something between the two without including either. A dinner with Sydney Smith is noted down in the Diary, November 16, 1834. He said that his brother Robert had in the time of George III. translated the motto Libertas sub rege pio, The pious king has got liberty under.' His position as a Churchman gave him, as usual, an opportunity for a joke: If ever a religious war should arise again, he said, 'I should certainly take arms against the Dissenters. Fancy me with a bayonet at the heart of an Anabaptist, with-Your churchrate or your life.' He said nothing should ever induce him to go up in a balloon, unless indeed it would benefit the Established Church. 'I recommended him (continues Barham) to go at once, as there would be at least a chance of it,' meaning, we presume, that there would be a chance of his not coming down again or not coming down in a church-serving or duty-doing state. April 18, 1836.-Dined with Owen Rees in Paternoster Row. Present, Mr. Longman, senr., Messrs. C. Longman, T. Longman, W. Longman, Tom Moore, Dr. M'Culloch, Mr. Green, the host, and myself. Dr. Hume, Sydney Smith, and Mr. Tate asked, but could not come. Moore gave an account of the King's (George IV.) visit to Ireland. One man, whom the King took notice of and shook hands with, cried, There, then, the divil a drop of wather ye shall ever have to wash that shake o' the hand off of me!' and by the colour of the said hand a year after it would seem that he had religiously kept his word. Moore told this story to Scott, together with another referring to the same occasion. The other story is best told in a letter to Mrs. Hughes, and is well worth telling. When George IV. went to Ireland, one of the pisiatry,' delighted with his affability to the crowd on landing, said to the toll-keeper as the King passed through, 'Och, now! and his Majesty, God bless him, never paid the turnpike! an' how's that?' Oh! Kings never does: we lets 'em go free,' was the answer. Moore, on his visit to Abbotsford, told this story to Sir Walter, when they were comparing notes as to the two royal visits. Now, Mr. Moore,' replied Scott, there ye have just the advantage of us. There was no want of enthusiasm here: the Scotch folk would have done anything in the world for his Majesty, but-pay the turnpike.' It was at this dinner that Moore pointed out what struck him as the difference between the conversation of Jeffrey and that of Scott. 'Scott all anecdote, without any interme diate matter-all fact; Jeffrey with a profusion of ideas all worked up into the highest flight of fancy, but no fact. Moore preferred Scott's conversation to Jeffrey's; the latter he got tired of.' Moore was unlucky. Jeffrey was a delightful talker, mingled fact with fancy, and was particularly happy in the frequent recurrence to his reminiscences. On Barham's appointment to the incumbency of St. Mary Magdalene and St. Gregory by St. Paul, he found the united parishes in a state of the most admired disorder and divided into two hostile parties, one led by a revolutionary oilman, who at the first vestry meeting insisted on ousting the new incumbent from the chair. On his (Barham's) refusing to give it up, a second chair was brought and placed alongside of him. Before it was occupied, Barham turned short upon the oilman, 'Now, sir, you have brought in that chair and placed it there; let me see you dare seat yourself in it, and within four and twenty hours you shall find yourself in the Ecclesiastical Court.' The oilman drew back appalled.. Omne ignotum pro magnifico; or, if of literary habits, he might have remembered Dr. Johnson's reply to Gilbert Wakefield, Registrar of the Ecclesiastical Court of Lichfield, who objected to Irene, that the heroine was re duced to such a state of wretchedness in the third act that it was impossible for the author to make her more wretched for the climax: 'But I can, though; I can put her into the Ecclesiastical Court.' The first of the Ingoldsby Legends appeared in 1837 in Bentley's Miscellany, in which the series was kept up with unabated spirit for six years. It was subsequently continued in The New Monthly Magazine. Hook frankly avowed that he had little or no invention, and after his own or his friends' adventures (which form the groundwork of his best novels, especially of Gilbert Gurney) were exhausted, he was continually on the look-out for stories to work up. Barham was sensible of the same deficiency; he could adorn but not create a tale, and for the outlines or framework of many of his legends he was confessedly indebted to the inexhaustible stores of Mrs. Hughes and her This is no deduction from their merit, nor even from their originality as literary compositions, any more than it is a depreciation of Shakespeare to show that he has drawn largely on the Chronicles for his historical plays. Nor do we think that there was any need of the apology proffered by the biographer for the anti-papal tendencies of the paternal poetry, which are also observable in the Stories like the paternal prose. following are fair enough in a Protestant priest, who has not thrown a veil over the black sheep of the Establishment: son. There was an old woman, living at Naples, very devout, who went to her confessor on a case of conscience. Her object was to learn whether San Gennaro or the Virgin Mary was the greater Saint. Why, daughter,' said the padre, 'that is a very nice question, and perhaps it might puzzle the Holy Father himself to decide upon it. However, for your comfort it may perhaps be satisfactory to know that both of them were Apostles!' may be less inclined to pass over in a clergyman with social claims of the highest order, is the exclusive fondness for such society as he met at the Garrick,' and the undue estimate he consequently formed of those who more or less contributed to its agreeability. Four years before his death, August 28, 1841, he writes to Mr. Bentley : All my oldest and best friends seem dropping off one by one. Poor Cannon was the first to go, James Smith, Bacon, Tom Hill, and now Hook, the one I had known the longest and spent the most pleasant hours with of them all.... Independent of the loss to his private friends, I consider his death just at this juncture a public calamity. Barnes gone! and Hook gone! the two ablest, beyond all comparison, of the advocates of civil order and of all that is valuable in our institutions! Barham seems to have forgotten that Barnes (an able and accomplished man) was editor of the Times when it acquired the appellation of 'The Thunderer' by its articles in favour of the Reform Bill of 1832; whilst Hook's habits and style of writing ill-fitted him for an irreproachable champion of Church and State. On some one calling Lord Eldon a pillar of the Church, Say a buttress,' quietly remarked Lord Stowell, 'for to my certain knowledge he is never inside one.' The same might have been said of Hook. But intense Toryism was an all-redeeming virtue in Barham's estimates of men : vered a multitude of sins. 'Yes,' said he in reply to a political adversary, 'I am a priest and a bigot of course: I know it; and I firmly believe that England will never be a really free country till we have abolished trial by jury and the liberty of the press.' it co Again, September 2, 1841, on the same subject, to Mrs. Hughes: Mathews, Frank Bacon, poor Power, Tom Hill, and James Smith- and now Hook-he who flung his life and spirit into the rest! I question if half-a-dozen What, perhaps, stern moralists such associates were ever removed, or such a party broken up, in so short a time. I doubt if I shall have the courage now to enter the Garrick Club again. Its glory has indeed departed! Tom Hill was a retired drysalter, whose pride it was to be the cause of wit in others, especially to be the butt of Hook. In reference to his age, which was indefinite, James Smith said to him: Hill, you take unfair advantage of an accident: the register of your birth was burnt in the Great Fire of London, and you now say that you are younger than you are.' On finding him in such company one is tempted to exclaim: The thing we know is neither rich nor rare, But wonder how the devil it got there. The Garrick must also be held answerable for the preference thus avowed and justified in a letter to Mrs. Hughes: You ask me if I think locomotion favourable to composition. I answer, decidedly yes,' the best thing in the world for it. Others prefer gin and water; the latter, taken hot on the box of the Worcester Mail, I certainly have found efficacious, perhaps as containing both the grand requisites. The force of Genius will no farther go; To make the third, she joins the other two. Byron loved gin and water and galloping. Your friend Tom C. (Campbell) drinks gin and water, and rolls in the gutter. Hook likes brandy better, but despiseth not toddy' with the easy motion of a cabriolet. Moore runs up and down stairs at Bowood and Holland House, and though restricted to coffee. sighs in his heart and soul for poteen. That his mind has been less prolific of late I attribute solely to the deprivation. In short, to paraphrase a classical axiom, locomotion is the author's shirt, but "gin-twist" is his skin.' At the same time, far be it from us to say that gin-twist is a demoralising or unclerical drink; or that Bar ham's mode of occupying his leisure hours was disadvantageous to his tone of mind or genius on the whole. We might not have had the Ingoldsby Legends if he had passed his evenings amongst canons residentiary or in domestic circles whose respectability is is unimpeachable whilst their dullness is beyond dispute; and we doubt whether we should have had the winning, genial, and eminently useful character which is thus portrayed in a concluding paragraph by the biographer: 'Perhaps his virtues were of a kind especially adapted to win their own reward; certain it is he had ever cause to view humanity under its fairest aspect. He never lost a friend; he never met with coldness or neglect. His family were devotedly attached to him; those upon whom he was instrumental in conferring benefits were rarely, if ever, wanting in gratitude; and his own claims to consideration were readily and liberally allowed. All these things pass away. His memory may be cherished as a faithful pastor and firm friend, by some few "fashioned of the better sort of clay," and his social qualities may secure him a place for a season in the recollection of those who only sought in him an agreeable companion, but, as an author, he can scarcely be forgotten. His productions, whatever may be their defects or blemishes, must occupy that niche in the literature of the country which his genius has unquestionably carved out.' He died on June 17, 1845, in the fifty-seventh year of his age, from the effects of an inflammation in the throat. THE SUN'S CORONA. BY RICHARD A. PROCTOR, B.A. CANTAB. a paper which appeared in Fraser's Magazine for February 1870 I called attention to certain results which seemed fairly deducible from the observations made by American astronomers and physicists during the eclipse of August 7, 1869. The news of those observations reached me while I was engaged on that paper (entitled Strange Discoveries respecting the Aurora), and seemed to add a new importance to the discoveries which I had already recorded. The aurora had been analysed with the spectroscope, and the results were full of interest. The zodiacal light had been similarly analysed, with results indicating an association between this phenomenon and the terrestrial aurora; and this circumstance seemed even more interesting than the facts revealed respecting the aurora itself. But scarcely had these results been recorded when there came the news that the solar corona had also been analysed with the spectroscope during the eclipse of 1869, and that its spectrum presented the same bright lines which appear in that of the terrestrial aurora! Three phenomena severally interesting, as well as severally perplexing, were thus brought into seeming association; and though the nature of any one of them was by no means definitely revealed, yet considerations of the most signifiI cant nature were suggested-considerations at once enhancing the interest of these several phenomena and promising to afford one day a means by which all three might be interpreted. Let us examine what is the present state of our knowledge respecting the sun's corona, noting specially what new light, if any, has been thrown upon the problem by the recent eclipse expeditions, but also not forgetting that vast mass of evidence which former observers have accumulated for our use. It may be noted, indeed, that if we are in a position to theorise at all respecting the corona's nature, we shall certainly not theorise safely unless we consider all the evidence we have. To take this or that fact, however striking, and on it to found a theory respecting a phenomenon so remarkable, and presenting so many complex relations, would be unwise indeed. We must endeavour to bear in mind all that has been learned, to apportion to each observed fact its due weight, and where observed facts seem opposed to each other to analyse them with special care, since nearly always the most definite and striking evidence is afforded by those observations which seem most perplexing. Let us first examine what is known about the sun and his surroundings, in order that we may the more satisfactorily weigh the evidence respecting phenomena as yet unexplained. Such a course is also rendered advisable by the fact that there will be frequent occasion to refer to the prominences and other like features in speaking of the corona and the problems it presents to us for solution. The rainbow-tinted streak which forms the basis (so to speak) of the solar spectrum tells us that the sun's light comes in the first place from matter which is incandescent, and is either solid or liquid; or, if gaseous, exists at a very great pressure. The innumerable dark lines which cross the rainbowtinted streak show that outside this matter there are the vapours of many well-known terrestrial elements, existing at a lower temperature than the matter which gives the continuous background of the spectrum. Of the exact position of these absorbing vapours we know (or, perhaps, I should say we knew, before the recent eclipse) comparatively little; but they must necessarily lie above the regions whence the really white light proceeds. Outside these absorbing vapours is that region into which the coloured prominences are projected. But far lower than the summits of the prominences there lies the region to which the AstronomerRoyal gave (in 1842) the expressive name the sierra. It appears in solar eclipses as an arc of red light around the sun. Its border is well defined and serrated. In colour it resembles closely the prominences; and the researches of spectroscopists have shown that it consists in the main of the same gases. It is this layer which Mr. Lockyer, unaware of its prior recognition, called the chromosphere, a name which is, for many reasons, far less satisfactory than the one devised by Mr. Airy. Then, lastly, outside the prominences and the sierra there had been recognised the corona, a glory of light surrounding the sun during total eclipses. Precisely as the coloured matter is divisible into lofty prominences and the low sierra, so this corona had been seen to consist of two distinct portions, viz., projecting radiations extending sometimes to a distance from the sun far exceeding his apparent diameter, and a lower, brighter, and more uniform portion extending to a distance of little more than a fifth of the sun's apparent diameter. Since the recognition of this peculiarity has been described by those little familiar with the history of solar eclipses as the most important result of the recent eclipse expeditions, it may be as well to remark in this place that the fact has been known for at least 164 years. For in 1706 MM. Plantade and Capiés recognised the existence of a ring of very white light around the moon, within the limits of which ring 'the light was everywhere equally vivid; but beyond the exterior contour the light was less intense, and was seen to fade off gradually into the surrounding darkness, forming an annulus round the moon of about eight degrees in diameter.' I quote from Grant's Physical Astronomy, to which excellent treatise I would refer the curious reader for many other accounts respecting the ring-formed portion of the corona. It is this seemingly compound object - the solar corona that astronomers have been so anxiously seeking to interpret during the last two or three years. The recent acquisition of new powers of research, as well as the new knowledge lately obtained respecting the constitution of the solar system, at once suggested hopes that this problem might be at length mastered, and encouraged the expectation that the results would throw a most important light on the economy of those regions of space which immediately surround the solar orb. It may be said that the first attempt to apply the new means of research to the phenomena presented by the corona was made during the eclipse of 1860, when Mr. De la Rue and Fr. Secchi photographed the eclipsed sun. The success of these physicists was, however, but limited as respects the corona. They succeeded in obtaining excellent photographs of the coloured prominences; but only faint indications of the corona are shown even in the best of their pictures. The photograph which showed the widest extension of the corona was one of Fr. Secchi's; and he was enabled to draw from this view the conclusion that the corona |