the untiring zeal of the Methodists, who have essayed a task that has been left to them, almost without competition, by the national Church. Even in the lower virtues of the moral scale, such as economy, forethought, and prudence, our operative is not a zealot. A pitman's economy, for example, consists in obtaining as many coveted eatables as his money will immediately purchase, and his forethought is only exhibited in obtaining as many more as the petty shopkeeper will give him credit for. Hence a man who has a large current account with his neighbor, or traveling tradesman, is generally found to take a remarkable aversion to his locality at the termination of his annual abidement, and away he departs to a distant pit. Petty deception is prevalent amongst pitmen to a great extent. They appear to esteem trickiness as an indication of shrewdness, for it will be practised with éclat upon a superior in the face and presence of the whole community. Of course, honesty is not compatible with such a turn of mind; and yet a resident in or near the colliery village will seldom or never lose anything of considerable value. The scenes of long-continued intemperance, rioting, and gambling, that formerly awaited every pay-day, are now rare, and chiefly confined to new collieries, which generally obtain the refuse of the older establishments. There is, notwithstanding, too much reason to suspect that secret vices of this kind are not very uncommon; and it cannot be said that their habits of ablution, and their small and crowded houses, are favorable to chastity. We feel bound, however, to say in compensation, that they dispense charity largely, though somewhat indiscreetly. An itinerant psalmodist, if provided with a touching or nasal voice, a clean white apron, and three or four small children at his side, trained to choral skill, will be loaded with small contributions in his perambulation through a colliery village. The means and opportunities of education have for some time attracted the attention of employers, but as yet not much has been effected. There are few or no infant-schools in the collieries, as far as we know; and the "dame-schools," that are said to resemble them, show the resemblance only in the lowest particular, that of their forming a secure receptacle for children whose presence at home would be inconvenient, while the preceptress is commonly a matron whose current of kindliness has long since been frozen up. As to day-schools for the boys, they are scarcely to be expected; for when a boy of eight or nine can earn tenpence a-day in the pit, to the pit he is despatched. Hence it may readily be conceived that pitmen's widows, with families of boys, are not considered the encumbrances they generally pass for in higher society, but on the contrary, are here looked upon as valuable properties, not likely to be long in the market. Night-schools and Sunday-schools, then, are the only ones at all open to the mining youth in general. But even where there is a fair attendance on a night-school, it lasts only for the winter, and the cessation in summer nearly counterbalances the partial and imperfect instruction of the winter. If pupils be deficient, it is not likely that the master will be effective. Exceedingly few of the masters have been trained to their work; and they would need an especial training to teach pit-lads. Judged by the low criterion of an ability to spell, no small proportion of the teachers would be condemned, lamentable novelties in orthography having been frequently addressed to us in caligraphic flourishes. In fact, the individual encouraged to assume the office of schoolmaster has generally been proved unfit for anything else, and has frequently lost a leg, or an arm, or an eye, and has only not lost his good opinion of himself and the sympathy of his neighbors. A FEMALE KNIGHT.-At the head of the list of the Knights of the Legion of Honor lately created by the President of the French Republic, is a widow by the name of Brulon, who was born in 1771, and is now an officer in the Hotel des Invalides, where she has lived for the last 52 years, enjoying the esteem and veneration of the old companions in arms. She was the daughter, sister and wife of military men, who died in active service in Italy. Her husband died at Ajaccio in 1791, after seven years service. In 1792, at the age of 21, she VOL XXIV. NO. IL entered the 42d Regiment of Infantry, in which her husband had served, and made herself so remarkable by her honorable conduct, that she was permitted to continue in the service notwithstanding her sex. She was attached to the regiment years, and performed seven campaigns as private soldier, corporal, sergeant, and sergeant-major. She was wounded at the siege of Calvi, and being rendered incapable of service, was admitted into the Hotel des Invalides. In October, 1822, she was promoted to the rank of Ensign. 17 From Blackwood's Magazine. PARIS IN 1851. [Continued from the Eclectic Magazine for September.] The Opera. In the evening I went to the French Opera, which is still one of the lions of Paris. It was once in the Rue Richelieu; but the atrocious assassination of the Duc de Berri, who was stabbed at his porch, threw a kind of horror over the spot; the theatre was closed, and the performance moved to its present site in the Rue Lepelletier, a street diverging from the Boulevard. Fond as the French are of decoration, the architecture of this building possesses no peculiar beauty, and would answer equally well for a substantial public hospital, a workhouse, or a barrack, if the latter were not the more readily suggested by the gendarmerie loitering about the doors, and the mounted dragoons at either end of the street. notonous, nor grand and Gothic, they have made it riant and racy, like a place where men and women come to be happy, where beautiful dancers are to be seen, and where sweet songs are to be heard, and where the mind is for three or four hours to forget all its cares, and to carry away pleasant recollections for the time being. From pit to ceiling it is covered with paintings-all sorts of cupids, nymphs, and flower-garlands, and Greek urns-none of them wonders of the pencil, but all exhibiting that showy mediocrity of which every Frenchman is capable, and with which every Frenchman is in raptures. All looks rich, warm, and operatic. cloth, tremendous trowsers, and the scowl of a stage conspirator. The Parisian men have since learned the decencies of dress. One characteristic change has struck me everywhere in Paris-the men dress better, The passages of the interior are of the and the women worse. When I was last same character-spacious and substantial; here, the men dressed half bandit and half but the door of the salle opens, and the Hottentot. The revolutionary mystery was stranger, at a single step, enters from those at work, and the hatred of the Bourbons was murky passages into all the magic of a crowd-emblematized in a conical hat, a loose necked theatre. The French have, within these few years, borrowed from us the art of lighting theatres. I recollect the French theatre lighted only by a few lamps scattered round the house, or a chandelier in the middle, which might have figured in the crypt of a cathedral. This they excused as giving greater effect to the stage; but it threw the audience into utter gloom. They have now made the audience a part of the picture, and an indispensable part. The opera-house now shows the audience; and if not very dressy, or rather as dowdy, odd, and dishevelled a crowd as I ever recollect to have seen within theatrical walls, yet they are evidently human beings, which is much more picturesque than masses of spectres, seen only by an occasional flash from the stage. The French architects certainly have not made this national edifice grand; but they have made it a much better thing,-lively, showy, and rich. Neither majestic and mo As I entered the house before the rising of the curtain, I had leisure to look about me, and I found even in the audience a strong contrast to those of London. By that kind of contradiction to everything rational and English which governs Parisians, the women seem to choose dishabille for the Opera. As the house was crowded, and the boxes are let high, and the performance of the night popular, I might presume that some of the élite were present, yet I never saw so many ill-dressed women under one roof. Bonnets, shawls, muffles of all kinds, were the costume. How different from the finish, the splendor, and the fashion of the English opera-box. I saw hundreds of women who appeared, by their dress, scarcely above the rank of shopkeepers, yet who probably were among the Parisian leaders of fashion, if in republican Paris there are any leaders of fashion. But I came to be interested, to enjoy, to indulge in a feast of music and acting; with no fastidiousness of criticism, and with every inclination to be gratified. In the opera itself I was utterly disappointed. The Opera was Zerline, or, The Basket of Oranges. The composer was the first living musician of France, Auber; the writer was the most popular dramatist of his day, Scribe; the Prima Donna was Alboni, to whom the manager of the Opera in London had not thought it too much to give £4000 for a single season. I never paid my francs with more willing expectation: and I never saw a performance of which I so soon got weary. Elysées, with the Arc de l'Etoile rising above it, at the end of its long and noble avenue; in my front the Palace of the Legislature, a chaste and elegant structure; and behind me, glowing in the sunbeams, the Madeleine, the noblest church-I think the noblest edifice, in Paris, and perhaps not surpassed in beauty and grandeur, for its size, by any place of worship in Europe. The air cool and sweet from the foliage, the vast place almost solitary, and undisturbed by the cries which are incessant in this Babel during the day, yet with that gentle confusion of sounds which makes the murmur and the music of a great city. All was calm, noble, and soothing. The obelisk of Luxor, which stands in the centre of the "Place," is one of two monoliths, or pillars of a single stone, which, with Cleopatra's Needle, were given by mehemet Ali to the French, at the time when, by their alliance, he expected to have made himself independent. All the dates of Egyptian antiquities are uncertain-notwithstanding. Young and his imitator Champollion-but the date assigned to this pillar is 1550 years before the Christian era. The two obelisks stood in front of the great temple of Thebes, now named Luxor; and the hieroglyphics which cover this one are supposed to relate to the exploits and incidents of the reign of Sesostris. The Obelisk.-I strayed into the Place de la Concorde, beyond comparison the finest space in Paris. I cannot call it a square, nor does it equal in animation the Boulevard; but in the profusion of noble architecture it has no rival in Paris, nor in Europe. Vive la Despotisme! every inch of it is owing to Monarchy. Republics build nothing, if we except prisons and workhouses. They are They are proverbially squalid, bitter, and beggarly. What has America, with all her boasting, ever built, but a warehouse or a conventicle? The Roman Republic, after seven hundred years' existence, remained a collection of hovels, till an Emperor faced them with marble. If Athens exhibited her universal tal-weather, it is almost the color of limestone. ents in the splendor of her architecture, we must recollect that Pericles was her master through life as substantially despotic, by the aid of the populace, as an Asiatic king by his guards; and recollect also, that an action of damages was brought against him for "wasting the public money on the Parthenon," the glory of Athens in every succeeding age. Louis Quatorze, Napoleon, and Louis Philippe-two openly, and the third secretly, as despotic as the Sultan-were the true builders of Paris. scene. It is of red syenite; but, from time and It has an original flaw up a third of its height, for which the Egyptian masons provided a remedy by wedges, and the summit is slightly broken. The height of the monolith is seventy-two feet three inches, which would look insignificant, fixed as it is in the centre of lofty buildings, but for its being raised on a plinth of granite, and that again raised on a pedestal of immense blocks of granite-the height of the plinth and the pedestal together being twenty-seven feet, making the entire height nearly one hundred. The weight of the monolith is five hundred thousand pounds; the weight of the pedestal is half that amount, and the weight of the blocks probably makes the whole amount to nine hundred thousand, which is the weight of the obelisk at Rome. It was erected in 1836, by drawing it up an inclined plane of masonry, and then raising it by cables and capstans to the perpendicular. The operation was tedious, difficult, and expensive; but it was worth the labor; and the monolith now forms a remarkable monument of the zeal of the king and of the liberality of his govern As I stood in the centre of this vast enclosure, I was fully struck with the effect of The sun was sinking into a bed of gold and crimson clouds, that threw their hue over the long line of the Champs Elysées. Before me were the two great fountains, and the Obelisk of Luxor. The fountains had ceased to play, from the lateness of the hour, but still looked massive and gigantic; the obelisk looked shapely and superb. The The gardens of the Tuileries were on my leftdeep, dense masses of foliage, surmounted in the distance by the tall roofs of the old Palace; on my right, the verdure of the Champsment. There is, I understand, an obelisk remaining in Egypt, which was given by the Turkish government to the British army, on the expulsion of the French from Egypt, but which has been unclaimed, from the difficulty of carrying it to England. That difficulty, it must be acknowledged, is considerable. In transporting and erecting the obelisk of Luxor six years were employed. I have not heard the expense, but it must have been large. A vessel was especially constructed at Toulon, for its conveyance down the Nile. A long road was to be made from the Nile to the Temple. Then the obelisk required to be protected from the accidents of carriage, which was done by enclosing it in a wooden case. It was then drawn by manual force to the river and this employed three months. Then came the trouble of embarking it, for which the vessel had to be sawn nearly through; then came the crossing of the bar at Rosetta-a most difficult operation at the season of the year; then the voyage down the Mediterranean, the vessel being towed by a steamer; then the landing at Cherbourg, in 1833; and, lastly, the passage up the Seine, which occupied nearly four months, reaching Paris in December; thenceforth its finishing and erection, which was completed only in three years after. | part of its course, must be left for his explanation; but the whole constitutes a beautiful and magnificent object, and with the sister fountain, perhaps forms the finest display of the kind in Europe. I did not venture, while looking at those stately monuments of French art, to turn my thoughts towards our own unhappy performances in Trafalgar-squarethe rival of a soda-water bottle, yet the work of a people of boundless wealth, and the first machinists in the world. The Jardin des Plantes.—I found this fine establishment crowded with the lower orders fathers and mothers, nurses, old women, and soldiers. As it includes the popular attractions of a zoological garden, as well as a botanical, every day sees its visitants, and every holiday its crowds. The plants are for science, and for that I had no time, even had I possessed other qualifications; but the zoological collection were for curiosity, and of that the spectators had abundance. Yet the animals of pasture appeared to be languid, possibly tired of the perpetual bustle round them for all animals love quiet at certain times, and escape from the eye of man, when escape is in their power. Possibly the heat of the weather, for the day was remarkably sultry, might have contributed to their exhaustion. But if they had memory-and why should they not?-they must have strangely felt the contrast of their free pastures, shady woods, and fresh streams, with the little patch of ground, the parched soil, and the clamor of ten thousand tongues around them. I could imagine the antelope's intelligent eye, as he lay panting before us on his brown patch of soil, comparing it with the ravines of the Cape, or the eternal forests clothing the hills of his native Abyssinia. The fountains of the Place de la Concorde would deserve praise if it were only for their beauty. At a distance sufficient for the picturesque, and with the sun shining on them, they actually look like domes and cataracts of molten silver; and a nearer view does not diminish their right to admiration. They are both lofty, perhaps fifty feet high, both consisting of three basins, lessening in size in proportion to their height, and all pouring out sheets of water from the trumpets of Tritons, from the mouths of dolphins, and from allegorical figures. One of those fountains is in honor of Maritime Navigation, and the other of the Navigation of Rivers. In the former the figures represent the Ocean and the Mediterranean, with the Genii of the fisheries, and in the upper basins are Commerce, Astronomy, Navigation, &c., all capital bronzes, and all spouting out floods of water. The fountain of River Navigation is not behind its rival in bronze or water. It exhibits the Rhine and the Rhone, with the Genii of fruits and flowers, of the vintage and the har-heavy and unwieldy-looking animals could be vest, with the usual attendance of Tritons. Why the artist had no room for the Seine and the Garonne, while he introduced the Rhine, which is not a French river in any But the object of all popular interest was the pit of the bears: there the crowd was incessant and delighted. But the bears, three or four huge brown beasts, by no means reciprocated the popular feeling. They sat quietly on their hind-quarters, gazing grimly at the groups which lined their rails, and tossed cakes and apples to them from above. They had probably been saturated with sweets, for they scarcely noticed anything but by a growl. They were insensible to apples-even oranges could not make them move, and cakes they seemed to treat with scorn. It was difficult to conceive that those ferocious; but the Alpine hunter knows that they are as fierce as the tiger, and nearly as quick and dangerous in their spring. The carnivorous beasts were few, and, The Consulate, and still more the Empire, restored the Establishment. Napoleon was ambitious of the character of a man of science; he was a member of the Institute; he knew the French character, and he flattered the national vanity, by indulging it with the prospect of being at the head of human knowledge. except in the instance of one lion, of no | professors had fled, and were starving, or remarkable size or beauty. As they natu- starved. rally doze during the day, their languor was no proof of their weariness; but I have never seen an exhibition of this kind without some degree of regret. The plea of the promotion of science is nothing. Even if it were important to science to be acquainted with the habits of the lion and tiger, which it is not, their native habits are not to be learned from the animal shut up in a cage. The chief exertion of their sagacity and their strength in the native state is in the pursuit of prey; yet what of these can be learned from the condition in which the animal dines as regularly as his keeper, and divides his time between feeding and sleep? Half-a-dually reducing the character of the Jardin; dozen lions let loose in the Bois de Boulogne would let the naturalist into more knowledge of their nature than a menagerie for fifty years. The Jardin dates its origin as far back as Louis XIII., when the king's physician recommended its foundation for science. The French are fond of gardening, and are good gardeners; and the climate is peculiarly favorable to flowers, as is evident from the market held every morning in summer, by the side of the Madeleine, where the greatest abundance of the richest flowers I ever saw is laid out for the luxury of the Parisians. The Jardin, patronized by kings and nobles, flourished through successive reigns; but the appointment of Buffon, about the middle of the eighteenth century, suddenly raised it to the pinnacle of European celebrity. The most eloquent writer of his time, (in the style which the French call eloquence,) a man of family, and a man of opulence, he made Natural History the fashion, and in France that word is magic. It accomplishes everything -it includes everything. All France was frantic with the study of plants, animals, poultry-yards, and projects for driving tigers in cabriolets, and harnessing lions a la Cybele. But Buffon mixed good sense with his inevitable charlatanrie-he selected the ablest men whom he could find for his professors; and in France there is an extraordinary quantity of "ordinary" cleverness-they gave amusing lectures, and they won the hearts of the nation. The institution had by this time been so long regarded as a public show, that it was beginning to be regarded as nothing else. Gratuitous lectures, which are always good for nothing, and to which all kinds of people crowd with corresponding profit, were gra when Cuvier, a man of talent, was appointed to one of the departments of the institution, and he instantly revived its popularity, and, what was of more importance, its public use. Cuvier devoted himself to comparative anatomy and geology. The former was a study within human means, of which he had the materials around him, and which, being intended for the instruction of man, is evidently intended for his investigation. The latter, in attempting to fix the age of the world, to decide on the process of creation, and to contradict Scripture by the ignorance of man, is merely an instance of the presump tion of Sciolism. Cuvier exhibited remarkable dexterity in discovering the species of the fossil fishes, reptiles, and animals. The science was not new, but he threw it into a new form-he made it interesting, and he made it probable. If a large proportion of his supposed discoveries were merely ingenious guesses, they were at least guesses which there was nobody to refute, and they were ingenious-that was enough. Fame followed him, and the lectures of the ingenious theorist were a popular novelty. The "Cabinet of Comparative Anatomy" in the Jardin is the monument of his diligence, and it does honor to the sagacity of his investigation. One remark, however, must be made. On a former visit to the Cabinet of Comparative Anatomy, among the collection of skeletons, I was surprised and disgusted with the sight of the skeleton of the Arab who killed General Kleber in Egypt. The Arab was impaled, and the iron spike was shown still sticking in But the Revolution came, and crushed all the spine! I do not know whether this institutions alike. Buffon, fortunate in every hideous object is still to be seen, for I have way, had died in the year before, in 1788, not lately visited the apartment; but, if exand was thus spared the sight of the gen-isting still, it ought to remain no longer in a eral ruin. The Jardin escaped, through some plea of its being national property; but the museum of science. Of course, the assassin deserved death; but, in all probability, the |