LITTELL'S LIVING AGE-No. 537.-2 SEPT., 1854. Apart he stands, and lowly, as befit By menials beckoned to a lowly chair, Still true to art, because to nature true. THE crowning apple speaks the finished feast-Changes the various scene, excursive, new, Silenced the hum of conversation round;- "I KNOW THUS MUCH MYSELF A MAN TO BE- The world-wide kindred of the heart addressed, Then from the roof resounds the wild acclaim- Wreaths upon wreaths from noble temples torn, The poet seeming poor, the seeming great? There is no rich, no poor, the heart grown wide, "I AM A MAN its, and nought beside. scend and take thy fires uncreate. And part me from the world. Let me disown For one short hour its pleasure and its spleen, And wrapt in dreamy thought, some peaceful moments glean. No voice of any living thing is near, Save the wild sea-bird's wail, That seems the cry of sorrow deep and drear, That nothing can avail; Now in the air with broad white wing they sail, The sea approaches, with its weary heart An earnest grief, too tranquil to depart, Speaks in that troubled sigh; Yet its glad waves seem dancing merrily, For hope from them conceals the warning tone; Gaily they rush toward the shore-to die, All their bright spray upon the bare sand thrown, While still around them wails that sad and ceaseless moan. And thus the heart would raise its visions dear, And shape them new from fragments that remained, But finds their brightness gone, by earth's cold touch profaned. Long have I lingered here, the evening fair The sinking sea sighs forth its sad despair Hushed is the sea-bird's melancholy cry, That holds the records sad of sorrow's former rage. And nature answers my complaining woe And learn that scattered and defiled no more From the deserted shore, That thus the hopes I bitterly deplore, The fallen waves are wafted to the skies, THE SCREW PROPELLER. - Anon. is clearly mistaken in thinking that, when Darwin says that "the undulating motion of the tail of fishes might be applied behind a boat with greater effect than common oars," he had any idea of a screw propeller. He meant not a rotatory, but, as he says, an "undulating" motion, like that of the fish's tail: such as we see every day employed by the boys in all our rivers and harbors, called sculling that is, driving a boat forward by the rapid lateral right and left impulsion of a single oar, worked from the stern of the boat. It was the application of steam to some such machinery as this that Darwin seems to have meant; and not to the special action of a revolving cut water screw. I avail myself of this occasion to record, that about the date of Darwin's publication, or very soon after, the very ingenious Earl Stanhope not only thought of, but actually employed, the idenhe had fitted up for the purpose; and in which, tical screw propeller now in use in a vessel which by his invitation, I, and several other gentlemen, accompanied him in various trips backwards and forwards between Blackfriars and Westminster bridges. The instrument was a long iron axle, working on the stern port of the vessel, having at exactly like the flyer of a smoke-jack; while inthe end in the water a wheel of inclined planes, the men. The velocity attained was, I think, board, the axle was turned by a crank worked by said to be four miles an hour. I am sorry that I am not able to specify the exact date of this experiment, but it must have been between 1802 and 1805. What Lord Stanhope said about employing steam to work his machine, I do not clearly recollect. He entered into a great many details about it, but I remember nothing distinctC. ly but the machine itself. Notes and Queries. From the Quarterly Review. 1. The Lives of the Queens of England, etc. By Agnes Strickland. Vols. VI. VII. London, 1843. 2. Memoirs of the Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, K. G., etc. By Sir Harris Nicolas, G. C. M. G. London, 1847. 3. The Romance of the Peerage, or Curiosities of Family History. By George Lillie Craik. Vols. I. II. London, 1748. 4. Lives and Letters of the Devereux Earls of Essex, etc. By the Hon. Walter Bourchier Devereux. 2 Vols. London, 1853. the daughter of Henry VIII. and the daughter of James II., were the last of our rulers who were English by both parents. Their maternal ancestry was not drawn from kings and Kaisers, but from simple English subjects, and those of no very exalted rank or pedigree. Both were indeed the daughters of peers, but neither Anne Boleyn nor Queen Anne was born in the peerage; the former, indeed, was doubtless the cause of her father's elevation. The whole dynasty to which Elizabeth belonged was one under which royalty was more thoroughly national than it had been for many centuries before, or than it has ever been since. Ir has been remarked by Sismondi, that the The marriage of the duke of York with Anne effect of the Salic law in the succession of a Hyde was looked on as something strange, kingdom, is to render the royal family more and almost monstrous; but such was not the strictly national; while one in which female feeling a century earlier. The royal personsuccession is allowed, is perpetually exposed to ages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the chance of receiving a foreign dynasty. Of intermarried more habitually with English the long line of kings of France, every one was men and English women than those of any a Frenchman; while England and Spain have subsequent age, or indeed of any preceding each been, more than once, transferred to for- one since the Norman Conquest. It was the eign rulers through the operation of the con-point of time most favorable to such a practice. trary law. But it is a curious circumstance, The last vestiges of its foreign origin had just that whenever this has occurred in England,* been wiped away from the dynasty, and the it has never taken place through the marriage aristocracy founded by the Conqueror; the sysof a queen-regnant, but always through that tem of modern European politics, which reof some princess not in the immediate line of gards all crowned heads as forming a distinct succession, whose posterity has appeared to caste, intermarrying only within their own auclaim the throne after several generations. gust circle, was not as yet fully established. In Probably few persons seriously dreamed that England again, especially, the constant revothe union of Margaret of England with James lutions and changes of the succession brought of Scotland would lead to that of the two Brit- the crown within the reach of remote branches ish kingdoms under one sceptre; still fewer, of the royal family, who had nothing but their doubtless, imagined, when the decorous Pals genealogy to distinguish them from the rest of grave carried off his laughing bride from the the nobility of the realm. Anyhow the pedicourt of their first common sovereign, that gree of Queen Elizabeth would have appeared within a century both realms would receive, as painfully defective in the eyes of a German their king, the prince of a German state, of herald. She would have been utterly unable which few Englishmen, in those days, had to make out her sixteen quarterings of royal heard the name. But none of the queens- or even noble dignity. We have oftener to regnant who have preceded her present Majes- pick our way through the obscure genealogies ty, can be made responsible for the good or the of rustic knights and plodding citizens than evil of introducing new blood into the royal along the magnificent series of the Percies or line. Two, indeed-if we count, as is hardly the De Veres. As if to mock every notion of fair, the second Mary, three of their number the kind, when any unusually illustrious name were married to foreign princes, but none left does appear, it is the result of some strange surviving issue; only one bore children at all. mésalliance, which drew attention even at the The present heir-apparent is the first who has time. Elizabeth's grotesque title of Queen of derived the title of Prince of Wales from a maternal parent. And Elizabeth, the greatest of our queens, and one of the greatest of our sovereigns, desired no worthier epitaph than that "she lived and died a virgin queen." But more than this, two among our queens regnant have been conspicuously national sovereigns. The last Tudor and the last Stuart, The Plantagenet succession was hardly an exception: Matilda can be barely counted as a queenregnant; and her husband and son were not more foreign to the English nation than the existing royal family. France might have been backed up by a lineal, though not male, connection with St. Lewis and Hugh Capet, of more recent date than her descent from the "she-wolf," from whom that fantastic claim was originally derived;, but this was only because a handsome Welsh gentleman had pleased the eye of a daughter of France, the widow of the conqueror of Agincourt. In tracing her direct royal descent through the contending houses whose claims had centred in her father, we shall not find a foreign ancestor until the two lines converge in a pair of whom any nation would have been |