the amount of their army, may feel their position awkward and embarrassing, and possibly the present mission originates in a desire to ascertain the power, resources, and Indian policy of the most formidable of them. When Hyder Aly was urged by his captains to invade and conquer the possessions of the English in the Carnatic, he used to say that the power in sight was not much, and he had no fear of it, but that he dreaded the mysterious one out of sight, and of which he had no knowledge. The Nepaulese court, then, may be acting on the principle of desiring to ascertain the nature of the mysterious power that is out of sight in Hindustan, and which bewildered the ablest and most formidable of our Indian enemies. resisted with a poor force of 18,000 men, for such is edgment of foreign nations, their wishes and inFrance is able to hold up the mirror of terests. office, well suited to a great and generous nation; future history to England-a great and friendly but we cannot have the honor of returning the kindness, because our formal and trading ideas prevent our holding any national communion on such subjects unless British "interests" are concerned. We can thank a crew for saving an English ship; we should probably find no precedent to embolden our representatives in paying tribute to the memory of any great foreign statesman. Could we even acknowledge the acknowledgment? We leave such matters to the official channels of communication, and they make a very poor hand of it. This hearty recognition of national sympathy may be contrasted with the heartless petty squabbling about the miserable Greek affair. That, say our officials, was conducted according to the Be it so: it placed England in the position of highest technical rules of the diplomatic profession. making an evasive apology for a breach of treaty; of backing exorbitant claims disgraceful even to the sharper practisers in trade, and then 'bating its bill; of accepting the mediation of a friendly power, and repaying the service with slight; of yielding to remonstrance what was refused to good taste or justice; and, finally, of raising a bad feeling between England and a powerful nation, only allayed by a humiliating concession. This is what diplomacy has done for the honor and interests of Great Britain. The only man of mark belonging to the Nepaulese mission is its chief, Bahadur Jung, a young man said to be of great talents, (Asiatic talents, ever more subtle than vigorous,) very ambitious, and, from the history of his antecedents, we conclude not specially scrupulous as to means of advancement. He is no prince, in our sense of the word, although the newspapers, fond of swelling titles, call him so. He is indeed a rajpoot, a sufficiently high distinction to any pure Hindu, and as belonging to the hereditary military and governing class, he may, by courtesy, be called a prince, but if so, then he is only one out of some millions of Hindu princes, many of them of purer blood, and serving as "rank and file" in our own seapoy army. His two last names, indeed, pure Sanskrit, mean son of a prince" or rajpoot, but that is only Eastern bombast. Bahadur Jung is, we may remark, a title somewhat extraneous and preposterous for a Hindu, since they are Persian words, meaning "champion of battle," which he could not well have derived from the Mogul at Delhi, the only authority that could legitimately confer it. We heartily wish his excellency safe back in his native country, with an ample store of European knowledge; and safe when he is there, which is wishing still more for him. 66 From the Spectator, of 13 July. But the tortuous notions of the profession contaminated the other side; even the being in the tion. The same M. Dupin, who is the instrument right was not a disinfectant against that contaminafor suggesting and recording the generous national sentiment, when he was involved in the diplomatic squabble, and heard how England had yielded by its representative in that behalf, could not refrain from the unhandsome exclamation, "So we have the advantage at all points!" Sir Even the aspirations of diplomacy are ungenerous. It was for Lord Palmerston that Lord John Russell made the taunting boast, that "he was not the minister of Austria, nor of Russia, nor of France, but of England :" what is that but a jargon, or an official version of the retort common among the servile vulgar, "I am no servant of yours? Robert Peel was eminently the servant of England; among all our statesmen, not one more consistently and steadfastly devoted himself to promote the interests of England: but such devotion, so far from blinding a statesman to the feelings and interests THE tribute paid by the French to the memory of foreign nations, rather makes him more acute of Sir Robert Peel ought not only to be dear to in the perception and earnest in the consideration; those who were dear to him, and to the nation on and it was so with Peel. We test the result when whose behalf he labored, but it ought also to teach we see the representative of a highly acute and us a lesson. The President of the National Assem-sensitive people declaring, "Our French hearts are bly has formally pronounced an expression of regret for the loss which Europe has sustained; and the President of the French General Commission for the Exposition of 1851 has addressed a letter on behalf of that body to the President of the British Commission. "How French!" Very true; by no means "English :" we can't do that kind of thing at all, and we are none the better for the incapacity. still moved by the last words which he pronounced in the British Parliament-words of esteem and friendship for our country." Diplomatic smartness sets nation against nation, and so far endangers war: a generous reciprocity establishes between the same nations not only a feeling of common interest, but that higher sense of esteem and affection which draws them closer together, and binds both to the service of their common kind. Peel could The judgment pronounced upon statesmanship by do that individually; but it is France only that can foreign nations is said to be the judgment of "a give a national expression to such sentiments. cotemporary posterity:" here, then, we see Peel That one channel of communication should be taking his rank among the statesmen of history, by supplied by the commissions for arranging the his labors, his clear views, his generous acknowl-cosmopolitan display of progress in arts and indus strain from plunging head-foremost from the middle arch of the highest bridges, or the mast-head of a vessel, into the sea or any river stream; besides these, there has appeared the " flying Ireland," of saltatory fame, who at a single bound would clear the crown of Pickford's loaded van. All these were phenomena of the gymnastic order; but there have been manifestations contemporary with them of an exclusively intellectual form, and quite as anomalous from the every-day casts of humanity. try, appropriately enhances the tribute to the states- | tric, "Sam the Diver," whom nobody could reman who had done so much to develop industry, to render trade cosmopolitan, and to make countries better able to join in the furtherance of the arts. It may be called a striking illustration of the silent and peaceful advancement of that part which is true in democratical ideas-and all very widely and long entertained opinions have at least their nucleus of truth-when we note that the queen's husband has become capable of that national function by assuming a useful and "levelling" place among working commissioners. He is thus promoted from a royal station to the higher one of a national servant, and becomes an instrument in that intercourse of nations which will make their happiest alliance in history. But this capacity, which the French teach us how to exercise and acquire, is good for more than a mere international and therefore occasional purpose. The faculty of recognizing greatness is not only a power, because it is the means of exercising an influence upon other countries, such as the French now exercise over us by their appeal to our liveliest and most conscience-compelling sentiments, but also because the recognition and overt acknowledgment of greatness stimulates the growth of it amongst ourselves, nay, in ourselves. We foster the growth of greatness by acknowledging it; we augment our own capacity for noble feelings and ideas by opening our souls to such influence. The nation that is under the influence of such feelings and ideas will be in itself the more powerful and happy to possess this wisdom and feeling, is to have a wise head and a strong heart; to have a wise head and a strong heart, is to be wise in council and strong in action. From the Spectator. GYMNASTIC AND MORAL PHENOMENA. COMMON resemblances doubtless pervade the family of man, and average results in corresponding periods may be expected in the actions of its members; but society is constantly liable to be surprised by recurring instances of exceptional types. At intervals nature appears ambitious of asserting both the extent and variety of her capabilities, and though mostly observant of general laws, shows that her empire is not bounded to a dull cycle of monotonous creations. Hence it is that we are frequently startled by human phenomena deviating as widely from ordinary models as cometary appearances in the heavens do from the more regular or at least better ascertained movements of the planetary bodies. What shape or character these surprises on routine life may have, can never be foreseen; they may be some novel forms of outrageous crime, or simply the display of a peculiar gift, taste, or merely of mechanical dexterities. There have, it may be collected, and by many it will be remembered, been within the last twenty or thirty years repeated and remarkable instances of all these varieties of human extraordinaries. For example, it is not a great while past since there appeared several persons in succession smitten by an irrepressible desire to climb the outside of the loftiest towers and spires, till, by the aid of sundry artificial claws and dentals, they had reached the fanes of the highest pinnacles; others have come out with an unconquerable propensity for flying from eminence to eminence, as the crows do from steeple to steeple; then there was another eccen For a current expression of this class of incomprehensibles, reference may be had to the arithmetical exploits of the German calculator in last week's Spectator. Now, the mental power by which Herr Daze, with astonishing quickness, executed his processes of involution and evolution, of cubing and squaring numbers and extracting their roots, or that by which he multiplied twelve figures by twelve figures and gave the product exactly in a minute and three quarters, must have been as unfathomable to the grave and reverend signiors of the Institute of Actuaries, before whom he exhibited, as if he had suspended himself in mid-air before them without visible means of support. But the most observable feature in this case is, that it is not the first of the kind that has appeared; and hence it may be inferred that a law of recurrence governs them as well as more commonplace manifestations. In the spring of 1812, the curiosity of the London public was greatly excited by the calculating genius of an American child under eight years of age, named Zerah Colburn. He was altogether unversed in the common rules of arithmetic, and on paper could not perform a simple sum in multiplication or division; but by an internal or may be intuitive process of his own mind, he readily solved the most operose questions in ciphering. He not only determined the exact number of minutes or seconds in any given period of time, but discovered with extraordinary despatch the square or cube root of high numbers. Being asked to raise the number 8 to the sixteenth power, he named the last result, 281,474,976,710,656, and was right in every figure. He had a method of finding out prime numbers, or numbers incapable of division by others, in a way peculiar to himself. Such powers seem inscrutable, incommensurable by any intellectual gauge we possess. Conjectures may be formed respecting them; and it may be supposed within the compass of nature that an order of intelligences may exist innately gifted with such prompt and transcendent faculties as raise the possessors as far above our own intellectual grade as we are above the chimpanzee; and for aught that can be gainsaid, there may be entire worlds of such mental superiorities. But to indulge such thoughts is wandering in vain hypotheses; and we descend to terrestrial phenomena, by noticing a class whose distinctive peculiarity is some overruling taste or propensity. Of this order, and a not yet forgotten example, was the celebrated "Walking Stewart." This extraordinary had been an employé of the East India Company; but feeling a mission above the "making out of invoices for a company of grocers," he threw up his employment, and commenced a journey on foot from Calcutta through Central Asia and Syria till he reached Marseilles. He next traversed Spain, Germany, and the United States of America. It does not appear that Stewart had any special purpose in these incessant peregrinations, further than to gratify the love of seeing in 383 IS PURE WATER FIT FOR DRINK?-HOLIDAY SPORTS.-STANZAS FOR MUSIC. all parts of the habitable globe. He made no notes | and thus returning, to give health to the valetudiof his tours, left no reflections; the only conclu- narian. As to the presence of lime in water being sion of a general import which he seems to have necessary for the preservation of our bones, your arrived at was, that the time would come when correspondent need not fear that his osseous fabric ladies would cease to bear children, leaving travail will become enfeebled by drinking pure water, entirely to poor people. There was, subsequently since many articles of diet contain phosphate of to Stewart, a Captain Cochrane, not less eminent lime. in pedestrian feats; never tired, never hungry, and impregnable to all skyey influences. The captain expired in harness, in an effort to traverse Siberia and reach Kamtschatka on foot across the Uralian mountains. HOLIDAY SPORTS.-In some countries they go on hunting commonly on good Friday in the morning, for a common custom. Will ye break the evil There be Of a cognate character are those remarkable men custom, or cast away Good Friday? who may be said to grapple insatiably with the cathedral churches into which the country cometh savagery of nature. Mrs. Jamieson, in her Cana- with processions at Whitsuntide, and the women dian Rambles, mentions an English gentleman who following the cross with many an unwomanly song, in single blessedness had voluntarily exiled himself and that such honest wives as out of that procession from the fashionable society of London to encounter ye could not hyre to speek one such foul rybaudry the perils and hardships of an American back-word as they there sing for God's sake hole rebauwoodsman. Contrary to the wont of settlers, this dous songs as loud as their throat can cry. Will tough old bachelor had commenced hewing his you mend that lewde manner or put away Whitsunway in the forest, not inwardly from the frontier tide? Ye speak of lewdness used at pylgrymages; line of civilization, but outwardly; pitching, at the is there, trow ye, none used on holy days? And outset, his central point far within the bowels of why do ye not then advise us to put them clean the wilderness, and then working his way home-away, Sundays and all? Some wax dronke in wards, as it were, towards the region of light. In Lent of wygges and cracknels; and yet ye wolde this way half a century had been passed; and the not, I trust, that Lent were fordone.-SIR THOMAS fair tourist found the "old buffalo," as she terms MOORE's Dialoge, ff. 79. him, in the midst of well-stored granaries, with numerous flocks and herds. But the most remarkable specimen of living wonders is that afforded in the lion-hunter of South Africa. Since the appearance of Waterton's Wanderings in Guiana, and of Colonel Crocket's ursa major fights, nothing has been published to match the five years of a hunter's life in chasing grim lions, the elephant, rhinoceros, and giraffe, and doing battle besides with sea-cows and serpents. But Mr. Cumming's narrative is strongly confirmatory of our thesis, in the fact that a gentleman of family and fortune, from mere love of ultra-excitement and adventure, has scorned soft delights to live laborious and dangerous days in the savannas and wilds of the tropics, away from all the securities and pleasures of polished society. Without further search, it establishes the truth of our proposition, that there is much in human nature not dreamt of in Hamlet's philosophy, and mysteries of organism, of intellectual gifts and tastes, of which common standards offer no solution. IS PURE WATER FIT FOR DRINK? To the Editor of the Spectator. SIR-Your correspondent, "A Water Drinker," must be very ignorant of the laws of the animal economy, if he supposes that water impregnated with lime is useful for the preservation of health. On the contrary, the presence of this ingredient (alas! so cominon) is the fruitful source of dyspepsia, with all its horrors; of constipation; of obstructed kidneys, and of various other ailments too well known to us medical men. On the contrary, pure water (i. e., filtered rain-water) is one of the finest solvents in nature; and I hail with pleasure the suggestion of the board of health for the supply of the metropolis with pure water. All England knows the repute of the Malvern water; and its value consists in its purity, scarcely a trace of saline or earthy ingredients being found in it; the absence of limestone in that locality allowing the water of the district to filter through the gravel and sand, From Fraser's Magazine. STANZAS FOR MUSIC. [Both intended to be set to music.] 'T Is sweet to lie in the noon-day shade, 'Tis sweet to wander in twilight pale, 'Tis sweet in ail hours of day or nignt, I'm weary of this heavy chain, I think of what I was before, Are all I know! Yet there are times when doubts depart, POETRY.-The Washington, 355.-Southey's Common Place Book, 364.—Words for Music, 379.— Stanzas for Music, 383. SHORT ARTICLES.-Free Schools in Ohio, 346.-Mr. Layard, 355.-Madam Rachel, 356.—Sultan and Dervise, 364.-Turks at a Fire, 379.-Pure Water, 383. TERMS.-The LIVING AGE is published every Satur- Agencies. We are desirous of making arrangement day, by E. LITTELL & Co., corner of Tremont and Brom-in all parts of North America, for increasing the circulafield sts., Boston; Price 123 cents a number, or six dollars tion of this work-and for doing this a liberal commission a year in advance. Remittances for any period will be will be allowed to gentlemen who will interest themselves thankfully received and promptly attended to. To in the business. And we will gladly correspond on this insure regularity in mailing the work, orders should be subject with any agent who will send us undoubted referaddressed to the office of publication, as above. 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The volumes are published quarterly, each volume containing as much matter as a quarterly review gives in eighteen months. E. LITTELL & CO., BOSTON. WASHINGTON, 27 Dec. 1845. Or all the Periodical Journals devoted to literature and science which abound in Europe and in this country, this has appeared to me the most useful. It contains indeed the exposition only of the current literature of the Englis language, but this, by its urense extent and comprehension, includes a portraiture of the human mind in the utmos expansion of the present age. J Q. ADAMS LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 328.-31 AUGUST, 1850. From the Quarterly Review. 1. Le Conservateur de la Vue. Troisième Edition considérablement augmentée. Par J. G. A. CHEVALLIER. Paris. 1815. 4. Vision in Health and Disease, the Value of Glasses for its Restoration, and the Mischief caused by their Abuse. By ALFRED SMEE, F. R. S. the middle of the eighteenth century, excited hardly less sensation than the American war. The intelligence spread as if the electric fluid had been concerned in its propagation; everybody was exper iments. A thousand pages of the book of nature, 2. The Economy of the Eyes. By WILLIAM KITCH-in haste to study the laws and witness the INER, M. D. Second Edition. 1826. 3. Hints to Students on the Use of the Eyes. By EDWARD REYNOLDS, M. D. Edinburgh. 1835. long since deciphered, remained unvalued and unread; the new page alone could stimulate curiosity. Electricity had its reign, and the crowd, to whom science was not a regular pursuit, dropped at once from wonder to indifference. The influence of novelty is not at all less conspicuous in letters than in science. The last ephemeral production of the day is sought with impatience, and 1847. 5. Practical Remarks on Near Sight, Aged Sight, and Impaired Vision, with Observations upon the Use of Glasses, and on Artificial Light. By WILLIAM WHITE COOPER. 1847. the time-honored classics-the heir-looms of literature-are left to cumber the shelves. THERE lived in the west of England, a few years since, an enthusiastic geologist-a Doctor of The distaste for all except new-born science Divinity and Chairman of the Quarter Sessions. A has usually defeated the numerous attempts to disfarmer, who had seen him presiding on the bench, sociate from the bulk of Natural Philosophy the overtook him shortly afterwards while seated by portions which are of general and constant concern. the roadside on a heap of stones, which he was Of this class of works none have experienced busily breaking in search of fossils. The farmer greater neglect than treatises on the means of reined up his horse, gazed at him for a minute, assisting vision. Opticians and oculists who shook his head in commiseration of the mutability remarked the mischief occasioned by ignorance, of human things, and then exclaimed, in mingled supposed that the public could only be waiting for tones of pity and surprise, "What, doctor! be you an opportunity to be wise. They forgot that their come to this a'ready?" That there could be philos- callings, acting like glasses upon rays of light, ophy in stones had never crossed the mind of the brought cases to a focus, which make but a faint farmer in his most contemplative mood. They impression when dispersed. Since the subject were constantly in his thoughts, but always under had nothing attractive, it required in fact that the aspect of hard materials admirably adapted to the books should be read to learn the importance employ paupers and mend roads. He would of reading them. Their limited circulation is sooner have expected briars and thistles to yield chiefly among persons of ruined sight, who have him corn than that quarries should supply instruc- always a satisfaction in becoming wise after the tion to a divine and magistrate. In the physical event, like the navigator that refused to consult no less than in the moral world familiarity breeds his chart throughout the voyage, and studied it contempt; from his infancy he had beheld the when his ship had gone to pieces on a shoal. petrified animals of distant ages laid open to the Dr. Johnson expressed his surprise that even the inlight of this living world by the blow of a hammer, ventor of spectacles was regarded with indifference, and years before he grew to man's estate the dis-and found no biographer to celebrate his deeds.. closure excited in him equal emotion with a flaw Deeds, however, there are none to celebrate : Such is the usual fate of natural his very name is doubtful, and his life a blank. His invention is his history, and a history which merits attention for the information it conveys, though it is now too late to confer honor on the assemblage of letters which form the words Salvino and Spina.* in the stone. appearances with uninquiring minds. An officer in Anson's squadron showed a mirror to the Patagonians. As often as they caught the reflection of their faces they stole nimbly round to discover who was hid at the back of the glass. A lecturer on the laws of light, who had appeared among them while their wonder was at the highest, would have found a breathless audience. In England, multitudes, who could tell little more than the savages of Patagonia, would hear him, if they listened at all, with chilling composure. An immemorial acquaintance with the effect makes them heedless of the cause. A striking advance in science always affords an illustration of the principle. The discoveries in electricity, about CCCXXVIII. LIVING AGE. VOL. XXVI. 25 *A monk, named Rivalto, mentions in a sermon, preached at Florence in 1305, that spectacles had then been known about twenty years.. This would place the invention in the year 1285, which coincides with the period when the reputed rivals for the honor flourished. Popular opinion has pronounced in favor of Spina. His opponents allege that the very passage of the monkish chronicle, on which alone his pretensions rest, is fatal to the claim. It is there stated that another person, who is not named, had been before him in the discovery, but on telling the result, and refusing to divulge the means, Spina divined the secret, and proclaimed it to the world. An Italian antiquary found in a manuscript in his pos |