on the kindness of friends. In a word, he at length succeeded in gaining her hand, though with the solemn assurance that her heart was unalterably another's.

He took her with him to Sicily, hoping that a change of scene might wear out the remembrance of early woes. She was an amiable and exemplary wife, and made an effort to be a happy one; but nothing could cure the silent and devouring melancholy that had entered into her very soul. She wasted away in a slow but hopeless decline, and at length sunk into the grave, the victim of a broken heart.

It was on her that Moore, the distinguished Irish poet, composed the following lines:

She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps,
And lovers around her are sighing;

But coldly she turns from their gaze and weeps,
For her heart in his grave is lying.

She sings the wild songs of her dear native plains,
Every note which he loved awaking--
Ah! little they think who delight in her strains,
How the heart of the minstrel is breaking!

He had loved for his love-for his country he died,
They were all that to life had entwined him-
Nor soon shall the tears of his country be dried,
Nor long will his love stay behind him:

Oh! make her a grave where the sun-beams rest,
When they promise a glorious morrow;

They'll shine o'er her sleep, like a smile from the west,
From her own loved island of sorrow.

-Selected.

HAUNTS OF THOMSON, SHENSTONE, AND

POPE.

WE extract the following from an eloquent series of papers entitled "First Impressions of England and its People," presently in course of periodical publication by Mr Hugh Miller.

I was informed by an old man who was sawing slabs of New Red Sandstone, that I would have no difficulty in getting admission to the Lyttleton grounds; I had but to walk up to the gardener's lodge, and secure the services of one of the under gardeners, and, under his surveillance, I might wander over the place as long as I pleased. At one time, he said, people might enter the park when they willed, without guide or guard; but the public, left to its own discretion, had behaved remarkably ill; it had thrown down the urns, and chipped the obelisks, and scrabbled worse than nonsense on the columns and the trees; and so it had to be set under a keeper, to insure better behaviour.

I succeeded in securing one of the gardeners, and, passing with him through part of the garden, and a small but well kept greenhouse, we emerged into the park, and began to ascend the hill by a narrow inartificial path, that winds, in alternate sunshine and shadow, as the trees approach or recede, through the rich moss of the lawn. Half way up the ascent, where the hill-side is indented by a deep, irregularly semicircular depression,-open and grassy in the bottom and sides, but thickly garnished along the rim with noble trees,-there is an octagonal temple, dedicated to the genius of Thomson,-" a sublime poet," says the inscription, "and a good man," who greatly loved, when living, this hollow retreat. I looked with no little interest on the scenery that had satisfied so great a master of landscape; and thought, though it might be but fancy, that I succeeded in detecting the secret of his admiration; and that the specialties of his taste in the case rested, as they almost always do in such cases, on a substratum of personal character. The green hill spread out its mossy arms around, like those of a well padded easy chair of enormous proportions, imparting, from the complete seclusion and shelter which it afforded, luxurious ideas of personal security and case; while the open front permitted the eye to expatiate on an expansive and lovely landscape. We see the ground immediately in front occupied by an uneven sea of tree tops,-chiefly oaks of noble size, that rise, at various levels,

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on the lower slopes of the park. The clear sunshine imparted to them this day exquisite variegations of fleecy light and shadow: they formed a billowy ocean of green, that seemed as if wrought in floss silk; far beyond,-for the nearer fields of the level country are hidden by the oaks,-lies a blue labyrinth of hedge-rows, stuck over with trees, and so crowded together in the distance, that they present a forest-like appearance; while, still farther beyond, there stretches along the horizon a continuous purple screen, composed of the distant highlands of Cambria.

Such is the landscape which Thomson loved. And here he used to saunter, the laziest and best-natured of mortal men, with an imagination full of many-coloured conceptions, by far the larger part of them never to be realized, and a quiet eye, that took in without effort, and stamped on the memory, every meteoric effect of a changeful climate, which threw its tints of gloom or of gladness over the diversified prospect. The images sunk into the quiescent mind as the silent shower sinks into the crannies and fissures of the soil, to come gushing out at some future day in those springs of poetry, which so sparkle in the "Seasons," or that glide in such quiet yet lustrous beauty through that most finished of English poems, the "Castle of Indolence." Never before, or since, was there a man of genius wrought out of such mild and sluggish elements as the bard of the Seasons; -a listless man was James Thomson; kindly-hearted; much loved by all his friends; little given to think of himself; "who loathed much to write, he cared to repeat." And to Hagely he used to come, as Shenstone tells us, in "a hired chaise, drawn by two horses ranged lengthwise,"to lie a-bed till long past mid-day, because he had "nae motive" to rise,-and to browse in the gardens on the sunny side of the peaches, with his hands stuck in his pockets. He was hourly expected at Hagely on one of his many visits, when intelligence came, instead, must have been a loveable man ;-an essentially different of his sudden death. With all his amazing inertness, he sort of person from either of his two poetical Scotch acquaintances, Mallet or Armstrong. Quin wept for him no feigned tears on the boards of the theatre;-poor Collins, a person like himself, of warm affections, had gone to live beside him at Richmond, but on his death, quitted the place for ever; even Shenstone, a man whose nature it was to think much and often of himself, felt life grow darker at his departure, and, true to his hobby, commemorated him in an urn, on the principle on which the late Lord Buchan was so solicitous to bury Sir Walter Scott. "He was to have been at Hagely this week," we find him saying in a letter dated from the Leasowes, in which he records his death, "and then I should probably have seen him here. As it is, I will erect an urn in Virgil's grove to his memory. I was really as much shocked to hear of his death, as if I had known and loved him for a number of years. God knows, I lean on a very few friends, and if they drop me, I become a wretched misanthrope."

Passing upwards from Thomson's hollow, we reach a second and more secluded depression in the hill-side, associated with the memory of Shenstone. At the head of a solitary ravine we see a white pedestal, bearing an urn; the trees droop their branches so thickly around it, that, when the eye first detects it in the shade, it seems a retreating figure, wrapped up in a winding sheet. The inscription is eulogistie of the poet's character and genius; "in his verses," it tells us, with a quiet elegance, in which we at once recognize the hand of Lyttleton, "were all the natural graces, and in his manners all the amiable simplicity, of pastoral poetry, with the sweet tenderness of the elegaic." This secluded ravine seems scarce less characteristic of the author of the "Ode to Rural Elegance," and the "Pastoral Ballad," than the opener hollow below of the poet of the Seasons. There is no great expansion of view, of which, indeed, Shenstone was no admirer. Prospects," he says in his "Canons on Landscape,' "should never take in the blue hills so remotely that they be not distinguishable from clouds; yet this mere extent is what the vulgar value." Thomson, however, though not quite one of the vulgar, valued

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since Lyttleton and his lady had last gazed on it from the hill-top. "Alas!" exclaimed the contemplative Mirza, Man is but a shadow, and life a dream." A natural enough reflection surely,-greatly more so, I am afraid, than the solace sought by the poet Beattie under its depressing influence, in a resembling evanescence and instability in all nature, and in all history.

"Art, empire, earth itself, to change are doomed;
Earthquakes have raised to heaven the humble vale,
And gulfs the mountains' mighty mass entombed,
And where the Atlantic rolls wide continents have bloomed."

All very true; none the less so certainly from the circumstance of its being truth in advance of the age in which the poet wrote; but it is equally and still more emphatically true, that the instability of a mountain or continent is a thing to be contrasted, not compared, with the instability of the light clouds that, when the winds are up, float over it, and fling athwart the landscape their breadth of fitful shadow. And, alas! what is human life? "even a vapour that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." There need be no lack of mementos to remind one, as I was this day reminded by the passage in Thomson,-what a transitory shadow man is, compared with the old earth which he inhabits, and how fleeting his pleasures, contrasted with the stable features of the scenes amid which for a few brief seasons he enjoys them.

The landscape from the hill-top could not have been seen to greater advantage, had I waited for months to pick out their best day; the far Welsh mountains, though lessened in the distance to a mere azure ripple that but barely roughened the line of the horizon, were as distinctly defined in the clear atmosphere as the green luxuriant leafage in the foreground, which harmonized so exquisitely with their blue. The line extended from far beyond the Shropshire Wrekin on the right, to far beyond the Worcestershire Malverns on the left. Immediately at the foot of the eminence stands the Mansion House of Hagely, the "Hall" where the "hospitable genius lingers still;"-a large, solid-looking, but somewhat sombre edifice, built of the New Red Sandstone on which it rests, and which too much reminds one, from its peculiar tint, of the prevailing red brick of the district. There was a gay party of cricket players on the lawn in front. Lord Lyttleton, a fine looking young man, stripped of coat and waistcoat, with his bright white shirt puffed out at his waistband, was sending the ball far beyond bound, amid an eager party, consisting chiefly, as the gardener informed me, of tenants and tenants' sons ;and the cheering sounds of shout and laughter came merrily up the hill. Beyond the house rises a noble screen of wood, composed of some of the tallest and finest trees in England. Here and there the picturesque cottages of the neighbouring village peep through; and then, on and away to the far horizon, there spreads out a close-wrought net-work of fenced fields, that, as it recedes from the eye, seems to close its meshes, as if drawn awry by the hand, till at length the openings can be no longer seen, and the hedge-rows lie piled on each other in one bosky mass. The geologic framework of the scene is various, and each distinct portion bears its own marked characteristics. In the foreground we have the undulating trap,-so suited to remind one, by the picturesque abruptnesses of its outlines, of those somewhat fantastic backgrounds one sees in the old prints which illustrate in our early English translations the pastorals of Virgil and Theocritus. Next succeeds an extended plane of the richly-cultivated New Red Sandstone, which, occupying fully two-thirds of the entire landscape, forms the whole of what a painter would term its middle ground, and a little more. There rises over this plane, in the distance, a ridgy acclivity, much fretted by inequalities, composed of an Old Red Sandstone formation, coherent enough to have resisted those denuding agencies by which the softer deposits have been worn down; while the distant sea of blue hills that seems as if toppling over it, has been scooped out of the Silurian and Cambrian systems, and demonstrates, in its commanding altitude and bold wavy outline, the still greater solidity of the materials which compose it.

LOTTERIES, &c.

Most modern governments have endeavoured to raise a revenue by licensing lotteries; and they were authorised in this country from the Revolution down to 1823. The overweening confidence placed by every individual in his own good fortune has insured their success, notwithstanding the certain loss they must, at an average, occasion to those who are adventurous enough to embark in them. "The world," says Dr Smith, "never saw, and never will see, a perfectly fair lottery, or one in which the whole gain compensated the whole loss. In the state lotteries the tickets are really not worth the price which is paid by the original subscribers, and yet they are commonly sold in the market for 20, 30, and sometimes 40 per cent. advance. The vain hope of gaining some of the great prizes is the sole cause of this demand. The soberest people scarcely look upon it as a folly to pay a small sum for the chance of gaining ten or twenty thousand pounds, though they know that even that small sum is perhaps 20 or 30 per cent. more than the chance is worth. In a lottery in which no prize exceeded twenty pounds, though in other respects, it approached much nearer to a perfectly fair one than the common state lotteries, there would not be the same demand for tickets. In order to have a better chance for some of the great prizes, some people purchase several tickets, and others small shares in a still greater number. There is not, however, a more certain proposition in mathematics than that, the more tickets you adventure upon, the more likely you are to be a loser. Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your tickets, the nearer you approach to this certainty." But the loss of money by those who embark in the lottery is an inferior consideration. The real evil of the system consists in its tendency to diffuse a gambling spirit; and to stimulate persons to attempt to relieve themselves from their difficulties by adventuring in the lottery rather than by an increase of exertion or economy. It is obvious that an institution productive of such effects is directly opposed to the growth of all those qualities in the people, the promotion of which should be a principal object of every wise government. During the continuance of the lottery system, the gaining of a prize by an individual belonging to a country village was about the most serious evil that could befall it, inasmuch as it invariably gave a shock to industry, and spread a taste for gambling among the inhabitants. A curious instance of this was mentioned in a debate in the House of Commons on the lottery in 1819. A village in which a benefit-club, for the support of aged and infirm persons, had been established, had the misfortune to have a lottery adventurer in it, who gained a prize of L.3000. In consequence of this unlucky circumstance, the benefit-club was immediately suppressed, and a lottery-club established in its stead. And, not satisfied with this, many persons carried almost all their furniture, and some even their bed-clothes, to the pawnbroker's, to get a little money to throw away on lottery-tickets!

In 1808 the lottery system was carefully inquired into, and its numerous abuses set in a striking point of view by a committee of the House of Commons, who conclude their report by expressing their decided opinion, "That the pecuniary advantage derived from a state lottery is much greater in appearance than in reality. When we take into consideration the increase of poor-rates arising from the number of families driven by speculations in the lottery, whether fortunate or otherwise, to seek parochial relief; the diminished consumption of exciseable articles during the drawings, and other circumstances; they may well be considered to operate as a large deduction from the gross sums paid into the Exchequer by the contractors. On the other hand, the sum raised upon the people is much greater in proportion to the amount received by the state, than in any other branch of revenue.

"No mode of raising money appears to your committee so burthensome, so pernicious, and so unproductive; no species of adventure is known where the chances are so great against the adventurer; none where the infatuation is more powerful, lasting, and destructive.

In England all private gaming-houses have been prohibited for a lengthened period; in other countries, however, they are sometimes licensed by government, and yield a considerable revenue. The question, which of these is the preferable mode of dealing with gaminghouses, is one of considerable delicacy. It is objected to their being licensed, that it has a tendency to disseminate a spirit of gambling among the middle and lower ranks; and it is, on the other hand, contended that, though suppressed in law, they exist in fact, and that their proscription, by putting them under the control of desperate and profligate characters, and securing them from the inspection of the police and the public, renders them infinitely more noxious than they would be were they legalised. It must be owned that this is a case of considerable difficulty. But, on the whole, we should be inclined to think that, though our system may be more injurious to those who resort to gaming-houses, it is preferable to the other, as well for the stigma which it attaches to gambling, as for its tendency to prevent its making any great progress among the great mass of the people. This opinion would also seem to be gaining ground on the Continent. Previously to 1837 the French government realised a considerable revenue by licensing gaming-houses; the licenses were then, however, with drawn, and the gaming-houses of Paris, like those of London, may now, on being discovered by the police, be suppressed as a nuisance.*M Culloch's Political Economy.

We borrow the following account of the gains of the late legalised gaming-houses in Paris from the Siecle:

"The original lease was from 1819 to 1836, but was continued for one year more. On the 31st December 1837, when the license

was at an end, there were seven houses open in Paris, containing

together seventeen tables; nine of which were for roulette, six for trente-un, and two for creps. A separate account of the gains and

losses of each table was settled every month, making 204 settlements in each year. Of these 204 settlements for 1837, only seventeen showed losses. The following are the results:

NEBULE AND THE NEBULAR THEORY. MANY of our readers must often have heard of nebulæ and the nebular theory. There are not a few who talk very fluently on these matters who have but a very dim and indistinct idea of what the word means, an idea perhaps even more indefinite than the objects themselves. Nebulæ are usually defined as objects resembling small white clouds seen in the heavens. They resemble, but are not, clouds; for they do not exist in our atmosphere, but in the regions of the starry heavens, in which they retain a fixed place in relation to the stars around. In general, they are so dim and indistinct that only a practised eye can discern them, especially in our dull and hazy climate, where they are not visible thirty nights in a year on an average. There is one nebula, however, which all must or ought to have observed. This is the milky way, whose irregular zone of pearly light may be seen in the beginning of winter or end of summer stretching across the midnight sky. Even in the northern hemisphere, this zone is a beautiful object in a clear cloudless atmosphere, but appears to be far more splendid near the south pole. Sir John Herschel speaks thus of it, with the enthusiasm of a true astronomer:-"The general aspect of the southern circumpolar regions is in a high degree rich and magnificent, owing to the superior brilliancy and large development of the milky way, which, from the constellation of Orion to that of Antinous, is a blaze of light, strangely interrupted, however, with vacant and entirely starless patches, especially in Scorpio, near Alpha Centauri and the Cross, while to the north it fades away pale and dim, and is in comparison hardly traceable.

think it is impossible to view this splendid zone, with the astonishingly rich and evenly distributed fringe of stars of the third and fourth magnitude, which forms a broad skirt to its southern border like a vast curtain, without an impression amounting almost to conviction, that the milky way is not a mere stratum, but annular; or at least that our system is placed within one of the poorer or almost vacant parts of its general mass, and that eccentrically, so as to be much nearer to the region about the Cross than to that diametrically opposite to it."

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We quote this passage simply to give the reader some notion of the aspect of the milky way in regions of the heavens which few may ever witness. Though in that part of the heavens visible to us, it is comparatively pale and dim," yet its general aspect is the same as above described: a thin zone of light like a fleecy cloud, fringed and bordered with innumerable stars, which range along its margin as if drawn thither by some attractive power. The larger and more brilliant stars are pretty equally disposed through the sky-each portion of the heavens seems to have got its own share of thein-but this is not

Consequently, the system of gambling is the more mischievous and fatal the lower the stakes allowed to be played for. The table at which only gold was taken made a return of loss for five months out of the twelve. The trente-un table of the Cercle made six returns of loss out the twelve.

BALANCE SHEET OF THE ACCOUNT FOR 1837.

fr. 2,621,911 75

1,870,419 61

1,715,465 16

2,271,598 59

8,479,095 11

The table which produced the greatest monthly gain in the year was one for trente-un, which in February yielded a profit of 162,837fr. 79c. This was during the carnival, when, from the excitement of the season, the extent of play is always the greatest. None of the tables in the Palais Royal showed a loss in any one month except that for trente-un, at which only gold was staked.

the case with those of smaller dimensions, which are collected into groups near that zone of the heavens traversed by the milky way. This fact is easily perceived with the naked eye, but becomes more remarkable when a powerful telescope is used, and the diffused light of the milky way is resolved into an innumerable mass of stars of the tenth or eleventh magnitude. This circumstance explains some things in the extract from Herschel above. The milky way appears to be a bed or stratum of stars, whose thickness is very inconsiderable compared to its length and breadth. The sun is believed to be one of these stars, situated in the interior of the mass, which consequently appears like a ring surrounding it on every side. When we look across the thickness of the layer, only a few stars appear, and these of considerable size, as being all near us comparatively speaking. But when the eye is turned in the direction of the bed, then many stars appear, retiring away to vast distances in the unbounded depths of space. Hence, though more numerous, they are in general far smaller, and at last, where crowded together in the remote distances, none of them singly is visible, and only the mingled effulgence of their united rays is seen.

The opinion that this layer of stars is annular, or like a ring, with the stars composing it all collected around the margin, while the central regions are left vacant, is adopted by other astronomers besides Sir J. Herschel. It explains very well the fact of the ring in one part appearing more dim than in another. The size of this ring may be conceived, if it is possible for the mind of man to conceive such vast numbers, from the fact that the nearest fixed stars, or sister systems to our own, are now ascertained to be from two to eight hundred thousand times the distance of the earth from the sun. The Pole Star is now said to be thirteen hundred thousand times this distance, or so remote, that light, which can encircle the earth eight times in a second, would yet take twenty years to travel from it to our eye; yet these stars are among the nearest to our system, and the light of the milky way must have been hundreds or thousands of years on its journey. And other bodies, like the dimmer nebulæ, must be still more remote, and the light from them have performed a longer and more tedious journey. How singular the thought, that the beam of light which caught in Lord Rosse's telescope upsets or confirms our theories of a day, set out on its journey ages before man was called into being on

the earth.

The milky way, then, is a group of stars, whose light is blended together into a luminous cloud, by their extreme distance. Other luminous clouds or nebulæ are seen in the heavens similar to this, only dimmer and smaller. It might naturally have been supposed that these were similar in structure to the milky way, and, like it, composed of innumerable stars. And the telescope has in reality shown, that this is true of many. With good glasses, they are resolved into a kind of starry dust, sprinkled on the dark back-ground of the sky; and, with more powerful telescopes, their true nature is still more apparent. But there were others which could not be thus resolved; though, like one in the beautiful constellation of Orion, easily visible, even with a weak glass, the most powerful instruments of Herschel had no effect in changing their apparent nature. A cloud-like form in the weakest telescope-in the most powerful they were nothing more. Many of these unresolved nebula had very peculiar forms; one resembled an elliptical hoop, filled with a fine haze, or thin gauze; another like a dumb-bell, or

hour glass, of bright matter, enveloped in a hazy atmosphere; another a bright nucleus, surrounded by a nebulous ring, split into two through half its circumference. It is needless enumerating more of these fanciful resemblances, in which so much depended on the point of view in which they were seen, and the power of the telescope. This is the less necessary, as the recent improvements in that instrument, in the hands of Lord Rosse, have shown that the latter element is of the very highest importance, and that appearances, on which some men reasoned boldly last year, are now banished from the domain of science. The nebula in Orion, on whose irresolvability Professor Nichol, somewhat rashly, it would appear, staked the whole foundations of the nebular theory, has been changed into a splendid group of distinct orbs, and that gentleman seems accordingly to have given up his favourite hypothesis. of the nebulæ referred to above have also lost their former curious forms, to assume new ones, it would appear, even more singular; but as the facts have not yet come before the public in a very authentic form, we shall not dilate longer on this part of the subject.

Others

Now, a few words on the so-called nebular theory. Perhaps the earliest intimation of it is to be found in the following passage from one of Sir Isaac Newton's letters to Bentley, then composing his valuable sermons for the Boyle Lecture: If the matter of the sun and planets was evenly disposed throughout an infinite space, it would never convene into one mass; but some of it would convene into one mass, and some into another, so as to make an infinite number of masses, scattered at great distances from one another, throughout all the infinite space. And thus might the sun and the fixed stars be formed, supposing the matter were of a lucid nature. But how the matter should divide itself into two sorts; and that part of it which is fit to compose a shining body should fall down into one mass and make a sun; and the rest, which is fit to compose an opaque body, should coalesce, not into one great body, like the shining matter, but into many little ones; or if the sun were at first an opaque body like the planets, or the planets lucid bodies like the sun, how he alone should be changed into a shining body whilst all they continue opaque; or all they be changed into opaque ones, whilst he remains unchanged, I do not think explicable by mere natural causes, but am forced to ascribe it to the counsel and contrivance of a voluntary agent." This passage shows one point of view from which many have been led to adopt the nebular theory, from the desire to explain the origin of the universe without having recourse to a supernatural agent. The latter part also shows how little it is capable of doing this, and how even the far-seeing mind of Newton felt that it was necessary to have recourse to "the counsel and contrivance" of the Deity. The argument of Newton seems to us fatal to all attempts to make the nebular theory alone construct a world, and we have quoted it at length, in the hope that some who might despise the words of lesser men may listen to his weighty dictates.

Laplace, the greatest perhaps of Newton's followers, also started the nebular hypothesis as a means of explaining certain mathematical facts or laws that prevail in the structure of the universe. He saw that all the planets revolved in one direction, and nearly in one plane, round the sun, that the satellites do the same round the planets, that the sun itself, the planets, and the satellites, all rotate on their axes in the same direction, and that the motions of all these bodies are nearly circular.