12. TRUMPETER REDBREAST. I wondered this year,-for the harvest was in, I wondered, and said, ' Then the Autumn is here,— I woke in the morning, and, out in the air, And my passion of Autumn came down from the skies, Oh Robin, sweet Robin! do you know the power 13. HUNTING ON A GREAT SCALE. Liliput Levée. Very great numbers of the large game-buffaloes, zebras, giraffes, pallas, rhinoceroses, &c.—congregated at some fountains near Kolobeng, and the trap called hopo was constructed in the lands adjacent for their destruction. The hopo consists of two hedges in the form of the letter V, which are very high and thick near the angle. Instead of the hedges being joined there, they are made to form a lane of about fifty yards in length, at the extremity of which a pit is formed, six or eight feet deep, and about twelve or fifteen in breadth and length. Trunks of trees are laid across the margins of the pit, and more especially over that nearest the lane where the animals are expected to leap in, and over that farthest from the lane where it is supposed they will attempt to escape after they are in. The trees form an overlapping border, and render escape almost impossible. The whole is carefully decked with short green rushes, making the pit like a concealed pitfall. As the hedges are frequently about a mile long and about as much apart at their extremities, a tribe making a circle three or four miles round the country adjacent to the opening, and gradually closing up, are almost sure to enclose a large body of game. Driving it up with shouts to the narrow part of the hopo, men secreted there throw their javelins into the affrighted herds, and on the animals rush to the opening presented at the converging hedges, and into the pit till that is full of a living mass. Some escape by running over the others, as a Smithfield market dog does over the sheeps' backs. It is a frightful scene. The men, wild with excitement, spear the lovely animals with mad delight: others of the poor creatures, borne down by the weight of their dead and dying companions, every now and then make the whole mass heave in their smothering agonies.—Dr. Livingstone. 14. NIEBUHR'S BALLAD THEORY. He divides the Roman history into three periods. The purely mythical period, including the foundation of the city and the reigns of the first two kings. 2. The mythico-historical period, including the reigns of the last five kings, and the first fourteen years of the republic. 3. The historical period, beginning with the first secession. The poems, however, which he supposes to have served as the origin of the received history, are not peculiar to any one of these periods; they equally appear in the reigns of Romulus and Numa, in the time of the Tarquins, and in the narratives of Coriolanus, and of the siege of Veii. If the history of periods so widely different was equally drawn from a poetical source, it is clear that the poems must have arisen under wholly dissimilar circumstances, and that they can afford no sure foundation for any historical inference. For solving the problem of the early Roman history, the great desideratum is, to obtain some means of separating the truth from the fiction; and, if any parts be true, of explaining how the records were preserved with fidelity, until the time of the earliest historians, by whom they were adopted, and who, through certain intermediate stages, have transmitted them to us. For example, we may believe that the expulsion of the Tarquins, the creation of a dictator and of tribunes, the adventures of Coriolanus, the Decemvirate, the expedition of the Fabii and the battle of the Cremera, the siege of Veii, the capture of Rome by the Gauls, and the disaster of Caudium, with other portions of the Samnite wars, are events which are indeed to a considerable extent distorted, obscured, and corrupted by fiction, and incrusted with legendary additions; but that they, nevertheless, contain a nucleus of fact, in varying degress if so, we should wish to know how far the fact extends, and where the fiction begins-and also what were the means by which a general historical tradition of events, as they really happened, was perpetuated. This is the question to which an answer is desired; and therefore we are not assisted by a theory which explains how that part of the narrative which is not historical, originated.—Sir G. C. Lewis. 15. BOSTON IN THE LAST CENTURY. The king set himself, and his ministry, and parliament, and all Great Britain, to subdue to his will one stubborn little town on the sterile coast of the Massachusetts Bay. The odds against it were fearful; but it showed a life inextinguishable, and had been chosen to keep guard over the liberties of mankind. The Old World had not its parallel. It counted about sixteen thousand inhabitants of European origin, all of whom had learned to read and write. Good public schools were the foundation of its political system; and Benjamin Franklin, one of their grateful pupils, in his youth apprenticed to the art which makes knowledge the common property of mankind, had gone forth from them to stand before the nations as the representative of the modern plebeian class. As its schools were for all its children, so the great body of its male inhabitants of twenty-one years of age, when assembled in a hall which Faneuil, of Huguenot ancestry, had built for them, was the source of all municipal authority. In the meeting of the town, its taxes were voted, its affairs discussed and settled; its agents and public servants annually elected by ballot and abstract political principles freely debated. A small property qualification was attached to the right of suffrage, but did not exclude enough to change the character of the institution. There had never existed a considerable municipality : approaching so nearly to a pure democracy; and, for so populous a place, it was undoubtedly the most orderly and best governed in the world. Its ecclesiastical polity was in like manner republican. The great mass were Congregationalists; each church was an assembly formed by voluntary agreement; self-constituted, selfsupported, and independent. They were satisfied that no person or church had power over another church. There was not a Roman Catholic altar in the place; the usages of 'papists' were looked upon as worn-out superstitions, fit only for the ignorant. But the people were not merely the fiercest enemies of 'popery and slavery;' they were Protestants even against Protestantism; and though the English Church was tolerated, Boston kept up its exasperation against prelacy. Its ministers were still its prophets and its guides; its pulpit, in which, now that Mayhew was no more, Cooper was admired above all others for eloquence and patriotism, by weekly appeals inflamed alike the fervour of piety and of liberty. In the Boston Gazette,' it enjoyed a free press, which gave currency to its conclusions on the natural right of man to self-government. Its citizens were inquisitive; seeking to know the causes of things, and to search for the reason of existing institutions in the laws of nature. Yet they controlled their speculative turn by practical judgment, exhibiting the seeming contradiction of susceptibility to enthusiasm, and calculating shrewdness. They were fond of gain, and adventurous, penetrating, and keen in their pursuit of it; yet their avidity was tempered by a well-considered and continuing liberality. Nearly every man was struggling to make his own way in the world and his own fortune; and yet individually, and as a body, they were public-spirited.— Bancroft. 16. ENTHUSIASM FOR FREDERIC II. Even the enthusiasm of Germany in favour of Frederic hardly equalled the enthusiasm of England. The birthday of our ally was celebrated with as much enthusiasm as that of our own sovereign; and at night the streets of London were in a blaze with illuminations. Portraits of the hero of Rosbach, with his cocked hat and long pigtail, were in every house. An attentive observer will, at this day, find in the parlours of old с fashioned inns, and in the portfolios of printsellers, twenty portraits of Frederic for one of George II. The sign-painters were everywhere employed in touching-up Admiral Vernon into the King of Prussia. This enthusiasm was strong among religious people, and especially among the Methodists, who knew that the French and Austrians were Papists, and supposed Frederic to be the Joshua or Gideon of the Reformed Faith. One of Whitfield's hearers, on the day on which thanks for the battle of Leuthen were returned at the Tabernacle, made the following exquisitely ludicrous entry in a diary, part of which has come down to us: 'The Lord stirred up the King of Prussia and his soldiers to pray. They kept three fast-days, and spent about an hour praying and singing psalms before they engaged the enemy. O! how good it is to pray and fight!'— Macaulay. 17. LORD CLYDE. Lord Clyde's work spans half a century; it stretches from Vimiera to Lucknow, and takes in all the great military fields of this century: the Peninsular war, the American war, the first Chinese war, the Sikh war, the Crimean war, and the Indian mutiny. The disheartening glories of Corunna were a noble but a melancholy part of his introduction to a military life, and Walcheren gave him nothing but a fever. But a brighter day followed, and the laurels of Barossa, Tarifa, Vittoria, San Sebastian, and Bidassoa blossomed into a brilliant reputation, and sent him back to England a known and distinguished officer. A time of peace followed, but he found work to do in the service. In course of time came the first Chinese war ; then came the Sikh war, with the honours of Ramnuggur, Chillianwallah, and Goojerat. A brief interval over, and we see him leading his Highlanders at the Alma and Balaklava; and another short interval over and he is Commander-in-Chief in India, demolishing the Indian mutiny. His life thus includes all the great military exploits of this century. Everything was a work of ove with him in war, because he had the genius of war within him, the spark which lights up at the thought of a campaign and a field of battle. He was an enthusiast, no* an officer merely.-The Times. |