before the ice; of the mammoth, or woolly elephant; the woolly rhinoceros, the cave lion and bear, the reindeer, the musk oxen, the lemmings, and the marmots which inhabited Britain till the ice drove them out southward, even into the south of France; and how as the ice retreated, and the climate became tolerable once more, some of them, the mammoth and rhinoceros, the bison, the lion, and many another mighty beast, re-occupied our lowlands, at a time when the hippopotamus, at least in summer, ranged freely from Africa and Spain across what was then dry land between France and England, and fed by the side of animals which have long since retreated to Norway and to Canada. I should have liked to tell the archæologist of the human beings -probably from their weapons and their habits of the same race as the present Laplanders, who passed northward as the ice went back, following the wild reindeer herds from the south of France into our islands, which were no islands then, to be in their turn driven northward by stronger races from the east and south. But space presses, and I fear that I have written too much already.

At least, I have turned over for you a few grand and strange pages in the book of nature, and taught you, I hope, a key by which to decipher their hieroglyphics. At least, I have, I trust, taught you to look, as I do, with something of interest, even of awe, upon the pebbles in the street.

VITUPERATION.

THE mind of man naturally relishes and takes delight in vituperation in hearing others, provided that no personal interest is concerned, deliver themselves of hearty abuse, careless of nice discrimination. People would not call names if they did not meet with the sympathy of animated attention; there would be few vituperators if there were no applauding audience. Vituperation is, in fact, a social exercise, and the liking for it is ingrained; a spice of abuse enlivens a dull subject as much as a good story. We may all recollect the stimulus which an honest, cheerful, witty vituperator on our own side has given to our convictions. Even before a side is taken, the confidence which is inspired by an outburst of contumely goes for something, and has done so from the beginning of things. Satire, says Dryden,

and he means vituperation, is almost as old as verse; and though hymns, which are the praises of God, may be allowed to have been before it, yet the defamation of others came not long afterwards. Of course the vituperation of which we speak as being so generally acceptable is not malignant. It is that habit of a ready, licentious tongue which anticipates and strengthens opinion in the speaker rather than is formed by it. People of ordinary good nature do not like to be parties to the more bilious forms of railing, where the railer desires to injure by his execrations; it must be understood that the bark is worse than the bite, that the whole thing is an achievement of rhetoric, with which malice has little to do. If we cannot admit in the retrospect that a trick of vituperation is really harmless, either to speaker or sympathizers, yet people assume it to be so when it amuses them and they allow themselves to enjoy it.

The pleasure of vituperation we take to be a kind of glory, an exuberant elevation and sense of power in placing our antagonist or victim on any level we please. Whatever may be said of laughter, there is no doubt that calling names is an assumption of superiority; we judge a man when we designate him a blockhead or a rascal. Nor is this glory confined to the speaker; it inflates in a lesser degree those who listen, and who are supposed to be capable of appreciating a derogatory opinion which is confided to them. They feel themselves cleverer and honester by unconscious comparison. The power to string epithets together stands for a substantial accomplishment, and has a way of creating conviction as the string lengthens. Hence a good vituperator is hailed as an important ally among the zealots of a cause, both as keeping adherents in good hu

mor and their convictions at the proper tension. We are not sure that a party can ever be found to take root without one to carry people a little beyond themselves and so commit them. Not but that there are men so keenly vituperative as to be unfitted for any kind of fellowship. They play their game alone. Social vituperators are of this class. As the practice can scarcely be largely indulged in in society without some qualities that make it entertaining, it all passes for sport, as "the man's way." There are people so much in the habit of witty disparagement that, if they talk of their friends at all, they cannot help doing them an injury, and attaching some stigma to their names in the minds of those who hear them, so that ever after there clings a sense of something to their disadvantage; for to hear a person called names whom we do not know, or to whom we are indifferent, establishes a prejudice, the strength of which is in proportion to the absence of apparent ill-will in the vituperator, and to the very vagueness and dimness of the charge. Nobody can slip into the vein without some ill-nature; but when a man is young and fresh this taint may be as little perceived by himself as by his admiring friends. Indeed, though ill-nature certainly grows under the habit, at first it may be little enough. It is the unrestraint and want of discipline which does the mischief, the use of a language immoderate, unmeasured, indiscriminating, unscrupulous.

A habit will long outlive the wit which set it off, and a hardened vituperator who calls names, and characterizes his neighbor's actions in opprobrious terms, has few friends. The same epithets which, in the fascinating insolence of sanguine and confident youth, appear to be a mere ebullition of animal spirits, offend us as disappointed malice when the game of life is played out. In fact, no imagination is active or lively enough to supply an unceasing flow of fresh invective; and yet there is no point on which the ear more inexorably demands novelty and play of invention. The man who designates either friends or enemies by the same abusive terms through a lifetime gets nothing but the reputa tion of a foul tongue for his pains. There must be something quaint and new, something to repeat, in order to sustain his band of listeners. The whole language of calling names is transitional, and changes with a rapidity known to no other art. Thus the sexagenarian railer finds himself superseded and outshone by some younger tongue well up in the most recent vein; his very terms are old-fashioned; and, whether for this or some deeper cause connected with the morality of the subject, we shall always find him flat, embittered, tinged with melancholy or discontent, his friends consulting and shaking their heads over him behind his back, and the whirligig of time bringing about abundant revenges. And what happens to persons in their private capacity, happens to authors in regard to their fame. Pope made sure that his "Dunciad" would survive as long as the English tongue should remain as it was in the reigns of Queen Anne and King George; he seemed to rest his fame upon it. It is read no doubt still, but how stale and wearisome have his epithets become now. The perpetual recurrence of dunce, fool, and knave repels the general reader, to whose fancy they once condensed so much fine satire when dunce and fool were the favorite terms of opprobrium. Vituperation is the only language-assuming it to be the best of its kind that loses credit and dignity with time. It will not keep. If when it is old it still amuses us, it is rather at the expense of the vituperator than of his subject and victim. In our calm superiority we see the injustice of it, and muse on the righteousness of moderation. What disadvantage is it, for example, to the Presbyterians of the seventeenth century to find them described by their opponents in a string of epithets as "covetous, false, undermin ing, poor-spirited, void of generous souls, sneaking, suivelling," &c.? Who suffers in our estimation, Andrew Marvell, or the critic who habitually calls him "buffoon"? We are amused rather than convinced of Prynne's unpopularity when we are told that "he almost nauseated the sober part of the nation by the stench of his carrion pasquils." We are not influenced in our estimate of Anthony a-Wood when we find that a rival biographer pronounces his book a “tu

multuous mixture of stuff and tattle." Vituperation has two stages of appreciation when approved at all. At first

we like it because it expresses our prejudices with a courage and audacity which we are not equal to; and afterwards, as a literary curiosity, as showing upon what matters the asperities of a past age, which we have ourselves outgrown, exercised themselves. Where not redeemed by quaintness and the use of obsolete terms, the effect of vituperation on a style is generally to vulgarize it; for all names, all set forms of abuse, by whomsoever originated, descend to the vulgar at last. Hence it is wonderful how a habit of calling names lowers a man with posterity. Warburton was a great of fender in this way. His "Divine Legation" "stuck with some candid men "who did not like his line of argument; aad his orthodoxy was called in question. In return he calls the pious Romaine an "execrable scoundrel." His correspondence abounds with such terms - applied to wellmeaning divines as dunces, wretches, a worthless crew, abandoned libellers, and senseless, profligate scribblers. He boks forward, in his preface to a second volume, to "hanging them all like vermin in a warren, then leaving them to posterity to stink and blacken in the wind." He reached the climax of this sort of rhetoric when, in the House of Lords, he apologized to Satan for having supposed him capable of inditing Wilkes's pamphlet. Even antiquity was not safe from his tongue. Not only was the society of antiquiries a hospital of blockheads, but the very fathers of the church were miscalled. John of Antioch he suspected of bing a "shagrag," and Theodoret and an august brotherLood were "poltroons." He only, however, exceeded the practice of the day. There was a trick amongst friends of prising one another up to the skies, and treating all the rest of the world as "wretches," which tells but poorly upon an indifferent and supercilious posterity. We find a record of Swift's, whose cynicism took this direction, showing a strictly private indulgence of the vein in his comments on the leading men of his day. If that on Lord Wharton, "the most universal villain I ever knew," was not well merited, at least it was shared by his friends; but he had also personil antipathies, as to the Scotch. Thus somebody is " of the greatest knaves, even for a Scot;' the Duke of Argyle is an ambitious, covetous, canny Scot." Then there llow in order Duke of Bolton, a great booby; Duke of Montagu, "as great a knave as any in his time;" Earl of Ranelagh, "the vainest fool I ever saw;" Earl of Sandwith, as much a puppy as ever I saw, ugly and a fop; " Earl of Feversham," he was a very dull old fellow; " Lord Guildford, "a mighty silly fellow," and so on. In order to show a high standard of merit, it was necessary to such a temper to fatter somebody. Flattery, indeed, is a necessary antithesis to vituperation, as we see when a few of these wits get together or write civil letters to one another.

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The present century had the counterpart of these masters of the art in Prof. Wilson, whom nobody ever surpassed in the reckless daring of his contumely. His vituperation was essentially of the unmalignant sort, betraying unrestraint and recklessness rather than malice. What a quantity of stuff of this kind, that looks poor enough now, amused his Contemporaries, and uplifted them in the reading into some sense of his own audacious smartness! as when, for example, he characterizes cockneys by every epithet of scorn, calls Leigh Hunt, mainly on this account, a profligate creature, and stigmatizes all opponents, literary or political, as blackguards and villains. Though less exuberant, we find the same vein in De Quincey. It was a family tendency. His marvellous boy brother was an early proficient; once he proposed to execute the feat of standing head downwards on the ceiling "like those scoundrels the flies." He works himself into quite a passion of ill language against Dr. Johnson, for his tone towards Milton. He is rancorous and unappeasable, "Am I the man," he asks, to suffer him to escape under the trivial impeachment of prejudice'?" "Dr. Johnson, viewed in relation to Milton, was a malicious, mendacious, and dishonest man." We call this vituperative, becaused he is obliged to make admissions about Milton which expose himself quite as reasonably_to the same allegations, without once flying out at him. But

the vituperative temper cares nothing for consistency; blindness is one of its characteristics.

We have only touched on the more creditable forms of vituperation, as indeed a branch of rhetoric, a vehicle for zeal, an expression of honest conviction even where self comes in. It is innocent in proportion to the absence of merely personal considerations, if indeed it can ever be quite clear of these or of some dash of error. We certainly see that men may have taste and principles so much at heart that they keenly hate, and rejoice to vilify, the dead who are removed from them by long periods of time and remoteness of association. With what a rage of contumely Mr. Ruskin denounces painters who have lain for ages in their graves; what adjectives and what nouns in conjunction; what ingenuity of novel invective do his pages display! "Sickening offensivenesses; ""weaknesses and paltrinesses;""tottering affectations; "" tortured inanities; ""shallow, unreflecting nothingness;" distorted feverishness;" "strained and disgusting horrors such flowers of criticism on art are thickly strewn. How he storms at the "intolerable, inconceivable brutality of Salvator," "base born, thief-bred," and at the lower Dutch schools, " which lose the villanous in the brutal and the horror of crime in its 'idiocy'!" However well-merited may be his rebukes, it is impossible not to discern in Mr. Ruskin a relish for railing in well-sounding periods and a perception of the literary use of invective a relish which we regard as dangerous alike to growth in judgment and to permanent influence.

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Whatever may be the incitement to this vein - whether a detestation of moral turpitude, as in the mutual denunciations of Cavalier and Roundhead, Puritan and Churchman; or of folly, which was the stimulus to abuse among the wits of a later age; or of defective taste, which is perhaps the provocative to bad language that is most general in our own time all vituperation comes at last to the charge of knavery and villany of some sort. We are so far moral creatures that nothing satisfies the unlicensed tongue but measuring all men and things alike by a moral standard. The man is as villanous who perpetrates a false quantity as he who rebels against his king, or betrays his country, or scruples at a dogma, or tyrannically imposes it. However far removed our likes and dislikes, our tastes and efforts, may seem from the standard of moral right and wrong, vituperation never stops short of it. Not knowing the language of moderation, it is incapable of shades or degrees, and is driven to see wickedness and foul wrong in all that it disapproves in order to account for and justify its own vehemence.

THE LITERARINESS OF LITERATURE.

ALTHOUGH it is not pleasant to be mulcted in one of the higher enjoyments, as that man is mulcted who has to recant or modify a literary admiration, yet reasons superior to those of pleasantness, urging that a misplaced enjoyment is better lost than kept, should make us ready to revise any of our admirations on good cause shown. Accordingly, when the weightier ordnance of criticism goes off against some cherished object-when the spirits of Gifford or of Jeffrey speak through their time-honored depositaries to restrain the errant predilections of a younger generation we are always disposed to listen deferentially. Now the current number of the Quarterly Review contains a criticism of just the kind which it is none the less proper we should examine because it threatens to be destructive of some of

our pleasures. It is written in depreciation, not intemperate or malicious, of a phase of contemporary English poetry including productions which many readers of poetry regard with enthusiasm, as an honor to the age and language. Coupling together the names of Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Rossetti, and Mr. Morris, the writer charges the work of all three (and incidently that of other and still more celebrated living poets) with qualities which he holds fatal to their permanent reputation.

Let us see what are the qualities which the Quarterly Reviewer has in his mind. He sums up his points in the

single epithet literary,- "The Latest Development of Literary Poetry," not at first sight the most damning that could be attached to works of literature. But the sequel throws light upon his case. It appears that "literary," as a term of reproach, has for our reviewer a two-fold application: poetry is literary as to its subjects, if that is drawn from ancient or remote sources, implying familiarity and sympathy with old forms of recorded thought; it is literary as to its style, if its style differs from the idioms of speech in ordinary use except in so far as it economizes these and elevates them. Those are definitions which we draw word for word from the writer's own text, although he does not himself bear them consistently in mind, or take any pains to keep subject and style distinct in his allegations. Indeed, he permits his whole thoughts on the question in a confusedness which stands in the way of their proper discussion, and constrains us to treat them less as argument than as a loose bundle of considerations, suggesting one or two far from recondite counter-considerations, which it may be worth while to try and put forward with somewhat more precision. (And at starting we would disavow all advantage to be taken from one or two palpable slips made by the reviewer in the easier and less disputable parts of criticism. For example, he calls it a characteristic of the latest English blank verse to be "scientifically precise, and not unlike the iambic in its pauses;" whereas the truth is that the whole art of Mr. Tennyson in his blank verse has been to practise variations at once the most subtle and the most audacious in the normal iambic scansion of the metre, while its more monotonous treatment in the hands of Mr. Swinburne abounds none the less in ellipsis and other intentional licenses, to a point unheard of by its earlier masters.)

The Quarterly Reviewer then, after a slight allusion to the alleged causes of Keats's death, laments that "since Keats, English poetry has had an exclusively literary mark," and proceeds to give a list of antecedent poets free from this blot, from Chaucer down to Crabbe. As he mixes up the questions of matter and manner, and we desire to keep them to a certain extent apart, we will not follow him through his examples, but say what we have got to say in our own order. A poet, like a painter, may evidently either be inspired by the circumstances of his immediate experience, or by circumstances, which he has imagined or read of, belonging to other times and another environment than his own. Within what limits and in what mode is the latter inspiration, that due to retrospective or creative imagination, tradition, or reading, allowable to him? when and on what terms does it justly become a cause of reproach? We should ourselves say that the inspiration drawn from literature and the past is only illegitimate when it is not really inspiration; when it is a stock or mechanical trick of art, playing upon antique or far-away themes and allusions not for the sake of feeling, but for the sake of fashion, because fashion declares that the right rule of poetry. For a long time no poem could be written in France or England without direct mechanical reference to an ancient model, without an invocation to the Nine and abundant apostrophes and similitudes in the language of classical mythology, without calling the sun Phoebus and the moon Cynthia and the rainbow Iris. Imagery of this kind, whether adorning a contemporary or an ancient theme, is what we should call literary in an opprobrious sense, a sense implying the chillness of convention as opposed to the glow of inspiration. But there is another way of being literary which carries no opprobrium, which is spiritual and not mechanical, and that is when something antique or faraway catches freshly hold of a living imagination, excites it really, and is recast by it in a form of beauty. Every instance of this is a gain to mankind; the larger the class of themes to which the imagination of any age can extend this vivifying touch, the richer will be that age's literature and its bequest to the next. In the strength of the emotion, the vividness and beauty of the picture produced under the emotion, lies the sole criterion of right or wrong in the choice. It is the glory of the imagination to give a new life to things of which the old natural life is no more,

to invest with the colors of life things which never had it on the natural earth; it is a poetical age of literature when the imagination does this, freely, sincerely, and enjoyingly, for a vast range of old or visionary things; it is an unpoetical age of literature when the imagination can only do it for a narrow range, or does it imitatively and without enthusiasm. And the English poetry of the nineteenth centurynot least, we think, the very poetry of Mr. Morris with which our reviewer quarrels―carries out this work of reanimation with a new and catholic instinct of delight, ranging over the whole field of antiquity, the whole field of the Middle Age, in no stale or simulated spirit, but with the same stir and eagerness of living enjoyment as over the field of visible nature-with spontaneous lingerings of affection and bright amplifications of the brooding and realizing fancy. And that, we maintain (and are surprised that it should be necessary to maintain), is more than a legitimate, it is a memorable and invaluable service for poetry to do us. If it is well that poetry should strike out the aspects of the present in their own colors, it is certainly not less well that it should put the present in delighted possessions of the past and the past's visions-an imagination within an imagination-so that nothing lovely should be lost. And the Quarterly Reviewer who commits himself to the opinion that "the general function of the poet is to find expressions for the thoughts and actions of the men among whom he lives," seems to have framed a definition rather to justify his prejudications than to exhaust the acknowledged meaning of that which he defines. That is to starve the matter of poetry-to tie poetry arbitrarily down to one small portion of its functions, unless you include in the thoughts of living men (what the reviewer grudges to do) the thoughts which living men extend towards dead men and their thoughts.

But it is only the exclusive, the paramount, preoccupation with far-off fancies that we condemn." Let each man, we say, do his own work; and let us be thankful to him if he does it well, instead of insisting that he should do something else. And, in truth, our censor, in his hurry to stirmatize the real or assumed alienation of modern poets from the active life which surrounds them as something new and heretical in poetry, hazards the most curious appreciations of some of their predecessors, whom he would have us think of as having escaped their errors. Any thing or nothing gains exemption for a writer who flourished before the days of the French Revolution. Dryden and Butler are not "literary" - because our party politics are represented in their verse. Goldsmith and Crabbe belong to the course of genuine English poetry—because they describe pictures of English peasant life. Spenser is redeemed by the patriotic and contemporary allegory in his work, and because Gloriana stands for Queen Elizabeth. Milton's imagination is certainly guilty of transcending the bounds of space and time, but he keeps a foot on firm ground-by his part in politics? no, that seems to be overlooked; but by the fact that his minor poems contain "enchanting descriptions of English country scenery." That is very droll. Descriptions of English country scenery occur certainly in much larger proportion in the work of Mr. Morris, and might on the above principle have been expected to redeem that gentleman's muse from the reproach of being exclusively "literary." But, with a fine tenacity to a foregone construction in spite of appearances, the mark of the beast is detected even here; the loving and direct nature-writing of the modern writer is ingeniously set down as "very happily caught from "the out-of-door freshness and naïveté of the romances." In the same spirit - by no means, we have said, of malice, but of clammy adhesion to an ill-considered formula, as the limpet is not critical of any rock it has stuck to the new and passionate inspiration which Keats found in external nature is ignored; Keats, veritably the incarnation of a reaction against literary convention in poetry, is dubbed father of that literary spirit which we are henceforth to reprehend in our poetry, inasmuch as his works "do not contain a single allusion to passing events," as he failed to be "exhilarated by the conflict of modern opinions," and "found an opiate for his despondency in the remote tales

of Greek mythology." Despondency found the ally which we all know against the opiate, but happily not until some of the tales, from being remote, had been brought very near in an illumination which will not fade.

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We have left ourselves little space to speak of that part of the charge under consideration which refers to style and diction. Here again we venture to think the reviewer might have seen reason to distrust his aversions, if he had taken a little more pains to examine in what they really consisted. He complains that the modern poets" affect an arbitrary standard of diction," remote from the common speech of men, and seems to associate this remoteness of dialect with the remoteness of theme which is the other object of his strictures. "The style of our poets till the beginning of this century was generally as idiomatic as their subjects were national." And we are told how the old poets "treated the language as an inheritance;" how they with great pains "elaborated a poetical idiom' according to the proper genius of our tongue, of which younger writers have allowed scarcely a trace to survive; how between the language of modern poets and that in general use "there is an extraordinary difference; how the literary poet "aims first of all at being strikingly original," and at "producing a perfectly novel effect of language." The reviewer does not give sufficient examples to make it quite clear what qualities of diction he has actually in view. But, again, there occurs against him the obvious instance of Milton, who charged the language with unheard-of Latinisms, and, though he lived before the beginning of this century, transformed and expanded his inheritance certainly with greater boldness than any of his late successors. And there occurs, also, the obvious principle that just as the feeling to be expressed in poetry differs from the feeling expressed in common speech, in the same degree ought the language in which it is expressed to differ from that in general use. When the Quarterly Reviewer refers to Pope as a model, and to Pope's character of Atticus as a 'splendid example of poetic diction," we agree that he is referring to an excellent passage by a great master of English. But Pope is not a master, nor is the character of Atticus a passage, in that vein of poetry which is the expression of exalted feeling and impassioned imagination. And it has usually been one phase or another of exalted feeling and impassioned imagination which since the revolutionary revival English poets have endeavored to express; and our reviewer condemns the language in which they have expressed it by a standard adapted to something quite different. The style which he admires is in truth a much more generalized, much more really artificial or "literary" style than the later styles, which are repugnant to his feelings because they carry the stamp of a more emphatically expressed individuality and more highly strung feeling. In caling these "literary" and that "idiomatic" he has arrived at an actual inversion of the true position of the case. Most of the instances of archaic or technical diction which he cites in modern poetry are precisely instances of a surely healthy tendency of our language to enrich and invigorate its vocabulary from its own ancient stores, and other quarters forbidden by the literary canon of that which our reviewer calls the "idiomatic" period. We do not mean to say that in thus stretching and renewing the resources of English, modern poets have avoided the faults of mannerism that many rampant or glittering individualities in style may not contrast badly with the classical gait of the language in that poetry which was a poetry of wit and reason, and not of the imagination. But we do say it is idle thus to accuse the styles of contemporary poets as forming the dialeet of a caste idle to talk as if the prescription of a classical period could furnish an ultimate standard of poetical

diction in an emotional instinct which must be trained, indeed, in all the traditions of the language, but which must vibrate infallibly also to every note of genuine passion, every stroke of living imagination, every fine associated beauty of meaning or music, which comes carried along each new mode or

- when the truth is that the sole standard resides

mould of language in which an individual genius stamps itself. "How shall any man acknowledge the existence of this subtle standard in another? When will any two measure alike by so intangible a canon?" That is the despair of each critic may forever accuse his neighbor of lacking what is but an internal and invisible organ after all.

At any rate, we do not seem to have seen the signs of its existence in the remarks we have had under consideration. If we have thought and called admirable some of the poetry which we here find slightly esteemed — if, for instance, such or such a sonnet of Mr. Rossetti has seemed to us a masterpiece of imaginative richness as well of diction, none the less classical, none the less English, for its ornate and sonorous pregnancy, because these qualities are the appropriate dress of its peculiar pitch of thought and passion

we shall not consent to forego our enjoyment for a criticism which almost seems to have been written that a couplet of its writer's favorite poet might be fulfilled-concerning one who,

Now to sense, now nonsense leaning,
Means not, but blunders round about a meaning.

Dislike of the worship of new gods, distaste for the poetical part of poetry these, if we may venture the expression, constitute the pivot of the evolutions above reviewed; and these are the unconscious essence of half that indistinct grudging-spiritedness which passed once under the name of

criticism.

FOREIGN NOTES.

A MOVEMENT is on foot for all workmen in France to labor one hour per day extra and devote the proceeds to liberating the territory from the Germans.

AT a fancy ball in Florence, the Princess Strozzi wore a dress so heavy with jewels and gold damask, that, as soon as all her guests had arrived, she changed it for a lighter costume, which would enable her to move with something like ease.

A CORRESPONDENT at Brussels writes that Titian's "Madonna with the Veil," which was generally believed to have been destroyed at the storming and sacking of Rome by the Constable of Bourbon, has been found again among the pictures in an old chateau belonging to the late Dr. Riteri. The professors of the Academy of Turin pronounce it to be the genuine picture.

AN English gentleman in Paris has just become the fortunate winner of a most valuable lottery. It appears that a French lady persuaded the Briton to take tickets of two napoleons in a raffle which she was getting up for the purpose of disposing of some magnificent jewels, which rumor says had belonged to the Empress. He paid the sum, and thought no more of the matter; when to his utter astonishment he received a small packet one day, and on opening it he found he had become the happy possessor of a diamond cross and necklace worth about sixty thousand dollars. This is a fact- or it would not have been in the French papers.

THE latest hypothesis concerning Dr. Livingstone is that he is "imprisoned for debt." Why a man need have got into the heart of Africa to achieve this purpose is hard to say; but Mr. Winwood Reade, who has sojourned in Africa, has simply declared this to be the great traveller's probable fate. It seems that when you get into an African village a hut is given you, and as long as you remain you are supplied with goats, fowl, yams, &c.; and when you are going away you are asked to pay the bill. But suppose you don't pay your bill- and there are people of that turn of mind-your luggage is taken; and if you have no luggage you are taken yourself. This is what has happened to Dr. Livingstone.

M. LEOUZON-LEDUC, in his " Mémoires d'Alexandre II.," relates a curious incident in the life of the present Emperor

of Russia. One day the late Emperor Nicolas, hearing a great noise in the room in the Winter Palace where his children were playing, went in to see what was the matter. He found Constantine holding down his brother Alexander by both knees, and pulling with all his strength at the knot of a cravat which he had tied round Alexander's throat. Alexander, who was nearly throttled, was begging for mercy, and his father only came just in time to save him. On being asked the meaning of this strange scene, Constantine explained to his father that they were re-enacting a well-known event in Russian history the assassination of the Emperor Paul I. Constantine was put under arrest for having attempted to strangle the Czarowitch, and Alexander was sent to prison because he cried for mercy.

THE question of the use of phosphorized bronze as a material for guns is now engaging the attention of many of the European Powers. For some time past important trials have been going on with guns of this material in Prussia, and, we understand, with the most satisfactory results. The Swiss Government have under trial a breechloader of phosphorized bronze; the Dutch Government a muzzle-loader; the Italian Government, having repeated the statical tests which were applied to this material by Messrs. Montefiori-Levi and Künzel, of Liége, have resolved upon proceeding to the trial of guns of the material; and in Vienna some phosphorized bronze guns are about to be tested. Finally, the French Government are about to make some guns with this bronze, supplied from Liége.

MR. SPURGEON in a recent address to the Young Men's Christian Mission of the town of Walworth, objected to prefix "Reverend " as applied to himself. "I do not know myself," said he, "by that name. I am not entitled to the slightest reverence from anybody. If you must reverence man, find out somebody that deserves it. I do not profess to." After this disclaimer, it would, of course, be bad taste on the part of the Walworth Christian Young Men to feel or show any reverence for Mr. Spurgeon; but at the same time it must be difficult for them to meet his wishes in this respect when he elevates the ministerial office by such stories as the following:- "On Saturday,” he said, “I received a letter from Australia containing an order for three Baptist ministers.' I had some thoughts of getting them packed up and labelled This side up with care,' and sending them out by the next mail, but," continued Mr. Spurgeon, "the most amusing part was the postscript. Here it is-P.S. Don't send duffers."" This story made the Walworth Young Men's Christian Mission laugh exceedingly, and their mirth was renewed when Mr. Spurgeon added that had it not been for the postscript he could have executed the order at once, "but duffers' are no more liked in Australia than they are here." If decided Christians take to poking fun at each other in this fashion, they will be compelled for their own sakes to cultivate a little toleration. It must be dreadfully provoking for Baptist ministers of England to hear that it is not easy to find one who is not a "duffer."

THE experiences of a pork-butcher's shop-boy named Broche who has just been tried by court-martial at Versailles are well worth a passing record. On the outbreak of the Communal insurrection, he was taken - much against his will from the sale of sausages to serve in a Federal battalion of National Guards at Neuilly. Here he incurred the ill-will of his comrades by his refusal to accept the rank of a captain. He was accordingly tried and sentenced to be shot. The men entrusted with his execution decided - by way of a change, perhaps – to hang the unfortunate Broche, instead of shooting him, and he was accordingly launched into space from a first-floor window. He contrived, however, to cling to the wall, and so to avoid total strangulation, until cut down by some men of another battalion who took pity on him and disapproved of the unmilitary mode of execution adopted. Broche, however, only remained two days with his new friends. At the end of that time he attempted to escape, but was so closely pursued that he jumped into the Seine, and swam to the bank

occupied by the Versailles troops, who hospitably receive! him with a hailstorm of balls, one of which struck him in the leg. Being taken before a court-martial of officers of the regular army, his protestations of innocence were disbelieved, and he was condemned for the second time to be shot. The executioners of M. Thiers, however, did not do their work any better than those of the Commune, for though duly shot and left for dead, Broche escaped with two flesh wounds and a broken arm. He was hidden and nursed by an inhabitant of Puteaux, where he had been shot, and when the Commune fell, was again arrested and taken to Versailles, where he appears to have passed the last eight months in prison. Being tried a few days ago for the third time, the unlucky and yet lucky pork-butcher was at once acquitted. Here's a ready-made hero for a sensational novelist.

"It seems probable," says the Pall Mall Gazette, "that among other distinguished visitors to London during the approaching season we are likely to be favored with the presence of an Albanian gentleman, aged forty, and unmarried, whose appearance alone will insure him a warm welcome in fashionable circles." He is, according to the Medizinische Wochenschrift of Vienna, of middle heigh and beautifully and strongly built, and is tattoed from "top to toe." His whole body looks as though it were tightly enveloped in a webbing of richly woven Turkish stult. From the crown of his head to the tips of his toes he is cov ered with dark blue figures of animals and plants, in the interspaces of which appear to be characters in blue an: cinnibar red. The hands are tattoed on both surfaces, La only with inscriptions. The blue figures stop short at the insteps of the feet, but the tattooing is continued along the toes to the root of the nails in the form of red characters. Through the very hairs of the scalp and of the beard a ̧ pear also designs in blue. On the forehead, one on either side, are two panthers, separated in the middle line by rei characters. There are altogether on his body three hundred and eighty-eight figures. All of these are of a bla color, and represent apes, leopards, cats, tigers, eagles crowned sphynxes, storks, swans, men, women, elephants. crocodiles, snakes, fish, lions, snails, fruit, leaves, flowers, bows, arrows, and quivers. The inscriptions on the surface of the hands belong, according to Pro. Müller, to the language of Burmah. This interesting stranger is said 'o have been tattoed as a punishment in Chinese Tartary for supplying insurgents with arms during a rebellion in that country. He intends shortly to visit London, where b will no doubt meet one of the requirements of the daynamely, a person about whose identity at any future time

there cannot be a shadow of doubt.

THE Count Espagnac, a well-known picture fancier, wh... is constantly buying, selling, and exchanging works of art appeared recently as a prosecutor before the tribunal Correctional Police under the following circumstances: I March, 1870, a young man of engaging appearance, name Léon Bezier, called at his house in the Rue de Clichy and represented that he was going to England, where he would have excellent introductions to the Duc d'Aumale who was a great amateur of paintings and curiosities. I particularly proposed to sell to the duke some interesting autographs of the Orleans family which Count Espagn possessed. The count, after several interviews, gave his confidence to the volunteer broker. He at once truste him with the precious autographs; and subsequently, the receipt of assurances by his agent that he had beer warmly received at Twickenham, and that the duke was most desirous to purchase some chefs d'œuvre of the Espa_nac collection, packed up a Cromwell, a Saint George of Raphael, and a Giorgione, and despatched them to Bezier's address in London. Bezier wrote afterwards that the Queen was determined to have the Cromwell, and that the Prince of Wales would not let the Giorgione go. Mox consignments to London followed, among which were a miniature of Louis XIV., by Petitol, and (a great curiosity) the very proof-sheet of the Ami du Peuple which Mar was reading in his bath when Charlotte Corday killed hiu..