they had been considered merely as objects of sport. The laws relating to preservation of game were in every country uncommonly rigorous. They formed in England that odious system of forest laws which distinguished the tyranny of our Norman kings.

II.

This excessive passion for the sports of the field produced those evils which are apt to result from it; a strenuous idleness, which disdained all useful occupations, and an oppressive spirit towards the peasantry. The devastation committed under the pretence of destroying wild animals, which had been already protected in their depredations, is noticed in serious authors, and has also been the topic of popular ballads. What effect this must have had on agriculture, it is easy to conjecture. The levelling of forests, the draining of morasses, and the extirpation of mischievous animals which inhabit them, are the first objects of man's labour in reclaiming the earth to his use; and these were forbidden by a landed aristocracy, whose control over the progress of agricultural improvement was unlimited, and who had not yet learned to sacrifice their pleasures to their avarice.

HALLAM, "The Student's Middle Ages."

THE STUDY OF VERSE.

Our English public schools and universities continue with pertinacity the discipline of Latin and Greek versification, and I am not inclined to dispute its value, as a means of imparting an accurate perception of the formation and delicacies of those languages. But every argument in favour of such an exercise applies equally to the knowledge and use of our vernacular tongue. It is quite unnecessary for me to point out how the careful manipulation of verse must lead to an understanding of prose. The cadence of sentences, the weight of words, the fitness

of epithets, the varieties of expression-in fact, all the components of good prose-lie within the study and practice of verse. There the faults are most patent, there the differences most clear. . . . I believe it holds good that all eminent poets have, in their separate styles, been excellent writers of prose composition.

Lord HOUGHTON, "Address at the Opening of the Edinburgh
Philosophical Institution."

CHARACTER OF CROMWELL.

Cromwell died in the plenitude of his power and greatness. He had succeeded beyond all expectation, far more than any other of those men has succeeded, who, by their genius have raised themselves, as he had done, to supreme authority; for he had attempted and accomplished, with equal success, the most opposite designs. At every moment, under all circumstances, he had distinguished with admirable sagacity the dominant interests and passions of the time, so as to make them the instruments of his own rule-careless whether he belied his antecedent conduct, so long as he triumphed in concert with the popular instinct, and explaining the inconsistencies of his conduct by the ascendant unity of his power. He is, perhaps, the only example which history affords of one man having governed the most opposite events, and proved sufficient for the most various destinies. And in the course of his violent and chanceful career, incessantly exposed to all kinds of enemies and conspiracies, Cromwell experienced this crowning favour of fortune, that his life was never actually attacked; the sovereign against whom killing had been declared to be no murder, never found himself face to face with an assassin. The world has never known another example of success at once so constant and so various, or of fortune so invariably favourable, in the midst of such manifold conflicts and perils.

GUIZOT, "Oliver Cromw 11,"

THE ABORIGINES OF AUSTRALIA.

The Aborigines of Australia are believed to be gradually dying out before the advance of the white man. Several tribes have already disappeared.

The general colour of the native is of an earthy black, or sooty brown. They have the flat nose, large nostrils, and thick protruding lip of the true negro, but their hair is generally long and coarse, rather than woolly. Their limbs, and indeed their whole bodies, are lean, utterly unlike those of true African negroes. They have no chiefs, either elected or hereditary, government appearing to be patriarchal among them; the father having authority in the family, and the elders in a tribe. They have no permanent dwellings, and rarely wear clothes of any kind, except in the neighbourhood of white settlements, where they are compelled to wear blankets.

HEWITT, "Geography of the British Colonies."

CAR TRAVELLING IN IRELAND.

The Irish car seems accommodated for any number of persons it appeared to be full when we left Glengariff, for a traveller from Bearhaven, and the five gentlemen from the yacht, took seats upon it with myself, and we fancied it was impossible that more than seven should travel by such a conveyance; but the driver showed the capabilities of his vehicle presently. The journey from Glengariff to Kenmare is one of astonishing beauty; and I have seen Killarney since, and am sure that Glengariff loses nothing by comparison with this most famous of lakes. Rock, wood, and sea stretch around the traveller -a thousand delightful pictures; the landscape is at first wild without being fierce, immense woods and plantations enriching the valleys, beautiful streams to be seen everywhere.

THACKERAY.

HARLEY AND THE BEGGAR.

I.

In a few hours Harley reached the inn where he proposed breakfasting; but the fulness of his heart would not suffer him to eat a morsel. He walked out on the road, and gaining a little height, stood gazing on that quarter he had left. He looked for his wonted prospect, his fields, his woods, and his hills; they were lost in the distant clouds! He pencilled them on the clouds, and bade them farewell with a sigh!

He sat down on a large stone to take out a little pebble from his shoe, when he saw, at some distance, a beggar approaching him. He had on a loose sort of coat, mended with different-coloured rags, amongst which the blue and the russet were predominant.

II.

He had a short knotty stick in his hand, and on the top of it was stuck a ram's horn; his knees (though he was no pilgrim) had worn the stuff off his breeches; he wore no shoes, and his stockings had entirely lost that part of them which should have covered his feet and ancles; in his face, however, was the plump appearance of good-humour; he walked a good round pace, and a crook-legged dog trotted at his heels.

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"Our delicacies," said Harley to himself, are fantastic; they are not in nature! That beggar walks over the sharpest of these stones barefooted, whilst I have lost the most delightful dream in the world from the smallest of them happening to get into my shoe."

H. MACKENZIE, "The Man of Feeling."

MARINE CAVERNS.

Marine caverns, haunted by seals and sea-birds, some of which were formerly used by smugglers as places of concealment for their goods, with isolated, tunnelled, and

split rocks, the latter sometimes united at the summit by rude natural bridges, are features of our more exposed and iron-bound coasts. They exhibit a strange and often fearful magnificence-a wild beauty or savage grandeurthe effect of which is heightened by the boom of the billows in the hollowed precipices, or their splash against the exterior cliffs repeated by a thousand echoes, and mingling with the cry of vast flights of curlews, gulls, guillemots, razor-bills, cormorants, or herons.

MILNER, "Our Home Islands."

THE COCOA-NUT PALM.

The cocoa-nut palm is by far the most important production of nature in the tropics. To the Polynesian it is emphatically the tree of life, transcending even the bread-fruit in the multifarious uses to which it is applied.

Its very aspect is imposing. Asserting its supremacy by an erect and lofty bearing, it may be said to compare with other trees, as man with inferior creatures.

The blessings it confers are incalculable. Year after year the islander reposes beneath its shade, both eating and drinking of its fruit; he thatches his hut with its boughs, and weaves them into baskets to carry his food; he cools himself with a fan plaited from the young leaflets, and shields his head from the sun by a bonnet of the leaves; sometimes he clothes himself with the cloth-like substance which wraps round the base of the stalks, whose elastic rods, strung with filberts, are used as a taper; the larger nuts, skinned and polished, furnish him with a beautiful goblet; the smaller ones, with bowls for his pipes; the dry husks kindle his fires; its fibres are twisted into fishing-lines and cords for his canoes; he heals his wounds with a balsam compounded from the juice of the nut; and, with the oil extracted from its meat, embalms the bodies of the dead.

The noble trunk itself is far from being valueless.