"The height to which through an iron pipe it rises above the earth is, as has been stated, 112 feet; and thus not only is Paris gifted with an everlasting supply of water, amounting, at the surface, to 660 gallons per minute, and at the summit of the pipe to 316, but the latter quantity, in virtue of its elevation, and in obedience to the laws of hydrostatics, which it is sworn to obey, can be made to ascend to the various floors, including the uppermost, on which, one above another, the inhabitants of Paris reside.

"The concealed tube or passage, through which, by the magic influence of science, this valuable supply of water is now constantly arising from the deep, dark caverns in which it has been collected, into the lightsome painted chambers of the most beautiful metropolis on the surface of the globe, has been lined throughout with galvanised iron. Its diameter is, at the bottom, about 7 inches, and at the top 21 inches. "The water, when I tasted it, was not only warm, but strongly impregnated with iron. As a dog grows savage in proportion to the length of time he has been chained to a barrel, so does the temperature of imprisoned water increase with its subterranean depth; and accordingly it has been calculated by M. Arago and by M. Walferdin, that the heat of the water of an Artesian well which, previous to the Revolution of 1848, it had been proposed to bore in the Jardin des Plantes to a depth of 3,000 feet (ncarly nine times the height of the cross on the top of St. Paul's), would amount to about 100° of Fahrenheit, sufficient not only to cheer the tropical birds and monkeys, the hothouses and greenhouses of the establishment, but to give warm baths to the inhabitants of Paris."

We have thus endeavoured to lay before our readers a few samples of the sticks of which the "faggot" is composed. As a description of Paris it is of no value at all, but as a series of lively daguerréotypes of daily Parisian life, and scenes with which we are not already very familiar, it will be found amply to repay the reader. In the present days of universal education, we would suggest that to add the translation of all the most petty French phrases occurring in the text appears somewhat pedantic and unnecessary. The description of the Great Northern Railway is, perhaps, the best paper in the book, although we have been unable to find an extract which could be used with effect, and the article is far too lengthy for insertion in an entire form. The experience of our own North Western line, which Sir Francis "got up" for the purpose of publication in Stokers and Pokers," has been of great use to him, and many French customs by which our own railway directors might profit are dwelt upon, as well as those instances in which they might advantageously copy our system. The article on the Paris Post-office, too, is well worthy to rank

beside the famous account of the London Post-office which appeared in Dickens' Household Words. But we have already presumed too much upon our readers, and must perforce abruptly finish, as our space is limited, and moreover we only intended to review the book, and not fill our columns by wholesale with its matter. For further information we refer our inquir ing patrons to the neatly-bound volumes themselves : we have derived much pleasure and information from the perusal of them, and we hope to turn what we have read to account when next we visit the French capital; and we will take our leave in saying that we believe there is not another writer in the English language who could have made so lively a work on a field which has been already so well gleaned.

SHORT NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.

The Use of Sunshine. A Christmas Narrative. By S. M. THOSE who are familiar with "The Story of a Family," "The Maiden Aunt," &c., will be prepared to expect, in any production of the same authoress, a delicate perception of character, and a happy readiness in laying hold of, and delineating, those finer traits which give verisimilitude and individuality, and make her fancy sketches portraits. They will look with certainty for that intense feeling of the beauties of natural scenery, which is skilfully conveyed to the reader, and that power of finding in things natural, types and mementos of things spiritual, which gives no small part of its power to charm and instruct to her favourite guide, "The Christian Year; all being bound together, in one harmonious whole, by high, moral, and definite Christian principle. Some readers will perhaps be taken by surprise, to find, in a young English lady, a power of catching those chameleon-like tints which characterise our Irish neighbours, and of Daguerréotyping the ever-varying lights and shades of the inmates of a cabin, as if she had been familiar with them from infancy. The "History of Three Christmas-days" constitutes the tale, and the motif, or moral, is the "Use of Beauty and Joy."

A young English clergyman, overworked by his exertions among his flock, in one of our Yorkshire manufacturing towns, during a time of fever, is ordered to recruit his strength by quiet and pure air. A charming child-like sister, of seventeen, who has been as his child to him since the early death of their parents, accompanies him to a secluded part of the north of Ireland, on the banks of Lough-Foyle, a place to which they are attracted as having some connexion with a mysterious part of their mother's history, and by a college-friendship of Horace with the son of the "principal inhabitant." This friend has gone into voluntary exile in New Zealand, in consequence of offending his father, who is described by Marion, after her first glimpse of him, as "having a bright inexorable eye, which looked as if he could, if he had lived hundreds of years before, have walled up a town with his own hands, and been haunted by her

66

A popular author of our day has somewhere characterised language as 'fossil poetry,'-evidently meaning that just as in some fossil, curious and beautiful shapes vegetable or animal life, the graceful fern, or the finely vertebrated lizard, such as now, it may be, have been extinct for thousands of years, are permanently bound up in the stone, and rescued from that perishing which would otherwise have been theirs; so in words are beautiful thoughts and images, the imagination and feeling of past ages, of men long since in their graves, of men whose very names have perished, these, which would so easily have perished too, are preserved and made safe for ever...

Language may be, and is, this fossil poetry, but it may be affirmed of it with exactly the same truth, that it is fossil ethics, or fossil history. Words quite as often and as effectually embody facts of history, or convictions of the common moral sense of mankind; even as, so far as that moral sense may be perverted, they will bear witness and keep a record of that perversion... "Language, then, is fossil poetry; in other words, we are not to look for the poetry which a people may possess, only in its poems, or its poetical customs, traditions, and beliefs. Many a single word is also in itself a concentrated poem, having stores of poetical thought and imagery laid up in it. Examine it, and it will be found to rest on some deep analogy of things natural and things spiritual; bringing those to illustrate and to give an abiding form and body to these. The image may have grown trite and ordinary now, perhaps through the help of this very word may have become so entirely the heritage of all, as to seem little better than a common-place; yet not the less he who first discerned the relation, and devised the new word which should express it, or gave to an old, never before but literally used, this new and figurative sense, he was in his degree a poet-a maker, that is, of things which were not before, which would not have existed but for him, or for some other gifted with like powers.

"Let me illustrate that which I have been saying, by the word 'tribulation.' We all know, in a general way, that this word, which occurs not seldom in the Scriptores and in the Liturgy, means affliction, sorrow, anguish; but it is quite worth our while to know how it means this, and to question the word a little closer. It is derived from the Latin tribulum, that word signifying the threshing instrument or roller, by which the Romans separated the corn from the husks; and tribulation' in its primary significance was the act of this separation. But some Latin writer of the Christian Church appropriated the word and image for the setting forth of a higher truth; and sorrow and distress and adversity being the appointed means of separating in men their chaff from their wheat,-of whatever in them was light and trivial and poor, from the solid and the true, therefore he called these sorrows and griefs 'tribulations,' threshings, that is, of the inner spiritual man, without which there could be no fitting him for the heavenly garner."-Pp. 4-6.

"Now let us suppose this power of exactly saying what we mean, and neither more nor less than we mean, to be merely an elegant mental accomplishment; it is indeed this, and perhaps there is no power so surely indicative of a high and accurate training of the intellectual faculties. But it is also much more than this, it has a moral meaning as well. It is nearly allied to morality, inasmuch as it is nearly connected with truthfulness. Every man who has himself, in any degree, cared for the truth, and occupied himself in seeking it, is more or less aware how much of the falsehood which is in the world passes current under the conccalment of words, how many strifes and controversies,

'Which feed the simple and offend the wise,'

in words, carelessly or dishonestly employed. And when a man has had any actual experience of this fact, and has at all perceived how far this mischief reaches, he is sometimes almost tempted to say with Shakspeare's clown, Words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them.' He cannot, however, forego their employment, not to say that he will presently perceive, that this falseness of theirs, whereof he accuses them, this cheating power of words, is not of their proper use, but their abuse; that, however they may have been enlisted in the service of lies, they are yet of themselves most true, and that where the bane is, there the antidote should be sought as well. Ask, then, words what they mean, that you may deliver yourselves, that you may help to deliver others, from the tyranny of words, and from the strife of word-warriors. Learn to distinguish between them, for you have the authority of Hooker, that the mixture of those things by speech, which by nature are divided, is the mother of all error.' And although I cannot promise you that the study of synonyms, or the acquaintance with derivations, or any other knowledge but the very highest knowledge of all, will deliver you from the temptation to misuse this or any other gift of God, a temptation which always lies so near us, yet I am sure that these studies rightly pursued will do much in leading us to stand in awe of this divine gift of words, and to tremble at the thought of turning it to any other than those worthy ends for which God has endowed us with it."-Pp. 116, 117. One word on what we should lose by adopting the "Phonetic" method of spelling.

"I can conceive no method of so effectually defacing our English tongue, nothing that would go so far to empty it, practically at least and for us, of all the hoarded wit, wisdom, imagination, and history which it contains, as the introduction of this scheme. In innumerable instances, it would obliterate altogether those clear marks of birth and parentage which, if not all, yet so many of our words bear new upon their very fronts, or are ready on a very slight interrogation to declare to us. Words have now an ancestry, and the ancestry of words, as of men, is often a very noble part of them, making them capable of great things, because those from whom they were derived have done great things before them."-Pp. 119, 120.

Ravenscliffe. A Novel, by the Authoress of Emilia Wyndham. 3 vols. 8vo.

WE have the pleasure of announcing to our readers that, in spite of defects, "Ravenscliffe" is a story worthy of the writer of the "Admiral's Daughter." So powerful and affecting a book has not issued from the press for a long time. It is in the skilful contrast of characters and in the equally skilful interweaving of the various parts of the story that some of the secret of its success lies; but the great crowning excellence is the concentrated feeling, the deep passion, the vehement, absorbing, real, and yet romantic struggle which goes on in the minds of Randal Langford of Ravenscliffe and his adored bride Eleanor: he loving her above all things, to the exclusion of all things else; she loving him, it is true; but second to another, who is as precious to her as she is to him. She is gentle and weak, bowed down by the tyranny of her worldly mother and brother, and is compelled, out of very shame at the supposed desertion of the man she loves, to accept for husband the man who loves her with his whole heart, and whom she esteems and pitics and loves

from the habit of her childhood. The marriage day of these two is one of the finest and most effective pieces of domestic tragedy we have seen for a long time. The only thing which in the least mars its effect, on reflection, (it does not occur to the mind while reading,) is the similarity of position between Eleanor Wharncliffe and Lucy in the Bride of Lammermoor; only the Master of Ravenswood and the Master of Ravenscliffe, in spite of their striking resemblance, play opposite parts: the latter being the unwelcome husband. The passionate and pathetic scenes of "Ravenscliffe" are worthy of the best praise we can give; but what shall we say of the clay which she has allowed to mingle with her gold? for some portions of this book are as much below par as others are above it. The authoress seems to have gone to sleep over some parts, or to have given them to a housemaid to write, they are so stupid and so slovenly. At other times the moral reflections are such as to provoke laughter: they are so very flat and silly. Who, for instance, can read such platitudes as the following in such a book, and not wonder as some people used to wonder about the flics in amber?"Not that the things themselves were very rare,

They wondered how the devil they got there." We certainly did the same on coming across a few things like this:

"It is lamentable, it is grievous—one of the great evils under the sun-is perversion of character!!! In my opinion almost all faulty, almost all criminal characters, are but perverted ones. There is not only the mystery of original sin, for which most are but too ready to look, to be found, but the image of God exists, however defaced, in every one. If in busying ourselves so much in punishing, in order to the correction of faults, we were to give half our attention to the discovering and developing of good qualities, I believe our moral education would produce far less unsatisfactory results than it at present does!!!"

Our authoress does not seem to be in the least aware that she has said something as novel as the French incontrovertible truth, "Henri Quatre est mort." She goes on:

"We ought to have more faith in human nature. Faith, in itself, moves mountains, and the very confidence in the existence of good qualities would often call them into action."

Very original and fresh, certainly! If Mrs. Marsh would tell stories and avoid moral sentimentsstick to Scheherezade and abjure Joseph Surface-she would be a charming tale-teller. She cannot write a fine style, but she can, if she will, tell a story incomparably well-as she has done now.

The Old Engagement. A Spinster's Story. By JULIA DAY. 1 vol. Svo.

IF the Authoress of this little volume had possessed a judicious friend, privileged to be perfectly frank, (and consequently very disagreeable,) and who, in virtue of that frankness, had whispered into her car, "Do not publish. Your dialogue, though lively, is often forced, and the machinery by which you move your characters is so visible, that discerning people like your Miss Vaughan and Colonel Estcourt, instead

of being again drawn together by it, would have been bound to assert their free agency, and cast off the ropes (not threads) by which officious friends were seeking to bind them together, and would take refuge, one at the centre,' the other, thrice further than the utmost pole.' If a judicious friend had so spoken, we should have been spared the unpleasant office of whispering the same into the ear of our friend the public. We own, however, to a secret affection for Dr. Grove, perhaps because he is "the ugliest man in England." There is nothing in the tone or intention of the tale to condemn, and when a little reflection has enabled Miss Day to manage her plot a little more scientifically,—when, like nature, she learns to carry on her works in secret till the "bright consummate flower" bursts on us, we shall be very glad to welcome characters so agreeably sketched as hers in a more skilful grouping.

The Fair Carew; or, Husbands and Wives. A Novel 3 vols. 8vo.

A BOOK full of talent-well written, lively, sensible, with experience and insight into character-but a book that fails to keep up the attention, from the continual introduction of new people and their histories into the main current of the tale. Some of the characters, especially in the Luttrel family, are remarkably well drawn and worked out. On the whole, we are of opinion that the book ought to be more interesting than it is, and the next production of the author will be completely successful.

NOTICE OF ERROR.

serious error. IN page 274, volume xiv., there occurs a very James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, is there confounded with John Graham, otherwise called "Graham of Claverhouse." The mistake seems to have arisen from the accidental omission (either in proof or manuscript) of the word "not." The writer intended to have written: "It needs scarcely be mentioned that this is not the famous

Graham of Claverhouse,'" &c.; he begs to present his respectful acknowledgments to the two intelligent correspondents who have drawn his attention to the error; and he trusts they will perceive how easily the omission mentioned might be made, in the haste and rapidity sometimes required in periodical writing. For the benefit of the few readers whom the error may be supposed to have misled, it will be right to state that the Graham described in the article in question as being put to death at Edinburgh, was the Marquis of Montrose, who in 1650 attempted a cavalier insurrection in Scotland, while Charles II. was an exile in Holland; and that the not so respectable "Graham of Claverhouse" was the Viscount Dundee, who fell in battle at Killiecrankie (July 27, 1689), while engaged in an insurrection which he had raised in the Highlands in behalf of James II., at the time when the "Scottish Convention" was about to settle the crown on William and Mary.

Chronicle of Ethelfled.

BOOK SECOND.

WHEN I, Ethelfleda, consider the enormous disproportion between the most aggravated and prolonged sufferings of this present life and the glory that shall hereafter be revealed to us, it seems to me that were this little span one entire spasm or throe, we might gratefully so purchase the everlasting bliss. Whereas, we very well trow that this thorn-strewn path is interspersed with many sweet flowers, and watered with many refreshing streams, and overhung with many wholesome, unforbidden fruits; and that its course lies through many a deep glade and cheerful meadow, alternately in the cool shade and genial sunshine. Well, therefore, may the holy apostle of old remind us that our present afflictions, which are but for a moment, are working for us a far more exceeding weight of glory.

But reflections such as these do not, it is true, obtain their full masterdom under the immediate pressure of trials that wring from us strong crying and tears. And such being the case, it is no wonder that I, Ethelfleda, then a mere child, should have been sorely grieved that my sister's wedding-dinner was spoilt as it was. Three days the feast arose; on the third day, Alfred the prince, clad in weeds of peace, was seated at table between my mother and Ethelswitha, with a circlet of gold about his head, and a golden cup in his hand, and a smile and cheerful saying on his lips, when he suddenly gave a sharp cry, that made every one's blood run cold. You may be sure every man and woman there present started up or looked aghast, thinking he was either stabbed or poisoned; but none were so amazed as was Ethelswitha. They had both risen up, and he had staggered towards her a little, with his hands on her shoulders, his head drooping, and his face and hair steeped in a clammy dew. Then it was that my mother, who says that the same thing can never astonie her twice, did with all her composed stateliness cause him to be borne away to his chamber, attended by my father and Ethelswitha; and did check and allay the universal panic and ferment by telling the company, truly, the prince had a spasm she had seen him taken with once before. Having thus peaceified the assembly, she departed with all haste to the prince's chamber; and I, Ethelfled, who, if I had been less of a child should have remained and done the honours in her stead, did, by reason of my youth, steal away from the confused groups, and make for the ante-room of the prince's chamber, having no access whereunto, I hung about for a while in the outer gallery thereof. And, looking forth of the lattice at the gaily prankt groups on the green, the pavilions fluttering with ribbons, the booths loaded with cakes, the gleemen harping and piping, archers leaning on their long bows, wrestlers rolling on the grass, and children scrambling for nuts and halfpence, I wondered within

VOL. XV.

(1) See Leigh Hunt's "Indicator." (2) Helflinge.

myself, childlike, how folks could be so unfeeling and so happy.

But they were not so, in fact, at least the elder and more thoughtful, though I wist it not at the time. Many were astonied, some in tears, and every one anxious for tidings of the prince's welfare. For he was greatly loved of all.

At length, my mother coming forth, composed, but very pale, said "You here, Ethelfleda? we should both be in the hall." I said, "Oh, mother, what has hurt your hand? it has five wounds on it." She looked at them and began to weep, saying, "The print of his nails in his strong pain; I marked them not till now." But she wiped her eyes and went into the hall directly: I close following. I remember not much of that heavy evening, every one seemed out of tune. Feigned mirth is heavy; and feigned sympathy heavier. There was a minstrel who did us good service by singing the doleful song of Beowulf, which, at the speediest, is three hours long. The men drew about him, and many gerefas and thanes that pretended to listen consulted on the expediency of taking leave and ending the feast. My mother began to look harassed; she whispered to me, "See if you can glean tidings of him," so I went and found the outer gallery full of yellow torch-light and of people waiting quietly. I passed on through the now empty antechamber: Ethelswitha came to the door when I tapped; she said, "He is sleeping now, help me to disengage my veil, and be within call in my little room." So I undid her veil, which had been sent from Rome, and was as fine as gossamer, worked all over with silver stars; and I unclasped her golden slippers; and then, having advertised my mother of the prince's repose, I obeyed my sister's behest, and betook myself into her little dressing closet. After a time, I heard horses' feet softly treading under the window, and, looking forth, could make out, by the light of torches, my father bidding hushed farewells to sundry guests. Still looking forth, but noting nothing, I mused of all that had befallen during the last three days, which seemed now to have no reality in them; the gay carolling and winding of horns before day-dawn; the hunters and dogs dispersed over the dewy grass, impatient to start... Alfred the prince stepping forth, a gay bridegroom from his closet, people huzzaing, dogs baying, horses champing, the gay sun shining over all.

Then the noon-tide feast-royal and noble guests arriving-minstrels harping-rich gifts presentingEthelswitha as fair as May-tables spread all down the hall and along the green-others spread in green bowers-baked meats smelling everywhere—wine, ale, and eyder running-my mother seeing to all and at leisure for everything.

The archery, the prizes, the bride on her flowery throne; the rustic sports, the music. Supper, jesting, complimenting, mirth growing noisier; every one full of themselves, and yet ever looking at the bridegroom and bride. . . . all at once brought to a pause by that exceeding bitter cry.

F