premature in exulting over his strongest | the popularis aura as well as the Imperial instrument. It is a good machine and a volition, and wind has this advantage over strong, so good and so strong that it may steam, that it costs the workmen nothbe driven by wind as well as steam, bying.

there! The Abbess added: "They will be perfectly safe there- there are 300 Prussians lodged in the convent. They are respectful and even pious. Some are Catholics and some are Protestants, Mais tous sont pieux et d'une convenance parfaite." I have no doubt this is quite true, but it was as good as a joke coming from the same abbess who during the siege had told me, with upturned eyes, that she heard horrible stories about the treatment of their convents (all vague stories, without even a name mentioned), but that in most cases the nuns had fortunately been able to "sauver le bon Dieu" (meaning the consecrated wafers). I felt tempted to tell her I thought that was rather reversing the parts, but I withheld this Voltairian remark."

Pall Mall.

THE following is an extract from a letter | Royaumont. They had chosen the Nord be which we have received from one of our corre- cause they would soon meet the Prussians spondents in Paris, dated. the 12th of April:"We never had during all the former siege such noisy cannonade as we have had all last night and this morning. "Oncle Balerian," as the Germans called Mont Valérien, has never ceased thundering. Our house shook throughout once or twice in the night. The Reds do not seem to know what they are doing in the way of defence. One day they dug deep trenches across the Rue Royale and the Rue de Rivoli, and the next day they closed them up neatly again. Their drilling in the streets is quite comical even to the most unmilitary observer. They look half dead and are in rags. As a mass they may be said to form quite an inferior race, stunted, fierce, and stupid-looking and sickly. In all this hot weather they always go about with a thick coverlet rolled round their body, nobody knows why. They probably were told it was a "military precaution" in January last. But it is not their appearance, poor devils, that is comical; it is the actual drilling. The officers know nothing, and treat their naked swords as they would walking sticks, dragging them along on the ground and poking at the pavement with the point. I have seen them actually throw their swords down on the ground while they ran to administer a smart admonition to a man in the ranks. And the captain's or commandant's dress is almost always most eccentric. This Red insurrection will have had one good result: it has done much to appease the hatred towards the Germans. The German-spy fever is over. All respectable people would now prefer the Germans to the Communists. Even these latter see now that what they called savageness in the invader-bombardment, shooting of combatants out of uniform, &c.— is to be found among French soldiers at Versailles, and is, in fact, only war. I had a striking instance of this new feeling towards the Germans in the change the miracle, I should say - which has been worked in the bosoms of the nuns of the convent of L'Espérance close by, in which I have a relation. For the last week or so the whole convent has been busy making up lay dresses in case the nuns should have to leave the convent and hide. I went there yesterday and showed them how to set about making their bonnets, poor creatures, and gave them an old one as a model. I found that my relative, with a dozen of the youngest nuns, had left by the Nord line, and had gone off to the Abbey of

THE Broom (Sarothamnus scoparius) is extremely abundant in Maderia, but is supposed to have been originally introduced to the island. It is now sown extensively on the mountains for the purpose of being cut down for firing, or burnt on the spot every five to seven years to fertilize the ground. The twigs and more slender branches are also used commonly as withs for binding bundles of faggots, brushwood, fern, &c.; and numbers of country people, especially young girls and children, residing within reach of Funchal, gain a livelihood by bringing daily into the town bundles of broom for use in heating ovens, &c. The fine and delicate basketwork peculiar to Maderia is manufactured from the slender peeled twigs of this plant. Mr. Lowe speaks of a variety with pure white flowers which occurs on this island.

Nature.

THE culture of bamboo for paper making and other purposes is being promoted by the Government of Central India. The Indian Government is buying land in the hill district of the Neilgheries for a spice plantation. Col. Boddam has proposed the cultivation of the sunflower in Mysore. It is very successful in France. Government has sent out six more Scotch gardeners for experimental cotton growing. These men have answered very well.

Nature.

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"No flowers are admitted that have not perfume,"
said the Duchess to Lothair. "It is very old-fash- Alas! I have no garden, and no roses,

Where woodbines wander, and the wallflower Chilling our too fond hopes of a life immortal

From The Cornhill Magazine.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

sorts and sympathizeth with all things;" an absence of all antipathies to loathsome “LET me not injure the felicity of objects in nature to French "dishes of others," says Sir Thomas Browne in a sup- snails, frogs, and toadstools," or to Jewish pressed passage of the Religio Medici," if repasts on "locusts or grasshoppers;" an I say that I am the happiest man alive. I equal toleration which in the first half have that in me that can convert poverty of the seventeenth century is something into riches, adversity into prosperity, and astonishing - for all theological systems; I am more invulnerable than Achilles; an admiration even of our natural enemies, fortune hath not one place to hit me." the French, the Spaniards, the Italians, Perhaps, on second thoughts, Sir Thomas and the Dutch; a love of all climates, of felt that the phrase savoured of that pre-all countries; and, in short, an utter incasumption which is supposed to provoke the pacity to "absolutely detest or hate any wrath of Nemesis; and at any rate, he, of essence except the devil." Indeed, his all men, is the last to be taken too liter- hatred even for that personage has in it ally at his word. He is a humorist to the so little of bitterness, that no man, we core, and is here writing dramatically. may be sure, would have joined more There are many things in this book, so heartily in the Scotch minister's petition he tells us, "delivered rhetorically, many for the puir de'il" a prayer conceived expressions therein merely tropical . in the very spirit of his writings. A man and therefore also many things to be taken so endowed and it is not only from his in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be explicit assertions, but from his unconcalled unto the rigid test of reason." We scious self-revelation that we may credit shall hardly do wrong in reckoning him with closely approaching his own amongst them this audacious claim to sur- ideal- is admirably qualified to discover passing felicity, as we may certainly in- one great merit of human happiness. No clude his boast that he "could lose an arm man was ever better prepared to keep not without a tear, and with few groans be only one, but a whole stableful of hobquartered into pieces." And yet, if Sir bies, nor more certain to ride them so as Thomas were to be understood in the to amuse himself, without loss of temper most downright literal earnest, perhaps or dignity, and without rude collisions he could have made out as good a case for against his neighbours. That happy art his assertion as almost any of the troubled is given to few, and thanks to his skill in race of mankind. For, if we set aside ex-it, Sir Thomas reminds us strongly of the ternal circumstances of life, what qualities two illustrious brothers Shandy comoffer a more certain guarantee of happiness than those of which he is an almost typical example? A mind endowed with an insatiable curiosity as to all things knowable and unknowable; an imagination which tinges with poetical hues the vast accumulation of incoherent facts thus stored in a capacious memory; and a strangely vivid humour that is always detecting the quaintest analogies, and, as it were, striking light from the most unexpected collocations of unpromising materials: such talents are by themselves enough to provide a man with work for life, and to make all his work delightful. To them, moreover, we must add a disposition absolutely incapable of controversial bitterness; "a constitution," as he says of himself, "so general that it con

bined in one person. To the exquisite kindliness and simplicity of Uncle Toby he unites the omnivorous intellectual appetite and the humorous pedantry of the head of the family. The resemblance, indeed, may not be quite fortuitous. Though it does not appear that Sterne, amidst his multifarious pilferings, laid hands upon Sir Thomas Browne, one may fancy that he took a general hint or two from so congenial an author.

The best mode of approaching so original a writer is to examine the intellectual food on which his mind was nourished. He dwelt by preference in strange literary pastures; and their nature will let us into some secrets as to his taste and character. We will begin, therefore, by examining the strange furniture of his mind, as de

scribed in his longest, though not his most out hyperbole of the "fairy tales of characteristic book - the Inquiry into Vul-science." To us, who have to plod gar Errors. When we turn its quaint through an arid waste of painful observapages, we feel as though we were enter- tion and slow piecing together of cautious ing one of those singular museums of curi-inferences before reaching the promised osities which existed in the pre-scientific land of wondrous discoveries, the expres ages. Every corner is filled with a sion sometimes appears to be ironical. strange, incoherent medley, in which real- Does not science, we may ask with a primâ ly valuable objects are placed side by side | facie resemblance of right, destroy as with what is simply grotesque and ludi- much poetry as it generates? To him no crous. The modern man of science may such doubts could present themselves, for find some objects of interest; but they are fairyland was still a province of the emmixed inextricably with strange rubbish pire of science. Strange beings moved that once delighted the astrologer, the through the pages of natural history, alchemist, or the dealer in apocryphal which were equally at home in the Ararelics. And the possessor of this miscel-bian Nights or in poetical apologues. The laneous collection accompanies us with an griffin, the phoenix, and the dragon were unfailing flow of amusing gossip: at one not yet extinct; the salamander still moment pouring forth a torrent of out-of-sported in flames; and the basilisk slew the-way learning; at another, making a men at a distance with his deadly glance. really acute scientific remark; and then More common-place animals indulged in lapsing into an elaborate discussion of the habits which they had learnt in fables, inconceivable absurdity; affecting the air and of which only some feeble vestiges of a grave inquirer, and to all appearance now remain in the eloquence of strolling fully believing in his own pretensions, and showmen. The elephant had no joints, yet somehow indulging himself in a half- and was caught by felling the tree against suppressed smile, which indicates that the which he rested his stiff limbs in sleep; humorous aspect of a question can never the pelican pierced its breast for the good be far removed from his mind. The whole of its young; ostriches were regularly book, indeed, has that quality which is so painted with a horseshoe in their bills, to delightful to the true lover of the hu- indicate their ordinary diet; storks remorous, but which, it must be confessed, fused to live except in republics and free is generally rather abhorrent to the vul- states; the crowing of a cock put lions to gar, that we never quite know whether flight, and men were struck dumb in good the author is serious. The numerous class sober earnest by the sight of a wolf. The which insist upon a joke being as unequiv- curiosity-hunter, in short, found his game ocal as a pistol-shot, and serious state- still plentiful, and by a few excursions ments as grave as a blue-book, should cer- into Aristotle, Pliny, and other more rectainly keep clear of Sir Thomas Browne. ondite authors, was able still to display a His most congenial readers are those who rich bag for the edification of his readers. take a simple delight in following out any Sir Thomas Browne sets out on that quest quaint train of reflections, careless whether with all imaginable seriousness. He perit may culminate in a smile or a sigh or suaded himself, and he has persuaded in some thought in which the two elements some of his editors, that he was a genuine of the sad and the ludicrous are inextrica- disciple of Bacon, by one of whose suggesbly blended. Sir Thomas, however, is in tions the Inquiry is supposed to have been the Inquiry content generally with bring- prompted. Accordingly, as Bacon deing out the strange curiosities of his mu- scribes the idols by which the human seum, and does not care to draw any ex- mind is misled, Sir Thomas sets out with plicit moral. The quaintness of the ob- investigating the causes of error; but his jects unearthed seems to be a sufficient introductory remarks immediately diverge recompence for the labour of the search. into strange paths, from which it is obviFortunately for his design, he lived in the ous that the discovery of true scientific time when a poet might have spoken with- method was a very subordinate object in