the miller. This man had refused to pay the rent of his mill, on pretence that the stream which turned it had been diverted into a fish-pond. But as the water which ran into the pond also ran out of it into the same channel as before, the miller evidently suffered no damage. The judges, therefore, gave sentence against him, but the king not only reversed their sentence but disgraced them. For this, he was celebrated through all the newspapers in Europe; and yet he was in the wrong, and afterwards even acknowledged himself to have been so: but, notwithstanding this, he not only made no reparation to the parties injured, but allowed them to lie in prison all his lifetime.

He entertained most unaccountable prejudices against certain places and persons, which neither conduct nor merit could eradicate. One of these unfortunate places was Westphalia, on which he never conferred any bounty and one day a native of that country, a man of great merit, being proposed to him for a place, he refused, saying, "He is a Westphalian; he is good for nothing." Voltaire justly accuses him of ingratitude to the Count de Seckendorf, who saved his life, and against whom he conceived the most implacable hatred. His neglect of others who afforded him the most essential service, was shameful. When a robust butcher prevented him from falling, horse and all, over a precipice, where both would undoubtedly have been killed, the king only turned round, and saying Thank you, friend, rode off without ever inquiring farther about his preserver.

With regard to his literary merits, Voltaire boasts of having corrected his works, and others of having furnished him with materials for his history. He has been accused of stealing whole hemistichs of poetry from Voltaire, Boileau, Rousseau, and others; nor does the charge seem void of foundation. Such of his verses as have undergone no correction are very indifferent. But, while we thus mention the foibles of Frederick, it is but just to record his acts of virtue. Upon his accession, he treated his mother with great respect, ordered that she should bear the title of Queen Mother, and that instead of addressing him as his majesty she should call him son. As he was passing soon after between Berlin and Potsdam, a thousand boys, who had been marked out for military service by his father, surrounded his coach, and cried out, "Merciful king, deliver us from our slavery." He promised them their liberty, and next day ordered their badges to be taken off. He granted a general toleration of refigion, and, among other concessions, allowed the profession of free masonry.

The reign of this monarch was illustrious, as well for the variety of characters he sustained as for the important vicissitudes he experienced. But the pacification of Dresden, in 1745, enabled him to appear in a character far more glorious than that of the conqueror of Silesia. He was now entitled to the noblest eulogy, as the wise legislator of his country. Exclusive of his general attention to agriculture, commercs, and manufac

tures, he peopled, in particular, the deserts of Pomerania, by encouraging, with royal bounties, a great number of industrious emigrants to settle in that province; the face of which, in a very few years, underwent the most agreeable alteration. Above sixty new villages arose amidst a barren waste, and every part of the country exhibited marks of successful cultivation. Those desolate plains, where not a footstep had been seen for ages, were now converted into fields of corn; and the happy peasants under the protection of a patriot king, sowed their grounds in peace, and reaped their harvests in security.

HILE presenting the reader with a brief notice of this remarkable person, a few leading facts, relative to the extraordinary race of people to whom she belonged, may not, perhaps, prove unacceptable. The gipsies are called, in most parts of Europe, Cingari or Zingari; in Germany, Zigeuner; and by the Spaniards, Gitanos. It is uncertain when they first appeared in Europe, but mention is made of them in Hungary and Germany so early as the year 1417. Within the ten succeeding years, we find them in France, Switzerland, and Italy. The date of their arrival in England is still more uncertain; but, most probably, it was not till about a century later. In 1530, they are noticed in the penal statutes in these terms:-"Forasmuch as before this time, divers and many outlandish people, calling themselves Egyptians, using no craft nor feat of merchandise, have come into this realm, and gone from shire to shire and place to place in great company, and used great, subtle, and crafty means to deceive the people; bearing them in hand that they, by palmistry, could tell men's and women's fortunes; and so, many times by craft and subtlety, have deceived the people of their money; and also have committed many heinous felonies and robberies, to the great hurt and deceit of the people they have come among," &c. This is the preamble to an act, by which the gipsies were ordered to quit the realm under heavy penalties. Two subsequent acts, passed in 1555 and 1563, made it death for them to remain in the kingdom; and to the disgrace of the legislature it remains upon record that thirteen were executed under these acts in the county of Suffolk, a few years before the restoration.

The gipsies were expelled France in 1560, and Spain in 1591; but it does not appear that they have been extirpated in any country. Their collective numbers in every quarter of the globe have been calculated at seven or eight hundred thousand. They are most numerous in Asia, and in the northern parts of Europe. Various opinions have been given relative to their origin. That they came from Egypt has been the most prevalent. This opinion, from which is derived their appellation of gipsies, arose from some of the first who arrived in Europe pretending that they came from that country; which they did, perhaps, to heighten their reputation for skill in palmistry and the occult sciences. It is now generally agreed that they originally came from Hindostan; since their language so far coincides with the Hindostanee, that even now, after a lapse of more than three centuries, during which they have been dispersed in various foreign countries, nearly one-half of their words are precisely those of Hindostan; and scarcely any variation is to be found in vocabularies procured from the gipsies in Turkey, Hungary, Germany, and England.

The manners of the gipsies, for the most part, coincide, as well as their language, in every quarter of the globe where they are found; being the same idle, wandering race, and seldom professing any ostensible mode of livelihood, except that of fortune-telling. Their religion is always that of the country in which they reside, and though no great frequenters of mosques or churches, they generally conform to rites and ceremonies as they find them established. Grellman, in his history of the gipsies, says, that in Germany they seldom think of any marriage ceremony; but their children are baptized and the mothers churched. In England their children are baptized and their dead buried according to the rites of the church. Perhaps, the marriage ceremony is not much more regarded than in Germany, but it is certain that they are sometimes married in churches.

Among this extraordinary people, Margaret Finch had the title of Queen. She was born at Sutton, in Kent, in the year 1631, and after travelling over various parts of the kingdom, for nearly a century, she settled at Norwood, whither her great age and the fame of her fortune-telling talents attracted numerous visitors.

From a constant habit of sitting on the ground with her chin resting on her knees, generally with a pipe in her mouth, and attended by her faithful dog, her sinews at length became so contracted, that she was unable to rise from that posture. Accordingly, after her death, it was found necessary to enclose her body in a deep square box. She died in October, 1740, at the great age of 109 years. Her remains were conveyed in a hearse, attended by two mourning coaches, to Beckenham in Kent, where a sermon was preached, on the occasion, tó a great concourse of people, who assembled to witness the ceremony.

HANNAH SNELL.

HAT the weaker sex is endued with fortitude, courage, and resolution, in an equal degree with the stronger, is a position which seems to be confirmed by numberless examples. The histories of Portia, daughter of the virtuous Cato, and wife of Brutus, and of Arria, the wife of Thrasea Pætus, must be impressed on the recollection of every classical reader. The instances that might be collected from modern writers would furnish materials for many volumes. Among these, we have accounts of women, who have been induced by circumstances or inclination to disguise their sex, and embracing the military profession, have not only become familiarized with hardships and perils of every kind, but with scenes of carnage and devastation. Truth, however, compels us to observe, that these heroines, in "overstepping the modesty of nature," almost invariably transgress those limits which are prescribed by virtue and morality; and that while they have the appearance of one sex with the reality of the other, they frequently unite in themselves the vices of both. These observations will be found to be verified in the history of the female to the particulars of whose life we now call the attention of the reader.

Hannah Snell was born in Fryer street, in the city of Worcester, on the 23d of April, 1723. Her grandfather, embracing the military profession,