habits of the people who use them, their connexion with passages in Sacred Writ; or, in short, whatever might in any way make the instruction to be conveyed more complete or more inviting. Here is a wide field of usefulness opened for talents that have hitherto been content to waste themselves in adorning albums or over filling rarely opened portfolios; for not only original sketches from the more gifted, but even accurate reproductions in the case of those who do not aspire beyond the art of the copyist, might equally be made available. Nor is it painting alone that can render aid, for, as a picture gives a clearer idea of visible things than any verbal description can do, so there is another kind of representation whose vividness far surpasses that of any pictorial delineation. We allude to modelling, especially in wax, an accomplishment whose application has in general been so singularly and so needlessly limited as to have caused it to be almost classed among mere frivolities. Its applicability to objects of great usefulness is really very extensive; for there can be no absolute necessity that because Miss Evelina Smith employs her paint and scissars merely to form camellias, and fuchsias, and lilies, that therefore Miss Arabella Jones should confine herself to lilies, and fuchsias, and camellias, and when the vases are all filled, each table has its centre-piece, each slab its basket full, and every aunt, and cousin, and friend is supplied, should still tint another Tigridia or mould one more Japonica. Dare a new track for once, dear Arabella, and raise a trifling girl's pursuit to the dignity of earnest woman's work. Beside those favourite fuchsias in the garden grows a dark tall flower, dull of hue, but curiously beautiful in form; it will test your modelling powers, but a little difficulty will only enhance the pleasure of success; and when it is complete, with its glossy deep cut leaves around it, and, if possible, a representation of the root too, to lie beside it if you will, send it to the South Kensington Museum,* and haply some boy who shall there gaze upon your handiwork with the ominous 'Poison " label it will bear, will have it flash upon his recollection years hence when he may chance upon the plant in some far off garden, and by its remembrance be spared from sending into eternity all the guests of a dinner-party by mistaking it for harmless horse-radish. Or go out and gather from the road-side the graceful dulcamara with its gold and purple flowers and crimson berries, or its less brilliant but yet more dangerous congener, the deadly nightshade; the mere handling of them will not harm you, while their beauty cannot but interest, and your work may result in saving some poor child whom the Sunday School treat takes once a year among the fields and hedges, from being tempted all unconsciously to a fatal feast. And if your friend Evelina be roused to emulate such useful labours, there is abundant opportunity for her also to lend welcome aid. The children whom we often see carrying through the streets such sheaves of buttercups for bow-pots, might take home TragopoCommunications to be addressed to R. A. Thompson, Esq., South Kensington Museum, W. 66 gon also for soup or salads; and many another palatable pot-herb too, if sufficiently familiarized with their aspect to be able readily to recognize them. Or, again, while insufficient or improper diet so often brings sickness to the healthy and death to the sick, hundredweights of wholesome and delicious food, as we are assured by a competent authority, rot year by year untouched in wood and pasture, because the unlearned, not being able to discern the good from the bad, fear to gather of the feast so freely spread. Let accurate models of the Esculent Fungi of Britain become common objects, and the poor will have it in their power to obtain, without breach of any Game Law, what is at once substantial food for the robust, yet a most tempting delicacy for the invalid, and which offers itself without care or culture to all who can learn to know and appropriate it. Even these few suggestions, if ably carried out, would afford no unimportant addition to the stores of this "Treasury of Practical Knowledge ;" and on a little reflection no doubt many others would present themselves to any intelligent mind that might turn its attention to the subject, while the pleasure arising from the mere exercise of talent and skill could not but be considerably enhanced by its result being made thus greatly profitable to others. Surely, then, this invitation to aid by such means in developing so admirable a design will not be allowed to appeal in vain to the Working Women of England. ELLERET. XIV. TWO GRAVES. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, drowned July 8, 1822. In death they are not divided. Two graves within one year I saw, And violets, like his verse divine; But where the heavenly lilies bloom, And amaranth, to the angels dear, Mocks our pale buds which deck the tomb. There no dark cypress grows, nor pine, Where they, the Husband and the Wife, Their long-dissever'd lives entwine, And dwell beneath the Tree of Life. Boscombe, March 14, 1858. B. R. P. XV.-NOTICES OF BOOKS. 1.-Thorndale; or the Conflict of Opinions. By William Smith. WE have here, within the moderate bounds of a thick octavo, a tilting-ground, as it were, for the knights of intellectual and theological speculation. The Poet, the Utopian, the Pseudo-materialist, the Catholic, each in his turn breaks a lance and retreats, leaving the field open for his opponent. It is a graceful and polished tournament, and, if it settle no point in dispute, at all events, it passes in brilliant array the gold-clad knight of Utopia, the blackmailed warrior of Materialism, the silver-trumpet heralded and gorgeously attired champion of Catholicism; and, as each does battle for his cause, the interest and sympathy of the reader will wax or decrease as his affections and convictions tend towards the one or the other. Protestantism, with its denial of church authority, and its right of private judgment, opened at once a door to speculation, which its more orthodox members have since in vain striven to close, and the solution of which the Christian world awaits. Driven from pillar to post, assenting here and dissenting there, often splitting hairs over a distinction without a difference, the direct and immediate influence of Protestantism has been to promote dissension and strife, to constitute creeds and sects with differences of faith, trivial it may be on the surface, but wide and widening at heart. Faith without works, and works without faith, is the open controversial field upon which Protestantism has waged, and still wages, its fiercest attacks. But within the camps of the opposing legions there exists a diversity of opinion, a separation of interests, a spirit of aggression, in fine, a want of unanimity, which, while it weakens the body corporate, reacts upon the individual with deadly effect. Men question and rebel, cut off something here, and add another something there. Floundering in a sea of doubt, they buoy themselves up as they best can,`catching at the root or branch borne beneath their hand by some opposing current, which bears on its swollen and turbid waters evidences of devastation going on elsewhere. Orthodox yesterday, dissenting to-day, infidel perchance to-morrow; now over-bold, and anon over-timid ; Protestantism presents the anomalous phenomenon of a body without a head, disorganised members uncontrolled by the will, legs running hither and thither, arms striking out blindly right and left; and if we leave the body for the soul-chaos and confusion. Whither does all this tend?-Back to the "Mother Church," which alone stands firm and unmoved, or on to a purer and nobler faith of which these doubts and struggles are but the birth-throes? "A conflict of opinions," indeed, is this age witnessing, a conflict wherein the tender and loving suffer, the bold and unscrupulous harden, the many hope, the few believe, and some are doomed to despair. 'Thorndale' is a many-sided book, and touches upon all or most of these phases. In Thorndale himself we have the loving, unsatisfied soul, questioning vaguely of what is, and longing intensely for what may be. Disappointed in heart, aimless in life, with the hand of death upon him, he retreats to Italy, there to linger out in what peace and sunshine, internal and external, he may find, the few short months of a career marked by no outward action, but deeply scarred and furrowed by the harrowing questions of his time and education. It is while thus awaiting his end in a villa near Naples that Thorndale writes the diary which falls accidentally into the hands of the soi-disant editor, and is thus presented to the public. Four friends, the solace and delight of his youth, live with him in memory in his retirement-Luxmore the poet, Seckendorf the materialist, Clarence the utopian, and Cyril, whom, having left a speculator and questioner, Thorndale re-finds a Cistercian monk. Luxmore, designed by his father for the law, cherishes the ambition to be a poet : "I give to Luxmore without scruple the name of poet, for, though he is entirely unknown to fame-though his poem, alas! failed, and perhaps not a verse of his is remembered except by a few personal friends, yet he had the peculiar characteristics of the poet-had at least the weaknesses we generally attribute, justly or unjustly, to the poetic character. Wherever there was beauty or a noble emotion, there, I think, was truth for him. Philosophic or speculative inquiry seemed to end with him in its own mental excitement. A grand or beautiful thought was, like any beautiful thing in nature, to be admired for itself. Philosophy, like Love or War, did but ‘add another string to the lyre."" Of this ambition Luxmore gets cured by the very ordinary phenomenon of a volume of verses falling still-born from the press. "I am smiling,' he said once to me, at the recollection of a certain midnight scene still very vivid in my memory. I see myself alone in a garden. A lantern is on the ground. I am digging a deep hole in the earth. I am certainly not digging for hidden treasure; neither am I an assassin, burying, in the dead of night, the body of his victim: yet I dig deep, and from time to time look stealthily around to see if any one is watching me. This hole, this pit, this grave is at length completed. I draw from under a neighbouring tree a sack which I had deposited there, heavy with its secret burden. This I lay, not without some solemnity of action, in its destined grave. It is indeed a dead thing: it is my dead poem; and here I bury it,-safe at least from further disgrace. Here I commit it to the earth. "Dust to dust! I exclaim as I shovel in the mould; "ashes to ashes!" as I stamp it level with the rest of the soil.' * ** After this honourable burial conferred upon his defunct production, and in a mood, I suspect, of sheer despondency, he had yielded to the wishes of his father, and enrolled himself a student of law in one of the Inns of Court. When I returned from the Continent he had taken up his abode in the Temple, and spent his mornings as an industrious pupil in the chambers of a special pleader." Seckendorf, by education a Catholic, and, spite of his materialistic tendencies, retaining in the inmost recesses of his soul a species of adherence to the faith of his fathers, is thus forcibly described : "Seckendorf's philosophy stood as firm as a rock, and as hard and as barren. But he had no objection that you and others should cover up this rock-these hard bare facts of life-with whatever verdurous imagination you could get to grow there. If you brought to him Elysian pictures, whether of this world or the next, and held them up to him, for his own conviction, as realities he was to believe, he coldly repelled you, or he beat you down with his sarcasm. But if you spoke of them as convictions of the people-if you spoke of the great religious creeds of the world as portions the most remarkable in the drama of human life-you had his sympathies directly. As elements of this life, there was nothing he seemed to admire so much as our great imaginations of another life. You would think then, to hear him talk, that he was some great high-priest himself, some Egyptian hierarch, who, if he did not precisely believe all the mysteries and miracles he promulgated, had a sincere and not ignoble desire that others should believe." The gloomy struggles and sufferings of Cyril, "knowing nothing of philosophy but its doubts, and retaining nothing of religion but its fears," land him eventually in that haven where many a weak and fearful spirit has, in our time, sought refuge and rest, whither so many are at this moment tending. As we have said, Cyril becomes a monk. Of his days of strife and sorrow his friend writes thus: "I cannot describe, and do not wish to describe, the depth of terror and affliction which Cyril felt as his earliest faith was being rent from him. A soul athirst for piety seemed driven from the only temple in which it could worship. He grew restless, gloomy, at times even morose. It became very difficult to converse with him. If I assented to any of his new views, he recoiled from my assent; he was afraid to find himself right. He immediately began to quarrel with the terms of my assent. If I controverted his scepticism, he became vehement and angry, railed at the hypocrisy of the intellectual classes, and overwhelmed me with eloquent tirades on the love of truth. Some philosophers there were, he said, who delighted to show that nothing could be proved; there were others who delighted to use their philosophy, and knowledge, and ingenuity, in showing that nothing could be disproved that what seems most absurd to the man of common sense may yet, from a certain point of view, wear a perfectly rational aspect. Amongst this latter class he would sometimes rank me. The cloud was darkening over him. At length he rarely came to my rooms. Hearing he was unwell, I went to see him. I asked him after his health; he did not answer the question, took no heed of it; his thoughts were elsewhere! Oh, Thorndale!' he said, 'to pass long sleepless nights-sleepless and in pain-and not to know how to pray!' And as he pressed my hand he burst into an agony of tears. He had my most sincere sympathy; but how distressingly powerless did I feel in my attempt to relieve him!" Let us turn from this dark picture to the sunny opinions and beliefs of Clarence: not more opposed are day and night than these two men; both earnest seekers of the same truth :— "Clarence's philosophy is full of faith, full of hope. He has an unconquerable conviction in the progress of humanity; he will not hesitate cordially to adopt the last truth of the reason, because this seems at variance with the present wants of a progressive society. When an antagonist objects to some of his religious doctrines, that they are fit only for the climate of Utopia,' his answer is, 'I will believe then in the religion of Utopia; and be you assured of this-that if its religion is true, and is already here amongst us, what you call |