hands with glee, and said: 'Now I am ready for him.' Sir Robert Peel was made acquainted with the plot, and adroitly introduced the subject of the controversy after dinner. The result was, that in the argument which followed the man of science was overcome by the man of law, and Sir William Follett had at all points the mastery over Dr. Buckland. 'What do you say, Mr. Stephenson?' asked Sir Robert, laughing. 'Why,' said he, 'I will only say this, that of all the powers above and under the earth, there seems to me to be no power so great as the gift of the gab.' One day at dinner, during the same visit, a scientific lady asked him the question, Mr. Stephenson, what do you consider the most powerful force in nature?' 'Oh!' said he, in a gallant spirit, I will soon answer that question: it is the eye of a woman for the man who loves her; for if a woman look with affection on a young man, and he should go to the uttermost ends of the earth, the recollection of that look will bring him back; there is no other force in nature that could do that.' One Sunday, when the party had just returned from church, they were standing together on the terrace near the hall, and observed in the distance a railway train flashing along, throwing behind it a long line of white steam. 'Now, Buckland,' said Mr. Stephenson, 'I have a poser for you. Can you tell me what is the power that is driving that train?' 'Well,' said the other, 'I suppose it is one of your big engines.' 'But what drives the engine?' Oh, very likely a canny Newcastle driver.' 'What do you say to the light of the sun?' 'How can that be?' asked the doctor. 'It is nothing else,' said the engineer; 'it is light bottled up in the earth for tens of thousands of years-light, absorbed by plants and vegetables, being necessary for the condensation of carbon during the process of their growth, if it be not carbon in another form-and now, after being buried in the earth for long ages in fields of coal, that latent light is again brought forth and liberated, made to work, as in that locomotive, for great human purposes.' The idea was certainly a most striking and original one: like a flash of light, it illuminated in an instant an entire field of science.S. Smiles.

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103. DESCRIPTION OF JANE DE MONTFORT.

(The following has been pronounced to be a perfect picture of Mrs. Siddons, the tragic actress.)

Page. Madam, there is a lady in your hall
Who begs to be admitted to your presence.
Lady. Is it not one of our invited friends?
Page. No; far unlike to them. It is a stranger.
Lady. How looks her countenance ?

Page. So queenly, so commanding, and so noble,
I shrunk at first in awe; but when she smiled,
Methought I could have compassed sea and land
To do her bidding.

Lady. Is she young or old?

Page. Neither, if right I guess; but she is fair
For Time hath laid his hand so gently on her
As he, too, had been awed.

Lady. The foolish stripling!

She has bewitched thee. Is she large in stature?
Page. So stately and so graceful is her form,

I thought at first her stature was gigantic ;
But on a near approach I found, in truth,
She scarcely does surpass the middle size.
Lady. What is her garb?

Page. I cannot well describe the fashion of it:
She is not decked in any gallant trim,

But seems to me clad in her usual weeds

Of high habitual state; for as she moves,

Wide flows her robe in many a waving fold,
As I have seen unfurled banners play

With the soft breeze.

Lady. Thine eyes deceive thee, boy ;

It is an apparition thou hast seen.

Freberg. (Starting from his seat, where he has been sitting during the conversation between the Lady and the Page.)

It is an apparition he has seen,

Or it is Jane de Montfort.-Joanna Baillie.

104. THE ENGLISH COUNTRY GENTLEMAN.

To be a good old country gentleman is to hold a position nearest the gods, and at the summit of earthly felicity. To have a large, unencumbered rent-roll, and the rents paid regularly by adoring farmers, who bless their stars at having such a landlord as his honour; to have no tenant holding back with his money, excepting just one, perhaps, who does so just in order to give occasion to Good Old Country Gentleman to show his sublime charity and universal benevolence of soul; to hunt three days a week, love the sport of all things, and have perfect good health and good appetite in consequence; to have not only a good appetite, but a good dinner; to sit down at church in the midst of a chorus of blessings from the villagers; the first man in the parish, the benefactor of the parish, with a consciousness of consummate desert, saying, 'Have mercy upon us miserable sinners,' to be sure, not only for form's sake and to give other folks an example :—a G.O.C.G. a miserable sinner! So healthy, so wealthy, so jolly, so much respected by the vicar, so much honoured by the tenants, so much beloved and admired by his family, amongst whom his story of grouse in the gun-room causes laughter from generation to generation; this perfect being a miserable sinner! Allons donc! Give any man good health and temper, five thousand a year, the adoration of his parish, and the love and worship of his family, and I'll defy you to make him so heartily dissatisfied with his spiritual condition as to set himself down a miserable anything. If you were a Royal Highness, and went to church in the most perfect health and comfort, the parson waiting to begin the service until your R.H. came in, would you believe yourself to be a miserable, &c.? You might, when racked with gout, in solitude, the fear of death before your eyes, the doctor having cut off your bottle of claret, and ordered arrowroot and a little sherry—you might then be humiliated, and acknowledge your shortcomings and the vanity of things in general; but in high health, sunshine, spirits, that word 'miserable' is only a form. You can't think in your heart that you are to be pitied much for the present. If you are to be miserable, what is Colin Ploughman with the ague, seven children, two pounds a year rent to pay for his cottage, and eight shillings a week? No; a healthy, rich, jolly

country gentleman, if miserable, has a very supportable misery; if a sinner, has very few people to tell him so.—Thackeray.

105. COMMERCE.

Manufacturers and merchants, as a rule, have generally been either too modest, or have not been sufficiently acquainted with their own true position. In the aggregate, they are gradually becoming more and more important in the world than warriors and statesmen, and even than monarchs themselves. It is obvious to me that the power of these heretofore great authorities is waning, and that in our part of the world the power of the great industrial interests is sensibly waxing. If we were to take down the volume of history, which may be called the chart of past ages, we should see, I think, clearly that the stream of commerce runs close alongside the streams of freedom and of civilisation. It is a long time to go back to the age of those old merchants and mariners who were said to have come from the coast of Asia to this country in pursuit of one of the products of our mines. But the Phoenicians were a great people because they were merchants, and given to maritime pursuits, and it needs but a superficial knowledge of history to enable us to remember that from them came the arts and civilisation and the greatness of the Greek States in Europe, and at the same time the greatness and the commercial splendour of the city of Carthage on the African continent. From them, and from Greece, came the commercial population and colonists of Italy and Sicily; and Carthage, though comparatively early destroyed, yet left its traces on France and Spain. Then coming to a period where history is more complete and accurate, we find that in the cities of the North of Italy commerce is attended by arts, by letters, and freedom, and civilisation to an extent which, considering the condition of the other parts of the world, is at least beautiful to contemplate, and most remarkable. And the great citiesthe great commercial republics of Genoa and Venice—have left their mark in history, which time itself can never efface. Coming down to a period somewhat later, we find the commercial cities of the Netherlands taking a part in the history of Europe equally important, and showing themselves equally devoted to the arts, to civilisation, and to freedom. Then, pass

ing the narrow Channel, and coming towards our loved land, we find here that, precisely as commerce has extended and industry has been respected, towns and cities have grown, and populations have congregated. Turn to the southern hemisphere to countries which are still colonies of England, and in some degree dependent yet on English authority-we find that within a lifetime almost of the accurate discovery of that great southern continent there are flourishing cities, a vast trade, states and empires that are to be are growing up with a rapidity unknown to ages which are past. If this be so, I should say that the English people ought to take special pride in the greatness of those colonies, whether on the American or the Australasian continents. They came from us, they have taken all that is best of our institutions and of our laws and principles. Our ancestors were theirs, and through their instrumentality the English language will be spoken far more universally throughout the world than any other European language.-J. Bright (Speech at the inauguration of the Exchange at Birmingham).

106. THE QUARREL OF SQUIRE BULL AND HIS SON.

John Bull was a choleric old fellow, who held a good manor in the middle of a great mill-pond, and which, by reason of its being quite surrounded by water, was generally called Bullock Island. Bull was an ingenious man, an exceedingly good blacksmith, a dexterous cutler, and a noble weaver besides. He also brewed capital porter, ale, and small beer, and was in fact a sort of jack of all trades, and good at each. In addition to these he was a hearty fellow, an excellent bottlecompanion, and passably honest as times go.

But what tarnished all these qualities was a quarrelsome over-bearing disposition, which was always getting him into some scrape or other. The truth is, he never heard of a quarrel going on among his neighbours, but his fingers itched to be in the thickest of them; so that he hardly ever was seen without a broken head, a black eye, or a bloody nose. Such was Squire Bull, as he was commonly called by the country people his neighbours-one of those odd, testy, grumbling,