in the band of the King of France, was born at Versailles in 1767. At the age of thirteen he played at the Concert Spirituel, a concerto of his master's (Stamitz) composition with great success. At nineteen he had composed two grand operas, which were performed before the whole court. At the period of the Revolution, he travelled in Germany, Holland, and Italy, and established his fame as the first violinist in Europe. He subsequently returned to France at the invitation of Napoleon, where he received the appointment of first violin player to the Emperor, chef d'Orchestre at the opera, and professor of the violin at the Conservatiore. The two last appointments he continued to hold until by an accident he became deprived of the use of his arm in 1817.

The Emperor used to say that time was too precious to listen to instrumental music, excepting when Kreutzer was playing a concerto on the violin. He conferred on him the gold cross of the Legion of Honour, and often conversed with him in a familiar manner. As a composer Kreutzer also greatly distinguished himself. Besides an immense number of instrumental pieces, he wrote several operas, among which are, Lodoiska, Paul and Virginia, The Death of Abel, and Aristippus.

7, 1831. REV. ANDREW THOMSON, D.D. died, Minister of St. George's Church, Edinburgh, and long an ornament of the Kirk of Scotland.

He was just returning home from a meeting of presbytery, and having met a friend at the west end of Princes Street, he was giving him an account of the proceedings which had taken place. This gentleman walked along with him to his own door, where, stopping for a moment, as if he wished to say something more, he muttered some words indistinctly, and instantly fell down on the pavement. He was carried into his own house in a state of insensibility, and on opening a vein, only a few ounces of blood flowed, and he expired.

Such was the esteem in which Dr. Thomson was held, that about £8000 was raised, by subscription, for the benefit of his family, and a pension of £150 a year for life, granted to his widow by the King.

Dr. Thomson was greatly distinguished for natural talents, professional eminence, and great influence on society, in matters of a polemical description; and was unquestionably the most energetic, the most intrepid, the most resolute, and the most indefatigable minister of the national church of Scotland. In eloquence he was unmatched; and though the ardency of his zeal as a public disputant often carried him farther than even his friends could justify, yet the bold and manly way in which he invariably kept his ground, and his unaffected good temper and benevolence in private life, secured for him, on all occasions, a degree of suffrage which a less gifted, though more guarded, controversialist could never have obtained. Nature seemed to have intended him rather for the bar than the pulpit-though in any profession he must have risen to eminence, for he never scrupled to grapple with, and frequently defeated, the ablest of forensic orators in their own field.

11, 1763. WILLIAM SHENSTONE DIED, ÆTAT. 50.

The residences of eminent persons have always been objects of interest. The above view of the Leasowes, near Hales Owen, in Shropshire, where the most elegant of pastoral poets, Shenstone was born and died, derives additional interest from the circumstance of its no longer being the quiet and beautiful elysium that it once was: a line of canal having run close to the place, and robbed it of those charms which once attracted numbers from all parts. Shenstone devoted his time and his

fortune to the adornment of this spot, yet, as Campbell observes" With all the beauties of the Leasowes in our minds, it may still be regretted, that instead of devoting his whole soul to clumping beeches, and projecting mottos for summerhouses, he had not gone into living nature for subjects, and described her interesting realities with the same fond and naive touches, which give so much delightfulness to his portrait of the schoolmistress.

11, 1831. TURKISH TOLERATION ESTABLISHED.

The "march of intellect" must be making rapid strides when the following benevolent Imperial decree is issued in Turkey by the Sultan Mahmoud:-" Greeks, Armenians, Armenian Catholics, and Jews, shall, from henceforth, in common with the Turks and Mussulmen, be equal before the law. No Mussulman shall, in future, have any preference, or enjoy any superior rights in consequence of his being a Mussulman; for, according to the opinion of the Sultan, all form but one family —but one body, whatever may be the private creed of each of his subjects, which is a matter that only concerns the conscience of man, who cannot be called to account for his religion to any one but God. As to the government of the Sultan, it will not, under any circumstances, consider what is the religion of the person who may present himself before it."-Dated February 11, 1831.

13, 1831. REAR ADMIRAL SIR EDWARD BERRY, BART., K. C. B., DIED, ÆTAT. 62.

This gallant officer, the son of a London merchant, was born in 1768, and evincing an early predilection for the sea-service, was entered as a midshipman under Lord Mulgrave, on the 5th of February, 1779, being at the time under eleven years of age. His first voyage was to the East Indies in the Beresford,

of 70 guns, and from that period he was engaged in a continued series of actual service. In the first war of the French Revolution he received a lieutenant's commission for spiritedly boarding a ship of war. In the action off St. Vincent's on the 14th of February, 1797, he greatly distinguished himself by boarding the San Josef, and San Nicolas, being the first man who jumped into the mizen chains of the San Nicolas. For this exploit he was made post-captain.

In the memorable battle of the Nile on the 1st of August, 1798, Captain Berry greatly distinguished himself; as is sufficiently testified in Lord Nelson's dispatches to the Admiralty, in which he says:-"The support and assistance I have received from Captain Berry cannot be sufficiently expressed. I was wounded in the head, and obliged to be carried off the deck, but the service suffered no loss by that event. Captain Berry was fully equal to the important service then going on." Being charged with the dispatches on this occasion, he was on his way home in the Leander, Captain Thompson, of 50 guns, when the vessel was captured by a French 80-gun ship, and Captain Berry wounded in the arm. Being exchanged, he returned to England, and was knighted on the 12th of December, 1798; at the same period he also received the freedom of the city of London in a gold box.

In the battle of Trafalgar, on the 21st of October, 1805, Sir Edward again distinguished himself as captain of the Agamemnon, of 64 guns. After this engagement he sailed to the West Indies, and participated in Admiral Duckworth's victory off St. Domingo on the 6th of February, 1806. On his return home he received two medals from the King, for his services at Trafalgar and at St. Domingo; and having previously received one for the victory of the Nile, he was the only captain in his Majesty's service who had received the honor of three medals. On the 12th of December, in the same year, he was elevated to the rank of a baronet. He was afterwards appointed a Knight Commander of the Bath, and promoted to the rank first of Rear-Admiral of the White, and then of the Red, squadron.

At the peace of 1814 Sir E. Berry retired to Catton, near

Norwich, intending to fix his residence there; but after some years, his health declining, he removed to Bath, where he finally closed his active and serviceable life.

14. ST. VALENTINE,

A presbyter of the Romish church, who was beheaded during the persecution of Claudius II. in the year 270.

The annual custom of sending "valentines" on this day is of very ancient practice; although its origin is buried in obscurity. Lydgate, the monk of Bury, who lived at the close of the fourteenth century, establishes the custom to have been then prevalent, by his mention of it in a poem to the Queen of Henry V. Chaucer

Nature the vicare of the Almightie Lord,

That hote, cold, heire, light, moist, and drie
Hath knit by even number of accord,

In easie voice, begun to speak and say,
Foules, take hede of my sentence I pray,

And for your own ease in fodring of your need,
As fast as I may speak I will me speed.

Ye know well, how on St. Valentine's day,
By my statute and through my governaunce,
Ye doe choose your mates, and after flie away
With hem as I pricke you with pleasaunce.

Herrick also, in his Hesperides, says :

Oft have I heard both youth and virgin say,
Birds chuse their mates, and couple too this day:
But by their flight I never can divine,

When I shall couple with my Valentine.

Misson, in his Travels in England, written more than a century since, says: "On the eve of St. Valentine's Day, a time when all living nature inclines to couple, the young folks in England and Scotland too, by a very