"Our friend jumps out of bed, throws open the window, tells them with a stentorian voice, that there is an invalid in the house, and entreats them to disperse, but in vain; and after hearing the police rattles, and the windows smashed, again retires to his couch.

"And are we going to civilize the New Zealanders? Would they believe, should we tell them, that the most enlightened people in the world could not rest at night, from the noises in the streets? Hark! can it be possible? the wretches have ceased, and have entered themselves at the bar,' in order to whet their whistles.

"The air at length a solemn stillness holds.'

"I thence Invoke thy aid to my advent'rous story, That with no middle flight intends to soar Above th' Aonian mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme!' “Gentlemen,' he said, 'I resume :-The stock-broker was bewildered, but before any explanation could be given, the postchariot, with the bride, the bridesmaids, and Nose the first drove up. The rival noses were immediately confronted. Herr Necker gazed first upon one, and then upon the other with unfeigned perplexity-he was motionless, speechless. At length Nose the first broke the silence as follows!-'If there be deception here, I am guilty of it; but, nevertheless, I feel confident of pardon, since it is sanctified by love! Julie is now the wife of a colonel in the Prussian army -my name is Eckerlin; my nose is not what it appears.' As the India-rubber appendage was lifted off, Herr Necker recovered himself. This is a fraud,' said he, sternly; and according to our laws the marriage is null.' 'Not exactly,' said Colonel Eckerlin; for I have obtained our good King Frederick William's permission and authority to espouse the Fraulein Julie Ancelot here it is.' Herr Schrattenbak, jun., looked first at the India-rubber nose, then at Colonel Eckerlin, then at Julie, then at Herr Necker, then at himself in the chimney-glass, and then observed-I am glad of all this, for to tell you the truth, I have a secret penchant for a lady in Silesia, who admires my physiognomy much more, I fancy, than the Fraulein Julie; in fact, the lady I allude to thinks me a handsome likeness of the Emperor Trajan.' 'If you

are satisfied, I am sure I am; for I must own that I was somewhat alarmed at the size of Nose the first, but yours (no offence) would frighten a regiment! Come, let us all be friends, and sit down to a dejeuner in the pavilion.' I need not add (observed mine host,) that the RIVAL NOSES, strange as it may sound, shook hands in a spirit of the most perfect amity; and I am sure you will agree with me, that Colonel Eckerlin (who is now spending his honeymoon here) is worthy of his Julie !' • The

"A RAP! at the street-door. scavengers for your annual bounty which you are usually so kind to give. RAP! The dustman for a Christmas-box.' The man who carries the medal, has a bandy leg, whose name is Thomas Large. RAP! The beadle, (a poet, that makes more money by his verses than any other.) RAP! The turncock-great patron of temperance societies. RAP! The postman. RAP! RAP! RAP! RAP! RAPI The butcher, the baker, the grocer, the cheesemonger, and pots from the Goat and Compasses! All for Christmas boxes!

"Doubtless, Mr. Wrigglesworth's story would have been very entertaining, if it had not been for the interruptions."

BLACKWOOD.

THIS magazine is of an interesting character this month; the poems and ballads of Schiller are continued, as are also "Ricardo made Easy," Sketches of Italy," "Recollections of a Ramble through the Basque Provinces," Caleb Stukely," and the "History of France." The latter article, beginning with a brief sketch of Charlemagne and of his reign, is spiritedly written.

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Charlemagne, who, in the space of one lifetime raised an empire as vast as the Romans in six or seven centuries had conquered, and who civilized barbarians only by the aid of barbarians, Charlemagne, claimed by the church as a saint, by the Germans as their fellow-countryman, by the Italians as their emperor, will be found to stand at the very head and source of modern history.

"Everything appears to date from him. To him the church traces her wealth; in him letters find their earliest patron, and the new order of society its first legislator. In some such strain as this, Sismondi opens the history of the German emperor of the western world. But as we turn over the pages of the historian, lo! this vast empire perishes almost with the life of its founder; its territory is dismembered; its institutions fall; the coming dawn recedes; and, instead of the light of civilization, it is the darkness of feudal barbarism that thickens upon us. Many have been the lamentations uttered over the short-lived splendours of

the reign of Charlemagne. This cry of lamentation has been one of the commonplaces of history. Now, there is one point of view in which we wish to place the reign and conquests of this famous emperor, which may somewhat pacify these rhetorical regrets. M. Guizot shall be here our guide. Is it true, we ask, that a reign so magnificent, so full of vigour and of power, had no beneficial, no permanent result? Was Charlemagne one of those children of glory who appear but to astonish, and who, after all their enterprises, are but a dreadful scourge to their enemies, and to their own countrymen an unprofitable boast. Of him who revived the western empire shall we say this only that he took the faded purple and dyed it again in blood? From all his conquests, all his great designs, did nothing follow? Hardly so; and yet it is that part of his history which pleases the reader least, that we shall find the most valuable results of his power. Every one remembers those terrible wars with the Saxons, those burnings and slaughters, followed by those comprehensive baptisms, in one of which 30,000 converts were at once received into the Christian church. Those wars with the Saxons-those, also, with the Lombards —those, again, with the Arabs-those campaigns on the Elbe and the Pyrenees, they were called for by a strong necessity of the times; and they left behind them a great and durable result. Charlemagne, after subjecting the still restless inhabitants of his own territory, found himself pressed by hostile nations on all his frontiers. On the north-east, along the Rhine and the Danube, he was threatened by fresh German tribes -Saxons, Sclavonians, and others; on the south, by the Arabs, who had spread themselves over the opposite coasts of the Mediterranean. A twofold invasion hung over his realms, just emerging as they were from that barbarian deposit which had been so amply thrown upon them. Charlemagne rallied together all the inhabitants of his territory-Roman and German, Gaul and Frank, against these new assailants. His wars were essentially defensive. Nor were they the less defensive because they assumed an offensive form. As the republic of Rome had no means of permanently securing itself from invasion on the side of Gaul but by conquering and civilizing that country (the task which Cæsar undertook and accomplished), so Charlemagne had no hope of establishing peace on his own frontier but by subjecting and chastening the Saxons. The bishoprics he planted amongst them were his advanced posts of civilization; they were to him what the municipality had been to the Romans. He, in short, arrested-he rolled back the tide of invasion; in the north he repelled the Pagan; in the south the Mahometan. France was

not to be a highway for the Saxon on the one side, and the Arab on the other.

"Now, soon after the death of Charle magne, his empire and his institutions disappeared; but did he accomplish nothing? did he found nothing? we give the answer in the words of M. Guizot: Charlemagne, in fact, founded all those states that arose on the dismemberment of his empire. His conquests entered into smaller combinations; but to him they owed the permanence of the new forms they assumed. That restless, fluctuating population, careless of all boundaries, wandering, pillaging, conquering, which had for a long time overrun the greatest part of Europe, was made stationary. His was the trident that smote the moving mass and fixed it. After the time of Charlemagne, boundaries become defined; frontiers grow visible; states and politics claim a distinct and durable place upon the map of Europe. This, then, was the great task that Charlemagne performed; he procured for the many nations he governed the first requisite of national existence-the secure possession of a recognised territory. But it was beyond his power to unite this multitude of various races under one permanent government; and we see them breaking off into divisions which were regulated very much according to the several stocks from which the people had originally sprung."

THE NEW MONTHLY

Is varied in its articles, and is passable for interest and novelty. "A West-end Boarding-school" is cleverly written. We may also say the same of the "Recollections of a Royalist." All in all, this magazine supports its name, and its readers will find the wherewith in this number to amuse themselves.

Miscellaneous.

THE DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST, BY ALFRIC, SEVENTH ABBOT OF SAINT ALBANS, A.D. 950, AS DISSEMINATED AT THE REFORMATION.

ALFRIC had been bred up in the schools of Ethelwold, the Bishop of Winchester, the same who, in conjunction with Dunstan, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Oswald, Bishop of Worcester, expelled from all the cathedrals the married priests, and encouraged monks to supply their places. Alfric was Abbot, also, of Malmsbury, in King Edgar's time; and what is remarkable is this, that in his epistles, and in one of his sermons for Easter-day, his doctrine concerning the eucharist is wholly such as the reformers took up in the church of England

under Elizabeth and Edward-that is, against the bodily presence and transubstantiation, and perfectly the same as Berengarius taught in the time of William the Conqueror, and Pope Gregory VII., called Hildebrand; making the sacraments a memorial only, and to be taken spiritually and typically. Certainly," he says, "this housel (host)

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which we do now hallow at God's altar is a remembrance of Christ's body, which he offered to us, and of his blood, which he shed for us. And in his epistle to Wulfstan, Bishop of Shirburn, are these words, as may be seen in the original, still preserved in Exeter Cathedral-" and yet that living bread is not so bodily, not the selfsame body that Christ suffered in; nor is the holy wine the Saviour's blood, which was shed for us in bodily reality, but in ghostly understanding." In the Latin copy of this epistle at Worcester, sent to Oswald the bishop, these words are erased.

Alfric translated also the Bible, or many books of it, as may be learned from his tracts, which were printed by that great lover of antiquity, William L'Isle, Esq., of Wilburgham, in 1623. And some books of the said Bible translation were printed by Dr. Hickes, at Oxford, in 1698.-Newcome's History of the Abbey of St. Albans.

RUSSIAN RECRUITS.

THE recruits are, generally speaking, marched off to their regiments in chains; and to disable themselves for service, they have been known to practise self-mutilation, by chopping off a finger. We met, on our way from Odessa to Moscow, a long line of these wretched victims of a pure despotism. As they were chained and guarded by Cossacks, we took them for convicts, but, on inquiring, they proved to be recruits. Lyall, who was some years resident in Russia, says that those he saw "were absorbed in grief, and sat like statues, or lay extended like corpses;" and adds of others, that those who heard "their wild shrieks and lamenta tions would imagine that they were engaged in a funeral procession ;" nor would they be much mistaken, for the peasants who thus take leave of their wives and families consider it a civil death, if not a military

one.

The scenes to which the conscription gives rise are often of the most afflicting kind, and married men and the sons of widows are torn away from the families of which they were the chief prop and support.

Few furloughs are given; and as they can neither read nor write, their relations and friends seldom hear of them after they leave their home. Even if they support all the hardships and severity of their service, they

return to their village, after twenty-five years, scarcely recognisable by their friends; bowed down by disease and wholly incapable of gaining a livelihood, they drag out their miserable existence as best they can. The liberty they then receive, so far from being a boon, is a cruel farce; for their emancipation from slavery is granted to them only to relieve the crown, or their former proprietors, from the burden of their maintenance. "The dread which the Russian peasant has of the conscription is not surprising, when the severity of military service and discipline in this country is borne in mind; and when it is considered how completely every tie of family or affection is severed, every previous hope and prospect destroyed, for the victims of this iron system." Such is the opinion of Mr. Venables, who had excellent opportunities of judging.-Captain Jesse.

PHENOMENA OF LIGHT.

THE phenomena of light and vision have always been held to constitute a most interesting branch of natural science, whether in regard to the beauty of light or its utility. The beauty is seen spread over a varied landscape, among the beds of the flowergardens, on the spangled meads, in the plumage of birds, in the clouds around the rising and setting sun, in the circles of the rainbow; and the utility may be judged of by the reflection, that had man been compelled to supply his wants by groping in utter and unchangeable darkness, even if originally created with the knowledge now existing in the world, he could scarcely have secured his existence for one day. Indeed, the earth without light would have been an unfit abode even for grubs, generated and living always amidst their food. Eternal night would have been universal death. Light, then, while the beauteous garb of nature, clothing the garden and the meadow-glowing in the ruby-sparkling in the diamond, is also the absolutely necessary medium of communication between living creatures and the universe around them. The rising sun is what converts the wilderness of darkness which night covered, and which to the young mind not yet aware of the regularity of nature's change is so full of horror, into a visible and lovely paradise. No wonder, then, if in early ages of the world man has often been seen bending the knee before the glorious luminary, and worshipping it as the god of nature. When a mariner perceives the dawn of day, or even the rising of the moon, the waves seem to him less lofty, the wind is only half as fierce; sweet hope beams on him with the light of heaven, and brings gladness to his heart. A man, wherever placed in light,

receives by the eye from every object around from hill and tree, and even a single leaf-nay, from every point in every object, and at every moment of time, a messenger of light to tell him what is there, and in what condition. Were he omnipresent, or had he the power of flitting from place to place with the speed of the wind, he could scarcely be more promptly informed; and even in many cases where distance intervenes not, light can impart at once knowledge which by any other conceivable means could come only tediously, or not at all. For example: when the illuminated countenance is revealing the secret workings of the heart, the tongue would in vain try to speak even in long phrases what one smile of friendship or affection can in an instant convey; and had there been no light, man never could have been aware of the miniature worlds of life and activity which, even in a drop of water, the microscope discovers to him; nor could he have formed any idea of the admirable structure belonging to many minute objects. It is light again which gives the telegraph by which men converse from hill to hill, or across an extent of raging sea; and which, pouring upon the eye through the optic tube, brings intelligence of events passing in the remotest regions of space. The relation of the sun to light is most strikingly marked in the contrast between night and day, as the relation between combustion and light is seen in the brilliancy of an illuminated hall or theatre, as compared with the perfect dark ness when the chandeliers are extinguished. In tropical countries, where the sun rises almost perpendicularly, and allows not the long dawn and twilight of temperate latitudes, the change from perfect darkness to the overpowering effulgence of day is so sudden as to be most impressive. An eye turned to the east has scarcely noticed a commencing brightness there, when that brightness has already become a glow, and if clouds be floating near to meet the upward rays, they appear as masses of golden fleece suspended in the sky; a little after, the whole atmosphere is bright, and the stream of direct light bending round makes the lofty mountain tops shine like burnished pinnacles; then, as the stream reaches to still lower and lower levels, the inhabitants of these in succession see the radiant circle first rising above the horizon like a lip of flame, but soon displaying, as in the days of pagan worship, all its breadth and glory, too bright for the eye to dwell upon. With evening the same appearances recur in a reversed order, ending, as in the morning they began, in complete darkness.-Arnot's Elements of Physics.

The Gatherer.

A Striking Character.-I once saw a Russian captain strike one of his men a blow on the face with his fist, and, seizing him by both his ears, shake him until he pulled him out of the ranks; the man's cap then fell off, and the officer, ordering a corporal to pick it up, jammed it down on his head, The whole system with another blow.

is carried on in the same tyrannical and The Russian soldier overbearing manner.

meets with very little kindness or consideration to soften the misery of being imperatively driven into the service.Notes of a Half-Pay.

A Sharp Remedy.-An Italian, who had a quarrel with another, fell so dangerously ill, that there remained no hopes of his recovery. His enemy, informed of this, calls at his residence, and asks to see him; he enters the sick man's room, exclaiming, "Cospetto! he shall not die otherwise than by my hand!". Having reached the side of the bed, he gives him a desperate stab with a poignard, and makes his escape. The invalid lost a great quantity of blood; but this loss proved salutary, for it was the means of his speedy restoration to life and health.

A National Characteristic.—At a late trial for murder in the French criminal courts, and in which a native of Corsica was implicated as the assassin, part of the to whom the autopsy, or post-mortem inquievidence given by the examining surgeons, sition of the body of the murdered man had been delegated, went to prove that, "from the peculiar shape of the wound," (which had been inflicted with a knife,) "the death-blow must have been dealt from the hand of a Corsican, inasmuch as it was the characteristic and invariable habit of the wound!" the people of that nation to turn the knife in G. M.

modern poets, in his latter days, and when Milton, the British Homer and prince of he was blind, (a thing some men do with their eyes open,) married a shrew. The Duke of Buckingham one day, in Milton's "I am no judge hearing, called her a rose. of flowers," observed Milton; "but it may be so, for I feel the thorns daily!"

In St. John's Hall, one day during dinner, there happened to be a great paucity of waiters. A gentleman, impatient at the delay, at length exclaimed, "Confound it, we can't get a waiter." "The deuce we can't," said Mr. K., who sat opposite, "I think we are all waiters !"

LONDON: Published by CUNNINGHAM and MORTIMER, 1, Saint Martin's Place, Trafalgar Square; and sold by all Booksellers and Newsmen. T. C. Savill, Printer, 107, St. Martin's Lane.