without a struggle. His power was buried in this ruin; and the consequence has been, that for the last two years the nation has been plunged into anarchy, and property and life have been rendered insecure. But what is the return of the wave, and the reaction from that state of things following the universal extension of the suffrage in France? The return is a desire to base the suffrage, restricted as compared with universal suffrage, on household suffrage, on permanent residence, and the payment of local taxation. And, I am sure that that is a safe basis on which to rest the franchise." These remarks were loudly cheered throughout. The result of the division was that the third reading was carried by 254 to 186, and the bill passed.

Other questions not directly political, but involving interests of importance, have been brought in various ways into discussion, of which we find a summary notice in the "Household Narrative." The Metropolitan Interments bill has made no further progress in the House of Commons. Lord Ashley has withdrawn his opposition to the government proposal for giving practical efficacy to the Ten Hours Act; and all the more rational of the Ten Hours champions have signified acquiescence in the compromise. When the bill shall have passed, factories will be worked from six to six on five days in the week, and between six and two on Saturdays, with perfect leisure after two on the latter day, and with an hour and a half for meals and leisure on each of the former. A measure not less interesting to masses of the most industrious part of the population, is the scheme for securing more direct responsibility in the management of Savings Banks, and for extending the power of government to grant annuities and life assurances of small amounts through the medium of those institutions, which is now before the House of Commons for discussion. Various projects of law reform have been started. A commission has been issued, preparatory to a reform of the system of special pleading. Lord Campbell has introduced a bill to simplify criminal pleadings, and prevent the lamentable and too notorious defects of justice on small technical points; the same dignitary has declared, in judgment on a case in the Queen's Bench, that the intervention of an attorney is not essential in the employment of a barrister, but that the latter may receive his instructions directly from the party to the suit. A spirited attempt is in progress, by Mr. Keogh, to reform the Ecclesiastical Courts in Ireland; and the Lord High Chancellor Cottenham has issued a series of orders which will have the effect of dispensing, in a large class of suits, with the formality of bill and answer, and of providing for the reference to the master, on a mere observance of certain very simple forms. A motion to repeal the advertisement duty was lost, 208 to 39. A motion to inquire into the sanitary condition of the journeymen bakers was negatived, 90 to 44. A bill, the principal object of which was to place in the hands of the Board of Commissioners the regulation of all the Irish fisheries, was lost by a majority of 197 to 37. A bill proposing to allow railway companies to buy waste lands on the margins of their railways and establish cemeteries on them, was thrown out by 123 to 4. Lord John Russell has introduced a bill to abolish the _Viceregal Office in Ireland_. The bill gives power to the Queen to abolish the office by order in Council; to appoint a fourth Secretary of State, chargeable, like the others, with any of the functions of a Secretary of State, but in practice with Irish affairs: some of the functions of the Lord Lieutenant will be transferred to the Secretary for the Home Department, others be given to Her Majesty in Council. The Lord Chancellor of Ireland will be President of the Privy Council in Ireland. The bill was opposed by several Irish members, but leave was given to bring it in by 107 to 13.

An official correspondence on the intention of Ministers to issue a Royal Commission of inquiry into the state and revenues of the UNIVERSITIES of Oxford and Cambridge has appeared in the newspapers. Lord John Russell, after announcing the Ministerial intention in his place in Parliament, wrote to the Chancellor of the two Universities "to explain the views of her Majesty's confidential servants in recommending this measure to her Majesty's approbation." His letter is now published; and the other portion of the correspondence given to the public, is the letter of the Duke of Wellington to the authorities of the University of Oxford, requesting them to take the Premier's letter into consideration, and give him the assistance of their opinions in a report; and the report of the University authorities rendered in compliance with that request. Lord John Russell, in his letter, after alluding briefly to the legality of the Commission, puts forward the following general considerations: "No one will now deny, that in the course of three centuries the increase of general knowledge, the growth of modern literature, the discoveries of physical and chemical science, have rendered changes in the course of study at our national Universities highly expedient. The Universities themselves have acknowledged this expediency, and very large reforms of this nature have been adopted both at Oxford and at Cambridge. These improvements, so wisely conceived, reflect the highest credit on those learned bodies." He then proceeds to state the general line of the limitations of the proposed action of the government, saying that it is not to obstruct, but only to facilitate the changes and improvements already in progress. Both the Universities have warmly protested against the Commission.

Preparations for the INDUSTRIAL EXHIBITION of 1851 continue to be made. It is stated that about £50,000 has been subscribed toward the grand Industrial Exhibition, and nearly 200 local committees formed to promote. A project has been started to connect with it a religious congress of the Christians of all nations. To questioning in Parliament, it has been answered by the Minister that no government supply was contemplated beyond the expenses of the Royal Commission. The various German Powers have united, and the Commission in London has apportioned 100,000 square feet of space to the service of the German exhibitors generally, 60,000 square feet being reserved for the States of the Zoll-Verein 30,000 for Austria, and 10,000 for the North German States and the Hanse Towns.

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The transactions of the London SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES for the month present nothing worthy of record. The Zoological Society has received a new and valuable collection of animals, and among them the first live hippopotamus ever brought to Europe.--Letters from Mr. LAYARD, who is prosecuting his researches in the East, have been received to the 18th of March, in which he mentions the Arab reports of remarkable antiquities in the desert of Khabour, which have never been visited by European footsteps, and toward the exploration of which he was just setting out, with an escort of Arab Sheiks and their followers, in all, to the number of seventy or eighty in company. During his absence on this new track, the excavations at Nimrood are to be continued by the parties employed on that work, which has recently furnished interesting acquisitions to Mr. Layard's collection. One important inscription is mentioned, and more winged-lions and bulls.

The Times has an account of a new invention for extinguishing fires, the work of Mr. Phillips--the agent used being a mixture of gas and vapor. A public experiment was made with it, at which a compartment of a large open building, quite twenty feet high inside, was fitted up with partitions and temporary joisting of light wood, well soaked with pitch and turpentine, and overhung besides with rags and shavings soaked in the like manner. The torch was applied to this erection, and the flames, which ascended immediately, at length roared with a vehemence which drove the spectators back to a distance of forty feet, and were already beyond the power of water. The inventor then brought forward one of his hand machines, and threw out a volume of gaseous vapor, which in half a minute entirely suppressed all flame and combustion; and to show that the vapor which now filled the space was quite innoxious, Mr. Phillips mounted into the loft, and passed and repassed through the midst of it with a lighted candle in his hand. The machine with which this effect was accomplished, was rather larger than a good sized coffee-pot, and consisted of three tin cases, one within another, and mutually communicating. There was a small quantity of water in the bottom of the machine, and in the centre case was a composite cake, of the size and color of peat, containing in the middle of it a phial of sulphuric acid and chlorate of potash. In order to put the machine into action this phial is broken, and a gaseous vapor is generated so rapidly and in such quantity that it immediately rushes out from a lateral spout with great impetuosity Mr. Phillips explained that a machine of any size could be made according to the purpose for which it was intended.

Some recent experiments on light, in Paris, have attracted a good deal of attention in the scientific circles. M. Foucault is said to have practically demonstrated that light travels less rapidly through water than through air, though he made his experiments with instruments devised by M. Arago, and mainly under his direction. The importance of the discovery may be judged of from the fact that for the last twelve years M. Arago has been pondering over it, and on the means of effecting it.

Experiments have been made on the means of protecting the hands against molten metal. M. Corne, in a paper submitted to the Academy of Sciences, thus details them:

"Having determined on investigating the question, whether the employment of liquid sulphurous acid for moistening the hands would produce a sensation of coldness, when they are immersed in the melted metal, I immersed my hands, previously moistened with sulphurous acid, in the melted lead, and experienced a sensation of decided cold. I repeated the experiment of immersing the hand in melted lead and in fused cast-iron. Before experimenting with the melted iron, I placed a stick, previously moistened with water, in the stream of liquid metal, and on withdrawing it found it to be almost as wet as it was before, scarcely any of the moisture was evaporated. The moment a dry piece of wood was placed in contact with the heated metal, combustion took place. M. Covlet and I then dipped our hands into vessels of the liquid metal, and passed our fingers several times backward and forward through a stream of metal flowing from the furnace, the heat from the radiation of the fused metal being at the same time almost unbearable. We varied these experiments for upward of two hours; and Madame Covlet, who assisted at these experiments, permitted her child, a girl of nine years of age, to dip her hand in a crucible of red hot metal with impunity. We experimented on the melted iron, both with our hands quite dry, and also when moistened with water, alcohol, and ether. The same results were obtained as with melted lead, and each of us experienced a sensation of cold when employing sulphurous acid."

A circular from Prof. Schumacher has brought an announcement of the discovery of a new telescopic comet, by Dr. Peterson, at the Royal Observatory of Altona, on the 1st of May. "Unfavorable weather," says Mr. Hind, writing to the _Times_, "prevented any accurate observation that evening, but on the following morning at 11 o'clock, mean time, the position was in right ascension 19h 24m 8s, and north declination 71° 19' 34". The comet is therefore situate in the constellation Draco. The right ascension diminishes about 48" and the declination increases about 8' in the space of one day.

The LITERARY INTELLIGENCE of the month comprises the issue of no books of very great pretensions. The _Autobiography of Leigh Hunt_ was just ready for publication, and from the extracts given in the preceding pages of this Magazine, our readers will readily judge it to be a book of more than ordinary interest. It is full of anecdote and incident, often trivial in themselves, but sketched with that _naiveté_ and warmth of manner which constitute the charm of whatever HUNT writes. It will be a favorite with summer readers. Two octavo volumes of Selections from _Modern State Trials_, by Mr. TOWNSEND, have been published: they comprise only five state trials properly so called, the rest being trials for murder, forgery, dueling, &c. The book is interesting and eminently readable. General KLAPKA'S _Memoirs of the War in Hungary_ have been published, and attract the attention of the critical pen. The author was one of the leading generals in that gallant but unsuccessful struggle; and his opinions of the men engaged in it, and the causes of its failure, are therefore entitled to notice and respect. He regards the raising of the siege of Komorn as the turning point in the campaign. He speaks of KOSSUTH and GÖRGEY as the two great spirits of the war--the one a civilian, the other a soldier. The Athenæum condenses his views concerning them very successfully. Kossuth, according to him was a great and generous man, of noble heart and fervid patriotism, at once an enthusiast and a statesman, gifted with "a mysterious power" over "the hearts of his countrymen;" possibly, however, of too melancholic and spiritual a temperament for the crisis, and unfortunately a civilian, so that notwithstanding his "marvelous influence to rouse and bring into action the hidden energies of the masses," he could not "give them a military organization;" Görgey, on the other hand, an able, hard-headed soldier, believing only in battalions, and capable of using them well, but wanting enthusiasm, without great principle, without even patriotism, taciturn and suspicious, chafing against authority, and aiming throughout chiefly at his own ends in the struggle, wanting that breadth of intellect or strength of courage that might have made his selfishness splendid in its achievement. Had Kossuth had the military training of Görgey, or had Görgey had the heart of Kossuth; or, finally, had there been a perfect co-operation between the two men and the parties which they represented, Hungary might have been saved. Nor, so far as Kossuth was concerned, was there any obstacle to such co-operation. His disinterestedness, as it led him at last to resign all into the hands of Görgey, would have led him to do so, had it been necessary, at first. But Perezel and the other generals, who were friends of Kossuth, disliked Görgey; never had full trust in him, and even accused him from the first of treachery. Görgey is alive and rich; the earth covers the dead bodies of many of his former comrades, pierced by the bullet or strangled by the ignominious rope, others live exiles in various lands. Of these last is Kossuth. There is something striking in the unanimity with which all testimonies combine as to the nobility of this man. Even Görgey, his foe, once wrote to General Klapka--"Kossuth alone is a classical and generous character. It is a pity he is not a soldier." General Klapka's own book is an involuntary commentary on this one text--"O that Kossuth had been a soldier!"

A volume of selections from papers contributed to the _Edinburgh Review_, by Mr. HENRY ROGERS, has been published. They relate chiefly to questions of religious interest, or have an indirect bearing upon religious philosophy. Comparing them with the similar papers of Sir James Stephen, a critical journal says, the author is less wide and comprehensive in his range, in expression less eloquent and original, but more practical in his views. He attacks the two extremes of Tractarianism and Skepticism; gives large and sound expositions of Dr. Whately's views of criminal jurisprudence; and attempts special biographical sketches, such as Fuller's, Luther's, Pascal's, and Plato's.

The fourth volume of SOUTHEY'S _Life and Correspondence_ has been issued, and sustains the interest of this very attractive work. Southey's Letters are among the best in the language, easy, unaffected, full of genial, intelligent criticisms upon men, books, and things; and abounding in attractive glimpses of the lives and characters of the eminent literary men who were his contemporaries. The new volume mentions that after Southey's acrimonious letters to Mr. William Smith, M.P. for Norwich, appeared, he was offered the editorship of the London Times, with a salary of £2000, and a share of the paper, but declined it.

The readers of the _Excursion_ will remember that it was announced as the second part of a poem in three parts, called the _Recluse_. The first part was biographical, "conducting the history of the author's mind to the point when he was emboldened to hope that his faculties were sufficiently matured for entering upon the arduous labor which he had proposed to himself;" and the third part consisted mainly of meditations in the author's own person. It is now stated that the poem has been left in the hands of the author's nephew, Rev. Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, with directions that it should be published after his decease, together with such biographical notices as may be requisite to illustrate his writings. It is in fourteen cantos. A meeting of the personal friends and admirers of Wordsworth has been held, to take steps to erect a monument to his memory.

There have been published a large number of books of travel, among which the following are mentioned:--Lord Chesney has issued the first portion of his narrative of the Government _Expedition to the Euphrates_; and a certain Count Sollogub has recorded his traveling impressions of Young Russia, in a lively little book called _The Tarantas_. An English artist, lately resident in America, has described his _Adventures in California_; and Mr. Robert Baird, a Scotch invalid traveling for health, with strong party prepossessions, but shrewd observant habits, has published two volumes on the _West Indies and North America in 1849_. Also, pictures of travel in the Canadas, in a book called the _Shoe and Canoe_, by the Secretary to the Boundary Commissioners, Dr. Bagley; a very curious and complete revelation of Eastern life, in a _Two Years' Residence in a Levantine Family_, described by Mr. Bayle St. John; a peep into _Nuremberg and Franconia_, by Mr. Whiting; a summer ramble through _Auvergne and Piedmont_, by the intelligent Secretary of the Royal Society, Mr. Weld; the record of a brief holiday in Spain, _Gazpacho_, by a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; _Notes from Nineveh_, by a clergyman who has lately had religious duties in the East; and a satisfactory and compendious compilation called _Nineveh, and Persepolis_, by one of the officials of the British Museum.

An article in the Quarterly Review, on the _Flight of Louis Philippe and his Family_, in the Revolution, has attracted a good deal of attention in Paris. It was written by Mr. Croker, from materials supplied by the ex-king himself, and denounces Lamartine and the leading actors of the revolution, with the utmost bitterness. Lamartine has written a reply to it, the chief object of which is to refute one of the principal assertions of Mr. Croker, by proving that he, Lamartine, not only did not take measures to prevent the flight of Louis Philippe and the members of his family, but that he actually exerted himself actively to have them placed out of the reach of danger. LEDRU ROLLIN has occupied his leisure, during his exile in London, by writing a book on the _Decadence of England_, which abounds in the most extravagant statements and predictions. It is denounced, in the strongest terms, as a worthless compound of malice and credulity.

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The OBITUARY for the month embraces the name of M. GAY-LUSSAC, one of the great scientific men of Paris. The _Presse_ says that few men have led a life so useful, and marked by so many labors. There is no branch of the physical and chemical sciences which is not indebted to him for some important discovery. Alone, or in conjunction with other eminent men, particularly with M. Thénard and M. de Humboldt, he carried his spirit of investigation into them all. At a very early age he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences. In 1810, says M. Pouillet, speaking in the name of that academy, when the university opened, at length, its public courses of high teaching, it sought to associate in that object the most eminent scientific men of France, and M. Gay-Lussac, though very young, recommended himself to it by the double title of chemist and natural philosopher. "M. Gay-Lussac was already famous by his discovery of the fundamental laws of the expansion of gas and vapors; by a balloon ascent the most important and almost the only one of which the history of science has any record to keep; and for many works on chemistry which tended to lay the bases on which that science was soon afterward to be established." M. Gay-Lussac was a peer of France.

The Brussels papers mention the premature death of M. P. SOUYET, the eminent chemist, at the early age of thirty-two. M. Souyet was professor of chemistry at the _Musée de l'Industrie_, and at the Royal Veterinary School at Brussels. His funeral, on the 6th inst., was attended by the most eminent scientific men in Brussels; and M. Quetelet delivered an address, in which he briefly enumerated the important discoveries and chemical investigations that have rendered the name of M. Souyet so well known. M. Souyet had written several valuable chemical works.

The EMPEROR OF CHINA, TAU-KWANG (the Lustre of Reason), "departed upon the great journey, and mounted upward on the dragon, to be a guest on high"--in other words died, on the 25th of February, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, and thirtieth of his reign. His death is said to have been caused by the fatigue he underwent at the funeral ceremonies of the late Empress-Dowager, his mother-in-law. The nomination of a successor in China rests always with the Emperor, and before his death Tau-Kwang decreed that his fourth and only surviving son should succeed him. He ascended the throne the day of the Emperor's death, and is to reign under the title of Sze-hing. He is only nineteen years of age. Keying, the former Viceroy at Canton, is appointed his principal guardian, and will no doubt hold a high and an influential position in the Cabinet. It is not likely that any material change in the policy of the Government will take place, but from the enlightened character of Keying and his knowledge of foreigners, the tendency of any new measures will probably be toward a more liberal course.

The EARL OF ROSCOMMON died on the 15th inst. at Blackrock, near Dublin, in the fifty-second year of his age.

MAJOR-GENERAL SIR JAMES SUTHERLAND, of the East India Company's Service, died suddenly on the 15th, at his house. He had enjoyed perfect health up to the day of his death, when he invited a large number of friends to dinner. He was giving instructions to his butler with respect to the wines in his drawing-room, and Lady Sutherland was standing near him. He suddenly grasped her shoulder, fell to the ground, and died in a few minutes. He was in the sixty-sixth year of his age, and had seen a great deal of service in India.

The "Scottish Press" records the demise of MRS. JEFFREY, the widow of one whose death was so recently the cause of an almost universal sorrow. Shortly after Lord Jeffrey's decease, his widow, affected in a more than ordinary degree by the sad event, broke up her establishment, and took up her abode with Mr. and Mrs. Empson, her son-in-law and daughter. Though naturally cheerful, her spirits never recovered the shock she sustained by the death of her distinguished partner, whom she has not survived four months. Mrs. Jeffrey was born in America, and was the grandniece of the celebrated John Wilkes, and second wife of the late Lord Jeffrey, to whom she was married in 1813.

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Affairs in FRANCE are without change. The Assembly was proceeding with the bill for restricting the suffrage, and some of its sections had been adopted. No doubt was entertained of its final passage. It meets, however, with stern opposition, and will lay the foundation for a settled popular discontent, highly unfavorable to the permanence of the government or the tranquillity of the Republic. No immediate outbreak is apprehended, as the preparations of the government are too formidable to allow it the least chance of success. The government has adopted very stringent measures against the opposition press. On the 14th, M. Boulé, the great printer of the Rue de Coq-Heron, was deprived of his license as a printer. He was the printer of the "Voix du Peuple," the "République," the "Estafette," and several other papers. The authorities seized all the presses, and placed seals on them. In consequence of this step, the Editors issued a joint letter explaining how their papers were prevented from appearing. The editor of the "Voix du Peuple" was brought again before the tribunals on the same day for attacks on the government. In the one case the sentence previously pronounced against him of a year's imprisonment and a fine of 4000f. for an attack on M. Fould's budget was confirmed, and for the other he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment and a fine of 5000f. Courtois and the Abbé Chatel have been convicted by juries, of inflammatory speeches at electoral meetings. The former was condemned to a year's imprisonment and 1000f. fine, and two years' more imprisonment if the fine be not paid. The Abbé Chatel has a year's imprisonment and 500f. fine. It seems rather surprising that the government should obtain verdicts against the Socialists, considering how Socialism has spread in Paris.

The French Embassador having been recalled from St. James's, General la Hitte, the Minister of War, read to the National Assembly on the 16th, a letter he had written to the French Embassador at London, in consequence of infraction, by England, of the conditions on which France had agreed to act as mediator in the affairs of Greece. The letter, after a summary of the circumstances of the misunderstanding, and the demand that it should be set to rights, proceeded to say: "This demand not having been listened to, it has appeared to us that the prolongation of your sojourn at London is not compatible with the dignity of the Republic. The President has ordered me to invite you to return to France, after having accredited M. Marescalchi in quality of Chargé d'Affaires," and concludes, "You will have the goodness to read this present dispatch to Lord Palmerston." This announcement was received by the Right with loud acclamations, the Left, or Mountain party remaining silent.

* * * * *

In GERMANY the Erfurt Parliament, having finished the revisal of its proposed Constitution for the German Union, dissolved itself, and has been succeeded by two separate Convocations. The one is held in Frankfort, and consists of the representatives of the old Germanic confederation, convoked by the Emperor of Austria, with the object of re-organizing that confederation. This conference includes all the secondary States of the old confederation except Oldenburg and Frankfort itself, though the assembly is held within its own walls. The other, held at Berlin, was assembled by the king of Prussia, and consisted of twenty-one heads of sovereign houses, with representatives of the three Hanse towns, Hamburg, Bremen, and Lubeck. This last convention has finished its sittings, and the members, previous to separating, were entertained by the king at a banquet on the 16th, when his majesty addressed them in a speech expressive of his satisfaction with their proceedings.

On the 22d _An Attempt was Made on the Life_ of the King of Prussia, by a Serjeant of artillery named Sesseloge, who fired a pistol at him as he was setting out for Potsdam, and wounded him slightly in the arm. The assassin was immediately apprehended.

* * * * *

The only political news from SPAIN during the month, related to some palace intrigues, in which the Queen, King-Consort, and General Narvaez were concerned. One evening in the last week of April the King suddenly notified to General Narvaez and the rest of the cabinet his intention of quitting Madrid in order not to be present at the accouchement of the Queen. After exhausting all means of persuasion to induce him to change his purpose, but which were of no avail, a council of ministers was held, in which it was decided to oppose by force the King's departure. His Majesty was placed under arrest. Sentries were stationed at the door of his apartment, and the King remained a prisoner during four hours, at the end of which time his Majesty capitulated, and even consented to accompany the Queen in an open carriage in her usual evening drive on the Prado.

After a _Drought of Five Years_, the province of Murcia has been visited by a copious rain. It was curious to observe the young children who had never seen rain in their lives, evince as much alarm as if some frightful accident had happened. Rain also has fallen in the vast "Huerta," or garden-land of Valencia: the simple inhabitants of the villages, in the height of their joy, have carried their tutelary saints about the streets with bands of rustic music.

At about a league from Saragossa a _Powder-mill exploded_ and many lives were lost. Parts of human bodies, remnants of clothing, and the remains of beasts of burden, were found scattered in every direction. The edifice was shattered to pieces.

* * * * *

Since the Pope has established himself in ROME, that capital has been very quiet. The French commandant, General Baraguay d'Hilliers, has returned to Paris, but the French troops remain. The Pope adheres to his high-handed measures of reaction. Rome is full of mysterious rumors, not entitled, however, to much credit. The Pope is accused of an attempt to escape from that city, and his continuance there is only attributed to the vigilance with which his movements are watched by the French. Tuscany is about to be occupied by 14,000 Austrian troops, the time of occupation to be determined by the will and convenience of the Cabinet of Vienna. There is a rumor that, as a counterbalance. Savoy is to be occupied by a French army. It is feared that plans are in agitation for the political enthrallment of all Italy.

LITERARY NOTICES.

THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACES PROVED TO BE THE DOCTRINE OF SCRIPTURE, REASON, AND SCIENCE. By the Rev. Thomas Smyth, D.D. New York: George P. Putnam. 12mo, pp. 404.

The question discussed in the present volume, is one that has excited great attention among modern savans, and more recently, has obtained a fresh interest from the speculations concerning it by the popular scientific lecturer Professor Agassiz of Harvard University. In many respects, Dr. Smyth has shown himself admirably qualified for the task he has undertaken. He brings to the discussion of the subject, the resources of great and various learning, the mature results of elaborate investigation, a familiarity with the labors of previous writers, and a lively and attractive style of composition. The argument from Scripture is dwelt upon at considerable length, and though presented in a forcible manner, betrays the presence of a certain tincture of professional zeal, which will tend to vitiate the effect on the mind of the scientific reader. Under the head of the Former Civilization of Black Races of Men, a great variety of curious facts are adduced, showing the original sagacity and advancement in all worldly knowledge and science, by which the family of Ham was distinguished. The testimony of a southern divine of such high eminence as Dr. Smyth, to the primitive equality in the intellectual faculties of the negro and European races, is not a little remarkable, and speaks well for his candor and breadth of comprehension. The discussion of the origin of the varieties in the human race is conducted with great ingenuity and copious erudition, but it must be admitted, hardly succeeds in making out a case to the satisfaction of the inquirer, who regards the subject only in the light of history and philosophy.

The influence of the theory which he opposes, on the relations of the Southern States, is considered by Dr. Smyth to be of a different character from that set forth by many writers. He believes that it would be suicidal to the South in the maintenance of her true position toward her colored population. The diversity of the Black and White races was never admitted by the fathers of the country. They always recognized the colored race which had been providentially among them for two centuries and a half as fellow-beings with the same original attributes, the same essential character, and the same immortal destiny. The introduction of a novel theory on the subject, Dr. Smyth maintains, would be in the highest degree impolitic and dangerous, removing from both master and servant the strongest bonds which now unite them, and by which they are restrained from licentious, immoral, and cruel purposes.

Without reference to many statements, which will produce the widest latitude of opinion in regard both to their soundness and their accuracy, the work of Dr. Smyth may be commended as a treatise of the highest importance in the scientific discussion to which it is devoted, abounding in materials of inestimable value to the student, filled with the proofs of rare cultivation and scholar-like refinement, and every way creditable to the attainments and the ability of the author and to the literature of the South.

HISTORICAL VIEW OF THE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE OF THE SLAVIC NATIONS; WITH A SKETCH OF THEIR POPULAR POETRY. By Talvi. With a preface by Edward Robinson, D.D., LL.D. New York: George P. Putnam. 12mo., pp. 412.

It is rarely that a subject is treated with the profound investigation, vigorous analysis, and intelligent comprehensiveness which are exhibited in the discussion of the interesting literary topics to which the present work is devoted. The authoress, whose name is concealed in the mystic word Talvi, is understood to be the lady of Rev. Professor Robinson, and her rare accomplishments in various departments of learning have long since established her intellectual reputation in the most cultivated European circles. Usually written in her native German language, her productions are perhaps not so extensively known in this country, although few of our educated scholars are ignorant of her researches in a province of literature with which her name has become, to a great degree, identified.

The volume now published is characterized by the extent and thoroughness of its investigations, its acute and judicious criticisms, its warm-hearted recognition of true poetry, even in an humble garb, and the force and facility of its style. The last trait is quite remarkable, considering the writer is using a foreign language. There is little, either in the translations or the original portion of the work, to remind us that it is the production of one to whom the language is not native.

After describing the old, ecclesiastical Slavic Literature, the authoress proceeds to the literary monuments of the Eastern and Western Slavi, giving an elaborate account of the Russian, Servian, Bohemian, and Polish literatures, with glances at the achievements of several less important branches of the great Slavic race. In the course of this discussion, a great variety of rare and curious information is presented, of high importance to the student of ethnography and history, and accompanied with complete and lucid references to the original sources. The most attractive feature of the work to the general reader will doubtless be the sketch of the popular poetry of the Slavic nations, illustrated with abundant specimens of songs and ballads, many of which are marked with a strong natural pathos and tenderness, and all of them possessing a certain rustic simplicity, which is usually of a very pleasing character, and seldom offensive.

HINTS TOWARD REFORMS, in Lectures, Addresses, and other Writings. By Horace Greeley. New York: Harper and Brothers. 12mo pp. 400.

A handsome volume, consisting principally of Lectures delivered before popular Lyceums and Young Men's Associations, with several brief Essays on subjects of popular interest. The distinguished author presents his views on the various topics which come under discussion with inimitable frankness and good humor, and in the fresh, flowing, unaffected style, which gives such a charm to the productions of his pen, even with readers who most strongly dissent from his conclusions. Among the questions considered in this volume are The Emancipation of Labor, The Ideal and the Actual of Life, The Formation of Character, The Social Architects, Alcoholic Liquors, Tobacco, The Trade Reform, The Church and the Age, Humanity, and several others of perhaps still more general interest. The admirers of the author, as well as all who are interested in the question of Social Reform, whether ranking themselves among the Conservatives or Progressives, will welcome this work as the only compact and systematic expression of his peculiar theories, now before the public, and as a valuable manual for reference on many points which engage a large share of attention at the present day.

ANTONINA; OR, THE FALL OF ROME. A Romance of the Fifth Century. By W. Wilkie Collins. New York: Harper and Brothers. 8vo, pp. 160.

It is long since the English press has sent forth a more truly classical and magnificent romance, than the present narrative of some of the thrilling scenes which attended the downfall of the Roman Empire. The author has been known heretofore by the biography of his father, the celebrated historical and landscape painter, the friend of Coleridge and Allston; but that work gives no promise of the splendor of imagination, and the rare constructive power which are shown in the composition of Antonina. It is one of those rich and gorgeous portraitures, glowing with life and radiant with beauty, which make a profound impression on their first exhibition, and long continue to haunt the memory with their images of mingled loveliness and terror.

* * * * *

D. and J. Sadlier have issued a translation of the Abbé Martinet's celebrated _Solution of Great Problems placed within the Reach of every Mind_, with a preface by the Rt. Rev. Bishop of New York, Dr. Hughes. This work holds a high rank in modern Catholic literature, and is brought before the American public by Bishop Hughes in a warm introductory encomium. It discusses many of the leading religious questions of the day in a racy and pointed style, and while opposing what the author deems the errors of Protestantism in general, reserves its hottest fire for modern Pantheism, Socialism, Rationalism, and other kindred innovations, which he regards as gaseous exhalations from the bottomless pit, taking a visible form in these latter days. From the well-known ability of the author, and the spicy relish of his pen, the work is adapted to make a sensation beyond the pale of the Catholic Church, without taking in account the high-toned sarcasm of the preface, in which department of composition the talents of Bishop Hughes are unquestionable.

Harper and Brothers have issued the second number of Lossing's _Field Book of the Revolution_, a work, which from the novelty of its plan and the ability of its execution, has already proved a general favorite with the reading public. It combines the authenticity of history with the freshness of personal narrative, and in the richness and beauty of its embellishments is hardly surpassed by any of the serials of the day.

The same house have published an original translation of Lamartine's _Past, Present, and Future of the French Republic_, which will be read with interest on account of the character of the author, and the light it throws on the practical workings of Democracy in France, though it has little of the fiery rhetoric of most of his former writings.

Harper and Brothers have issued a reprint of Dr. Lardner's _Railway Economy in Europe and America_, a work overflowing with scientific, statistical, and practical details, and which will be considered as essential to all who wish to comprehend the subject, in its various bearings whether engineers, stockholders, or travelers, as fire and water to the locomotive. Dr. Lardner has brought together the results of long and laborious research, and many portions of his descriptive narrative are as entertaining as a novel, and more so.

D. Appleton & Co. have published _The Lone Dove_, an Indian story of the revolutionary period, redolent of sentimentality and romance run wild, betraying a great waste of power on the part of the anonymous writer, who has evidently more talent than is made use of to advantage in the present work.

_Mezzofanti's Method applied to the Study of the French Language_, by J. Romer, published by the same house, is a work of great philological interest, on account of the curious analogies which it describes, and contains an excellent collection of specimens from French poets and prose writers, but its value as a practical manual for the teacher can be determined only by use.

The _Ojibway Conquest_, by Kah-ge-gah-gah-bowh, or George Copway, issued by G. Putnam, will find a place among the curiosities of literature as the production of a native Indian Chief, whose muse has been inspired by the forest and stream of his original haunts, without having incurred a large debt to the influence of civilization. Copway is an exemplary Christian and an intelligent man, but he will get less fame from his poetry than from his descent.

_Six Months in the Gold Mines_, by E. Gould Buffum, from the press of Lea and Blanchard, is one of the most readable books which have sprung up under the California excitement, the author having been familiar with the country before the gold fever had broken out. His style is straight-forward and pleasant, showing more of the soldier and adventurer than the scholar, but none the worse for that. His information appears to have been collected with great care, when it was not gained by personal observation, and has the outward and inward signs of authenticity, to a very satisfactory degree. The book can not fail to be acceptable to all who have one foot in California, as well as to the few readers who are not in that condition.

Crocker and Brewster, Boston, have published an admirable treatise, entitled _Astronomy, or the World as It Is and as It Appears_, understood to be from the pen of a highly intelligent lady of that city. It is equally excellent for the chaste beauty of its style, the clearness of its scientific expositions, and the completeness and accuracy of the information which it presents.

W. B. Smith and Co., Cincinnati, have published a large _Treatise on the Principal Diseases of the Interior Valley of North America_, by Daniel Drake, M.D., which discusses the subject with great learning, and in a popular style. It can hardly fail to take the rank of a standard authority in the important department which it treats.

Summer Fashions.

FIG. 1. CARRIAGE COSTUME.--Dress of bright apple-green silk; the skirt with three deep flounces pinked at the edges. The corsage high and plain. Mantelet of very pale lilac silk, trimmed with two rows of lace de laine of the same color, and each row of lace surmounted by passementerie. The lace extends merely round the back part of the mantelet, and the fronts are trimmed with passementerie only. Bonnet of white crinoline, with rows of lilac ribbon set on in bouillonnées. The bonnet is lined with white crape, and the under-trimming consists of bouquets of lilac and white flowers. Straw-colored kid gloves. White silk parasol.

FIG. 2. BRIDAL DRESS FOR THE MARRIAGE CEREMONY.--Robe of white poult de soie. The skirt very full, and ornamented in front with five rows of lace, finished at each end with bows of white satin. The rows of lace are of graduated lengths, the lower row being about a quarter and a half long, and the upper one not more than five or six inches. The corsage is high at the back, but open in front nearly as low as the waist, and edged round with a fall of lace, narrowing to a point in front. Within the corsage is worn a chemisette, composed of rows of lace falling downward, and finished at the throat by a band of insertion and an edging standing up. The sleeves are demi-long and loose at the lower part, and the under-sleeves are composed of three broad rows of lace. The hair in waved bandeaux on the forehead, and the back hair partly plaited and partly curled, two long ringlets dropping on each side of the neck. Wreath of orange blossom, jasmine, and white roses. Long bridal vail of Brussels net.

FIG. 3.--The revival of an old fashion has recently excited the attention of the _haut ton_ abroad. A specimen of the style is given in the Engraving, _fig._ 3. It is designed chiefly for a rich riding-dress, it being too long in the skirt for the promenade, and not convenient for the drawing-room. It is called the Moldavian Style; a _petite veste_ of dark green cloth entirely covered with an embroidery of lace imitating _guipure_ royal, and displaying the shape to the greatest perfection. The skirt is very ample and cut in a novel manner so as to fall in long folds like an antique drapery. The front is ornamented with an apron-trimming of deep lace. The sleeves are demi-long; the hands and wrists covered by long white gloves. When in full dress for the saddle, a gray beaver hat is worn, the brim low in front, and turned up at the sides, and ornamented with a long, twisted ostrich feather; cambric collar and _manchettes_ (ruffles) each closed by a double button of rubies or other precious stones.