her brow, her falling hair. As he had seen her last. And when they found her thus, they neither turned nor looked upon him, but gathered close round her, and comforted and kissed her: and pressed on one another to show sympathy and kindness to her; and forgot him altogether.

Thus the night passed. The moon went down; the stars grew pale; the cold day broke; the sun rose. The Carrier still sat, musing, in the chimney corner. He had sat there, with his head upon his hands, all night. All night the faithful Cricket had been Chirp, Chirp, Chirping on the Hearth. All night he had listened to its voice. All night the household Fairies had been busy with him. All night, she had been amiable and blameless in the Glass, except when that one shadow fell upon it.

He rose up when it was broad day, and washed and dressed himself. He couldn't go about his customary cheerful avocations; he wanted spirit for them; but it mattered the less, that it was Tackleton's wedding-day, and he had arranged to make his rounds by proxy. He had thought to have gone merrily to church with Dot. But such plans were at an end. It was their own wedding-day too. Ah! how little he had looked for such a close to such a year!"

Old Tackleton pays the carrier a visit in his marriage array, and they talk over the latter's sad mishap, waiting till the marriage hour comes up.

"Did I consider,' said the Carrier,' that I took her; at her age, and with her beauty; from her young companions, and the many scenes of which she was the ornament; in which she was the brightest little star that ever shone; to shut her up from day to day in my dull house, and keep my tedious company? Did I consider how little suited I was to her sprightly humour, and how wearisome a plodding man like me must be, to one of her quick spirit! Did I consider that it was no merit in me, or claim in me, that I loved her, when everybody must who knew her? Never. I took advantage of her hopeful nature and her cheerful disposition; and I married her. I wish I never had! For her sake; not for mine!

'Heaven bless her! for the cheerful constancy with which she has tried to keep the knowledge of this from me!

And Heaven help me, that, in my slow mind, I have not found it out before! Poor child! Poor Dot! I not to find it out, who have seen her eyes fill with tears, when such a marriage as our own was spoken of! I, who have seen the secret trembling on her lips a hundred times, and never suspected it, till last night! Poor girl! That I could ever hope that she would be fond of me! That I could ever believe she was!'

'She has tried,' said the poor Carrier, with greater emotion than he had exhibited yet; I only now begin to know how hard she has tried; to be my dutiful and zealous wife. How good she has been; how much she has done; how brave and strong a heart she has; let the happiness I have known under this roof bear witness! It will be some help and comfort to me, when I am here alone.'

"I sat upon that hearth, last night, all night. On the spot where she has often sat beside me, with her sweet face looking into mine. I called up her whole life, day by day; I had her dear self, in its every passage, in review before me, And upon my soul she is innocent, if there is one to judge the innocent and guilty!

Stanch Cricket on the Hearth! Loyal household Fairies!

Passion and distrust have left me!' said the Carrier: 'and nothing but my grief remains. In an unhappy moment some old lover, better suited to her tastes and years than I; forsaken, perhaps, for me, against her will; returned. In an unhappy moment, taken by surprise, and wanting time to think of what

she had; she made herself a party to his treachery, by concealing it. Last night she saw him, in the interview we witnessed. It was wrong. But otherwise than this, she is innocent, if there is Truth on earth!'

"If that is your opinion-' Tackleton began.

So, let her go!' pursued the Carrier. Go, with my blessing for the many happy hours she has given me, and my forgiveness for any pang she has caused me. Let her go, and have the peace of mind I wish her. She'll never hate me. She'll learn to like me better, when I'm not a drag upon her, and she wears the chain I have rivetted, more lightly. This is the day on which took her, with so little thought for her enjoyment, from her home. To-day she shall return to it; and I will trouble her no more. Her father and mother will be here to-day-we had made a little plan for keeping it together-and they shall take her home. I can trust her, there, or anywhere. She leaves me without blame, and she will live so I am sure. If I should die-I may perhaps while she is still young; I have lost some courage in a few hours--she 'll find that I remembered her, and loved her to the last! This is the end of what you showed me. Now, it's over.

'Oh no, John, not over. Do not say it's over yet! Not quite yet. I have heard your noble words. I could not steal away, pretending to be ignorant of what has affected me with such deep gratitude. Do not say it's over, 'till the clock has struck again!""

Tackleton now leaves his friend strolling disconsolate among some neighbouring elms, and hastens himself to meet his young and blooming bride.

"The Carrier's little wife, being left alone, sobbed piteously; but often dried her eyes, and checked herself, to say how good he was, how excellent he was! and once or twice she laughed; so heartily, triumphantly, and incoherently (still crying all the time), that Tilly was quite horrified."

But the denouement comes at last. The mysteriou stranger turns out to be old Caleb the toy-maker's son, who was reported to have died, but who now returns from South America to redeem a youthful engagement made with the blooming May, the intended bride of the old, rich, but unloveable Tackleton. The young stranger had been more alert and active that morning than the intended bridegroom: he comes back from church with his young wife, rejoicing the hearts of his old father and affectionate blind sister, and clears up the brow of the regenerated carrier. The day ends in mirth and happiness.

Such is an outline of the gay, golden-embossed, artistically adorned, little trifle of the day, or, we may say, of the hour. By this time, thousands and tens of thousands have devoured it, beguiled by the magic name of Dickens. Every miss in her teens and beardless boy, every milliner and mantua-maker, every fashionable belle, every draper's apprentice, as well as every man of wit and fashion about town, has been rapturous in its praise, and is full of free and flowing criticism on its merits. By this time too, in another dress, it has strutted its hour upon the stage, for which we believe it was originally intended.

It will not detract from the fame of the pencil which sketched little Nell, or Pickwick, or Oliver Twist, though the lines be less deep, and the lights and shadows less marked and enduring. The plot is commonplace enough, and the characters want depth and originality, with the exception of Dot, who is a perfect model of a pretty, dumpy, lively, loving, kind-hearted, and delightful little

wifie. Tilly Slowboy the nurse is also excellent in her way, and, in her baby slang, acts the part of a Greek chorus, in darkly expounding the plot; while the hissing tea-kettle, the chirping cricket, and a band of gentle fairies, form the machinery of the tale. The description

of Caleb's toy room forms an amusing episode; and Bertha is a good sketch, though we suspect her blind experiences are not quite agreeable to nature, or the philosophy of Dr Kitto in his Lost Senses, two volumes which we shall soon introduce to the notice of our leaders.

We had a little talk about tobacco last week, and if we recollect right, congratulated our fair friends and readers for by this time we are sure we have thousands of readers of the gentle sex-on their exemption from its baneful influence. We are now to take up the subject of tea; but be not startled, ladies, for we shall deal gently with you, as well as with your fragrant herb. If you had never heard of snuff-taking, or tobacco-smoking, in your lives, and if, by some of our new railway lines, you could be suddenly transported among the Turks, or even to the centre of Germany, how would you start and laugh outright, to see a human being spend several hours a-day in inhaling and puffing out, from an old sooty-looking tube, a smoke which, to your finer sensibilities, would prove of the most nauseous, sickening, and disgusting nature. Or how would you be still more astonished to see hundreds of people stuffing a brown dirty powder, pinch after pinch, up their nostrils, to the total disfiguration of their faces, linens, fingers, and imparting to their whole persons an odour compounded somewhat of a tan-yard and an apothecary's shop-we are sure you would call them brutes, and more hateful even than Gulliver's Hoynhyms. Now, tea, though we warn you that we may start some little objection to it, is managed altogether in a different way. With a classic dignity, you pour the fragrant infusion from the richly embossed tea-pot into the elegant china cups ranged around, and you sip and swallow it with a grace. What is more delightful than a tea-table with all its smiling domestic faces-what more grateful than its rich aromatic vapours-what more intellectual and poetic than the brilliant sentiments and soft eloquence which circulate around it. Contrast this with the puffing and blowing, the more than Dutch solemnity, and phlegm of the club-room-the beer-bespattered table the dirty floor-the spittoons-pah! We are sick of the very idea.

The tea shrub, as we daresay you all know, is a native of the temperate parts of north-eastern Asia. It grows on the mountain sides of certain districts of China, Japan, and part of our now Indian possession of Assam, to the north-east of Bengal. Speaking geographically, the tea districts extend from the twenty-seventh to the thirty-first degree of north latitude; but the plant will thrive even still farther north to about the forty-fifth degree. It is a shrubby plant, about the size of our wild sloe, with leaves something like the sloe or some of our willows. The flower blossom is exceedingly like that of the common hawthorn. It delights in a rather hilly locality, and a light sandy soil. It is not very well ascertained whether there are two or only one species of the tea-plant. We are inclined to think there is only one, and that the various qualities or kinds of tea depend upon the age at which the leaves are pulled, the

age of the tea plant, and other eircumstances. The fresh young leaves from the upper branches or young shoots of trees not too old or overgrown, constitute the finest flavoured and strongest tea, commonly called green teas. The older leaves from the lower and older branches, constitute a middle quality, and the coarser teas are formed from still coarser leaves. These leaves are hand-picked from the shrubs, dried over a fire, rolled up by the hand, and picked and sorted in the way in which the teas are brought to this country. When first prepared, the peculiar principle of the tea leaf is so active and strong, that it would be unsafe to use it; tea is accordingly kept a year in China before it is brought to sale, and frequently another year elapses before it is used in this country.

What is the nature of this principle? Chemists call it Theine. It is narcotic, highly azotised, and exercises a peculiar stimulating effect upon the whole nervous system. Liebig supposes that it contains a matter which enters directly into the constituent nourishment of the brain and nervous tissues, and that thus, its refreshing and exhilarating properties become so direct and remarkable. At all events, it is a decided stimulant, if used in moderation, of a mild, calm, and unperturbing nature, and not followed by any perceptible depression. If taken in excess, like all narcotics, it becomes hurtful to the stomach in the first instance, and at last to the nervous system. In a concentrated state, it is a decided poison. Along with this peculiar narcotic principle, or theine, there is also a slight and somewhat grateful aromatic quality, as also a bitter, which is the usual vege. table bitter called tannin. The excitement of strong tea, especially green tea, is well known to cause watchfulThere is a continued flow of vivid ideas, with no desire to sleep, even let you court your pillow ever so sedulously. It is a more refined and placid excitement than that caused by opium, or any other drug, but even this period of watchfulness is not followed by any fatigue or weakness, the disagreeable consequences are im. paired digestion, and flatulence.

ness.

That singular people, the Chinese, have been accustomed to drink infusions of tea for thousands of years. In a curious old tract on the geography of the Erythrean sea, written in the first century of the Christian era, a commercial people corresponding in all respects to the Chinese, are mentioned as coming from afar, bringing for sale "large mats full of dried leaves." These leaves there are strong grounds for believing were tea, so that its introduction into the west of Asia and probably into part of Europe, must have been at an early period. In modern times, the Dutch brought it to Holland, and from Holland it was imported in very small quantities into England in the year 1666. It then sold for sixty shillings a-pound, a sum equal to six or eight pounds of

our money at the present day. It was then only used as a medicine or a curiosity, the human palate requiring a long initiation to the actual relish of such narcotic dainties. Tea was by no means in general use even a century ago, but like other luxuries, its consumpt has increased with increasing civilization. In 1840, the annual consumpt of tea in Great Britain, amounted to thirty-six millions of pounds weight. On this a duty of about four millions of pounds sterling was paid, while the sale of the same amounted to about other four millions, thus not less than eight millions of pounds sterling are annually paid by the British nation for this one article of luxury.

WHAT IS THE USE OF TEA?

Do you ask this medicinally, financially, morally? We must frame our answers accordingly.

Could we exist without tea? Certainly, else the existence of Britons, and indeed of Europeans anterior to the seventeenth century, must be but a dream or fable. Did they laugh, talk, frolic, gossip in those times, or was their life a perpetual yawn? I do assure you the Countess of Northumberland in the days of Elizabeth, was a noble and fashionable lady, and she breakfasted on a pint of beer and a red herring, with a good cut of cold beef, and a brown loaf, and supped upon much the same fare, with perhaps a cup of sack, by way of a night-cap. And did all the world-I mean the world of fashion,-do the same? Yes, and all the vulgar world too, at least all of them that could command as good fare. "You astonish me, a world without tea! A world without a sun or a moon I can conceive, because we could live very well by gaslight, and indeed some people and some dresses look best with gas-light, but without tea! oh, I declare, life would be miserable." It is not more than thirty years since tea was known only as a kind of medicine for invalids in France, and they owe its introduction into more general use to the English-it was and is the same in Germany, and throughout the greater part of Europe. "Well, but they have coffee instead." I grant you they have, and coffee, as I shall presently show you, is of the same nature exactly as tea. "But have you really any objections to tea?" None to its moderate use, and as it is generally employed, but it may and is often used immoderately and improperly. The abuse of it causes all the derangements of the digestive and nervous systems which the excessive use of any other narcotic would do. Yet, even with unwise indulgence, tea does not produce those insidious moral perversions which most other stimulants do. In this respect, it may also be called the drink of the gods, a pure and sinless draught from heaven. Then, too, as it has superseded beer, and other tumultuary ensnaring beverages, it has been of vast service to the community. We know no ill that it can bring upon a poor man but its expense, which in a year amounts to a considerable part of his hard-won earnings, yet with this even, how cheaply he purchases, when he returns to his home in an evening, after his 'day's exertions, the sociality of his domestic hearth,the smiles of his children, the love and blessings of his frugal, and kind, and careful wife. I think I see them sitting round a cheerful fire, and clean swept hearth the hot rolls, the brown-ware tea-pot, made for use, and

not for show, the little happy faces peering round, and watching with an eye of intense interest the equable division of the luscious sugar-the frequent grateful and refreshing draughts of the tired-out good man, and the solicitous replenishing of the careful house-wife. Well, now, you have almost spiritualized tea, and I shall love it more and more when I call to mind the numerous lowly domestic hearths which it makes happy. But I long to hear some thing of coffee.

COFFEE AND COCOA,

which both consist of the kernels or fruits of shrubby plants, are in their nature essentially the same as tea. They both contain, as a principal ingredient, that peculiar narcotic principle called theine. It is certainly a curious instinct, for we can scarcely call it anything else, which has led men, far removed from each other, to select from among the numberless classes of vegetables, these three plants, which are so similar in their properties. The coffee tree, which grows to the height of ten or twelve feet, is a native of Asia, and particularly of Arabia. It has also been transplanted to the islands of the West Indies, where it finds a congenial soil and climate. The kernel of the seed or berry is that part which possesses the peculiar virtues of this plant, along with an essential oil, which imparts to the whole a strong aroma or flavour. Coffee has been long known and used in Turkey and other parts of Asia, but was introduced into general use in Europe only so late as the seventeenth century. The first coffeehouse established in London was in 1652, and in Paris in 1671. Tea and coffee thus appear to have been introduced into Europe much about the same time; and about fifty or sixty years before their introduction, tobacco and the potato were made known. In so short a period have these four substances taken such hold of the public taste, that now their use is deemed indispensable! Yet the elegant and tasteful Greeks, and the brave and hardy Romans, knew none of these things. Coffee is now universally used on the Continent; and Humboldt, many years ago, estimated its annual consumpt to amount to one hundred and twenty millions of pounds weight. In 1840, the consumpt of coffee in Britain amounted to twenty-seven millions of pounds. The quantity exported from all the coffee-growing countries amounted to two hundred and fifty millions of pounds. What a prodigious quantity! But pray, is there any difference in the properties of coffee as compared to tea? Essentially their properties are the same, only that coffee is reckoned more stimulating, and perhaps to some constitutions more heating. As tea is the peculiar favourite of the fair sex, coffee may be said to be that of men. Fortunately, too, it is very little liable to be abused,-less so, perhaps, than its sister, tea. A cup of hot coffee, as the first draught in a morning, and a cup after dinner, is the universal practice on the Continent. In the latter case, it perhaps aids digestion, instead of interrupting it, which tea, taken immediately after such a meal, is with many apt to do. It only remains to mention COCOA or CHOCOLATE, which is a production of tropical America, and was used by the Mexicans when first this people were discovered by the Spaniards. It is the inner nut or kernel of a pulpy fruit. In its properties it resembles coffee, with

out the peculiar flavour of that substance; and is, on the whole, a wholesome and pleasant substitute for either tea or coffee. Its use in this country is extending considerably. Linnæus called it theobroma-the food of the gods.

We are glad to be able to subjoin to these remarks the following poem in praise of tea, one of the early Doric lays of a celebrated Grecian, who has since tuned his lyre to the classic strains of the Greek anthology.

My Muse, if at my greatest need,
Thou ever to my prayer gav'st heed,
Now lend thine aid to tune my reed
With triple glee;
And o'er its stops my fingers lead.
I sing of Tea.

Hail, noble plant; thy very name
Kindles a true poetic flame:
Well worthy thou of all the fame
Which I can give;
And not to sing thee were a shame,
As lang 's I live.

Let other bards, wi' rhyming clink,
Sing to the praise of gude Scotch drink;
And let them bowse till candles blink
Wi' double glare;
And senseless mensless down they sink
Beside their chair.

"The times have been

That when the brains were out the man would die,
And there an end."

Here, however, are a few last words. He seems anxious for living fame, and grasps eagerly at straws. It is now about twelve months since a volume entitled the Vestiges of Creation came out in London under a strict incognito. The work professed to exhibit a theory of the development of all created things, by a simple and uniform law, impressed upon elementary matter from the beginning, whereby, from the mist of nebulæ, were gradually conglomerated suns, from these suns planets, and from the planets moons. Next, this world of ours began to be furnished with plants and animals, these commencing in the lowest and simplest forms, by the action of galvanism vivifying and organising matter, and after the first animals and plants were produced, another law of development evolved from the simpler kinds others more complicated, in gradual

gressive law being still presumed to be in force, even higher organizations than man are also hinted at. The simplicity of this plan, and the plausible language in which it was announced, took the fancy of the million, and appeared to them something quite new. It did not so delight the thinking part of mankind, however, who seem more difficult to please.

The critics were up in arms throughout all Britain, America, and wherever the English language extends. The reviews of the work must be familiar to our readers, and here comes the author's review of his reviewers. In these Explanations, however, he but reiterates what he said before. Notwithstanding the discoveries of Lord Rosse's telescope, showing that many of the supposed nebulæ are in reality clusters of stars, he falls back upon this reserve, that the remainder of the clusters not yet so resolved may be nebulæ, and in this he is backed--by Professor Nichol of Glasgow. He illustrates his theory of the formation of planets by de

tailing an experiment of Professor Plateau of Ghent, of a drop of oil shaken in a glass of diluted alcohol. The theory of the spontaneous production of animals he believes confirmed beyond a doubt by some farther experiments of a Mr Weeks, and the development theory is still farther re-illustrated from the facts of geology.

We do not mean to bore our readers by going into the discussion of a subject about which the public has of late heard too much, only there are one or two things of which we shall briefly take notice.

-as a

The author somewhat complacently speaks of his lucubrations as a new view of nature,"— "system which finds none of the previous labours of science shaped or directed in favour of its elucidation, but all in the contrary way." Now his leading views have been afloat in the world ever since philosophy was known. Not to dwell on the Epicureans,-Lucretius, for instance, and other ancient sects, we have in the famous Système de la Nature the very same general law of the formation and progression of the universe insisted upon, as we find in the pages of the Vestiges. In the "System" too we have (chap. ii. part 1,) the assumed fact of the spontaneous production of eels (animalcules) from moistened flower, by a still simpler process than the galvanized albumen of the Vestiges. If we look for a believer in Lamarck's theory of progressive development, we have only to turn to the pages of Darwin, and there we find him fully displayed (Zoonomia, § 39, 4.) "When we revolve in our minds the great similarity of structure which obtains in all the warmblooded animals, as well quadrupeds, birds, and amphibious animals, as in mankind, from the mouse and bat to the elephant and whale, one is led to conclude that they have alike been produced from a similar living filament, In some this filament in its advance to maturity has acquired hands and fingers with a fine sense of touch as in mankind. In others it has acquired claws or talons, as in tigers and eagles. In others, toes, with an intervening web or membrane, as in seals and geese. In others it has acquired cloven hoofs, as in cows and swine, and whole hoofs in others, as the horse." Then he goes on to his theory of appetency. "The trunk of the elephant is an elongation of the nose for the purpose of pulling down the branches of trees-beasts of prey have obtained strong jaws or talons-cattle have acquired a rough tongue and a rough palate, to pull off the blades of grass-some birds have acquired hard beaks, as parrots, or long beaks, as woodcocks, or broad ones, as ducks, to filter the water of lakes. All which seem to have been gradually produced during many generations by the perpetual endeavours of the creatures to supply the want of food, and to have been delivered to their posterity, with constant improvement of them for the purposes required." "From thus meditating on the great similarity of the structure of animals, and at the same time of the great changes they undergo, both before and after their nativity, would it be too bold to imagine that in the great length of time since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind--would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great first cause endued with animality, (mark this, galvanizing Mr

Weeks and Mr Vestige,) with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by imitations, sensations, volitions, and associations, and that possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end ! !"

But Mr Weeks and our author go farther than this We wish we had space to quote the appendix to the Explanations, where W. H. Weeks, Esq., of Sandwich details his experiments, showing how the galvanic spirit, after brooding for two long years in a dark room, over a chaotic mixture of ferro-cyanate of potass, at last produced several acari, and sundry minute fungi. A purer specimen of self-delusion, both on the part of the experimenter, and on that of his credulous correspondent, could not be exhibited in all the annals of alchemy. Unfortunately, the thus self-produced acari were never seen but in a drowned and mutilated state, because, as Mr Crosse, Mr Weeks' friend, sagely suggested, he had omitted to provide for them a shelf, up which they might have crawled from the matrix fluid, out of which they were formed, to dry land! Mr Weeks tells us, he visited his experiment room every other day for two years. Now it is strange, that in all that time he could not have seen the actual formation of such creatures, the singular junction of the crystallising atoms, first to form the brain, then the mouth, legs, spiracles, or air cells, and all the other curious parts of the insect machine. It is equally strange that no animals should have been formed till after a lapse of two years, and that in this case, as well as in the experiments of Mr Crosse, the only animals seen should have been these acari, creatures which happened to be swarming in all places, especially in the house of the experimenter, about the time the experiments were performed. It strikes us too that this experiment, so decisively convincing to both parties, is totally at variance with the general law of the Vestiges; however it may be so with that of nature. In an animal thus created, we should have looked for a structure of the simplest kind, and in the lowest scale of organization, a monad, a polype, or a vesicular hydatid; but no, we have here an insect, a creature, high up in the scale of being, far above worms, mollusks, and many other classes. We would require another volume of "Explanations" to explain this.

But we must do the author justice. He complains, and we think not without cause, of the treatment which he has received from his reviewers. In the first place, he utterly denies all intention of excluding a Deity from his system of creation—in this respect, he differs from the author of the System of Nature-that system denies a Deity out and out. Our author only lays down a system which he believes the Deity has actually employed, or which, he thinks, he should have employed. He has only attempted to expound laws, which he did not understand; not to deny or impugn the wisdom of the Lawgiver. In the next place, he very naturally, and, we think, effectively turns round and blames his accusers for having led him into many of his errors. It is an old remark, that the common prejudices of the multitude are but the cast-off opinions of philosophers. Here is a daw that has dressed himself in the plumes of his supe