and knowledge had spoilt his tastes for theatrical pleasures. The green curtain was no longer a veil, the unfolding of which was to bring back past ages, -but only a certain quantity of green baize, separating the audience, for a given time, from certain of their fellow-men, who were to come forward and personate certain characters. The orchestra lights were but a clumsy machinery. The blue and red

fire was but a chemical mixture burned behind the scenes. The actors were men and women painted. In short, the illusion was now understood, and ceased to impose upon the senses accordingly.

Charles Pemberton has given a still more vivid account of his first visit to the Play. You remember poor Pemberton! He was a writer of wonderfully vivid powers, - an admirable actor, a brilliant writer; but he was diseased and poor, and never made any head way in the world. He has told the story of his life in a series of papers originally published in "Fox's Monthly Repository," entitled The Autobiography of Pel Verjuice. Notwithstanding much that is inflated and convulsive in those papers, they also contain some of the most graphic descriptions in the English language. When a boy, in consequence of ill-usage, he ran away to Liverpool, where he was kidnapped by a pressgang, and sent to sea. For several years he served in ships of war, and was occasionally engaged in skirmishes and battles. Then he seems to have entered upon a new life, in the West Indies, where he took to "the boards," and managed theatres. He married, was unhappy, and became a wanderer over the wide earth. Then he returned England, appeared at Covent Garden as a tragedian in prominent parts, and afterwards "starred" it in the provincial towns. But his health, shattered by his early hardships, began to fail, and he left the boards for the purpose of lecturing on the Drama, giving readings of tragedies, &c.,- -a pursuit now become familiar and profitable. At the same time, he wrote those admirable and graphic papers for "Fox's Monthly Repository." Death, however, had fixed its strong talons upon him, and his friends saw he was not long for this world. His personal qualities had endeared him to many hearts; and his Sheffield and Birmingham friends subscribed a sum sufficient to send him abroad for the benefit of mild air and change of climate. He returned from Egypt "homesick" and dying, and, at the house of his brother, in Birmingham, the taper of his life, which had been long flickering in the socket, went out quietly and peacefully.

But this has led us from Pemberton's description of his "First Play:" it is too long for extract, though it is so vividly written that it would be read without tiring. The play was "Pylades and Orestes," and the chief player was Young Roscius,-who, like most other juvenile wonders, was "nowhere" when he reached maturer years. The crush at the door, like the surgings of an angry sea, the pressure through the dingy avenues of the Birmingham Theatre, once over,-"at length," he says, "I was IN THE THEATRE ! I started back at sight of the steep, almost precipitous, declivity it seemed like a hill, with its components and fragments, creeping, leaping, falling, rolling, rumbling, and settling down in the dying labours of an earthquake; though masses, for a whole half-hour, continued tumbling into place, till all was settled in a firm and compact body. The deep roar of the many hundreds of voices,-here and there one rising into a scream, at first appalled, then left me to a tumult of wonder, and bewildering, breathless intensity of eye and ear. There, directly beneath my gaze, was the large, sacred, green veil, behind which the mysterious preparations were then in a state of progress. What a sublimity of office was in that baize curtain! With

what dignified composure, what Jupiterean equanimity, did that curtain look forth its authority, its command that the sacred precincts which it guarded, the hallowed rites which it concealed, should not be profanely penetrated! Heroes and demi-gods, and Ida's beauteous queens were there, robing for the festival! An after and less reverential acquaintance with these affairs told me there was a drawing on of flesh-coloured legs; a tugging at gilt leather breastplates; a tying of lambroquins; a buckling of sandals; a proper adjusting of certain padding; corking and India-inking of eyebrows and whiskers, and a breeding of roses on the cheeks, by the marriage of a hare's-foot with red lead; and a thousand other mortal earthlinesses too tedious to mention. But of all these, I saw nothing now: blessed state of innocence! The deities were smiling at each other as they sipped their nectar, and inhaled ambrosial essences. I feasted in stillness on the exhilarating idealities, and sat in unbreathing ecstasy. Ha! look! look there! a face and two Olympian figures opening and peeping through a crevice in that sacred curtain! Most happy and envied, most privileged of beings! who, and what art thou? Thought is more speedy than speech; I had time to think this, not to speak it; for, instantly, there was an out-bursting of noises; such, my young remembrance could not parallel a fellow to them, such as forced me out of my feelings of worship and venerating curiosity. They were compounded of hiss, growl, snarl, whoop, yell; Off, off; 'Ya,-a-a-ah,-ya-a-a-ah! off, off!' Cats, dogs, geese, serpents, bears, brayers, wolves, owls, and rooks, were at once tearing their throats with warring discord on my stunned and confounded ears; but the face and fingers, after an exhibition of a phalanx of teeth by the former, withdrew, and the hallowed orifice closed. Now, my eyes turned to survey and revel through the capacious, deep, gorgeous, gilded, and emblematically painted-room? no; not room. It was a mountain scooped out from summit to base, and caverned in its bosom, -with a

blue and fleecy sky overhead, - the roof being coloured to represent a canopy of bright day,—all arranged with seats, bowery and flowery, on which a thousand tinted streaks, and dots of shrubs and verdure rested. But the shrubs and flowers were most inharmonious; and for heat, it was a blast furnace in Guinea! the hollow of Etna was breezy and cooling rather than that. The noise was deafening and tremendous; but amid the din, I caught the indistinct twanging and crashing of musical instruments, and looking, I saw, far beneath me, near the foot of that magnanimous green curtain, some fifty arms jerking, and as many heads bobbing and rocking, with delirious earnestness and furious rapidity; there was a regiment of violins undergoing military torture at one and the same moment. This, I afterwards learned, was called the orchestra. There was a magical and mysterious influence in that indistinctness of sound, which grappled at my imagination, as the splashes of light, in measureless distance, in Martin's pictures, have since grappled it. At once, as if some spell had struck every heart, and bound mute and motionless every voice and limb, there was a dead stillness. This sudden and instant calming of the tempest was positively awful and sublime. I trembled; and noiselessly, grandly, and slowly, the cloud of curtain rose up, up, and vanished. Then, oh, then! on my enchanted eyes grew forth a magnificent palace, interminable in colonnades, and sacred with recesses, stretching far, far, far into distance, thence the mellow effulgence of an ethereal splendour subdued, drew the imagination on to an everlastingness of melodious and flowery elysium. Paint, canvas, and brushes, glory to ye! In quick retrogression, the

eyes stepped on the gorgery of the marble columns, and over their sculptured and trophied decorations, then took their impatient rest on the space between the stream of light, on the verdant floor, and the nearest range of pillars. From opposite portals, two beings stepped lightly and gracefully forward till they met. Not yet; for the instant a sandalled foot from one was visible at the verge of the mystic recess, the mountain shook with the thunder which at once, in one passionate and headlong peal, rattled and echoed, and rolled, from its summit, sides, and hidden depths beneath me! It was the collision of four thousand palms, many of them as horny as a horse's hoof, the beating of so many feet with simultaneous, constantaneous strokes, and the volleying of two thousand voices in Bravo! bravo! bravo!' all in exact unison of burst. What a moment was that for the young and beautiful stripling: a juvenile deity descended, who stood, and bent a graceful acceptance of the homage! Again and again the thunder rose and rolled, and again the boy-god bowed. Yet was there another being, an elder, still a youth, standing near him, retired back a step or two; he stood erect and beautiful; he bowed not; he felt the homage was not to him; he was deaf and absent to it all; he was still Mr. King, spite of his sandals, tunic, and peplum. The uproar melted into air; the last rumble of the thunder sank down, down, down from a murmur to a sigh; then to unheard, suppressed breath; deep, deep, intense stillness; and I heard the voice of that rare creature, if creature he could be, musically syllable forth the words, 'Oh, Pylades! what's life without a friend?' In that vast assemblage of men, women, and youths, of different degrees, temperament, and character; the rough and the courtly, the rude and the refined, the semi-savage and the delicate, the educated and the illiterate, the turbulent and the meditative, the timid and the tipsy; not a whisper, not a breathed sound, curled on the atmosphere, to disturb the adoring silence; there was a tranquillity as perfect as in the stars, -it was like the quiet of a moon-ray sleeping on, and borne about by, a vivified statue. Oh how I was enthralled, enchanted, spellwrought, by what I saw and heard! With utter unconsciousness of myself, I arose and bent forward, with outstretched arms, as if to fly whither I was irresistibly and dreamingly drawn, when a jerk at my coat-tail, and a voice in anger's shrillness crying, 'Cawn't ye sit deawn? yo're rucking my geawnd,' drew me back. Oh, what a hurling down from the heaven of imagination was that! Gi' that gewee some woots! turn um hout! throw um hover!' screamed and bellowed from every side, and a thousand heads, and as many pair of exasperated eyes, were directed towards me. Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would thaw and resolve itself into a dew!' (I had read Hamlet) was my prayer. I was steeped, saturated, parboiled, in a caldron of shame. I was for some moments in a state of utter annihilation; but the storm died away, peace returned, and with it my fixedness of eye and devouring of ear. I was forgotten, praise be to the saints! and the splendid phantasma proceeded. The play-bill, which was crushed and doubled up to a hazel-nut's bulk by this time, had told me that Pylades was Mr. King, Orestes by the Young Roscius! Then came the deep-toned stately Pyrrhus, a metempsychosis of Mr. Barrymore, or Mr. Barrymore a metempsychosis of Pyrrhus: take your choice, reader; yet I offer another version of the 'say,' I think Mr. Barrymore was himself all the while. Heavens ! what majesty of step! Oh, reader, if you are very young, you can form no idea of it, unless you have seen Liston in Lord Grizzle, or Jack Reeve in Abrahamides: no disparagement to Barrymore

*

though; he was as good as nine-tenths of his day; that stage-tread' is obsolete now; but how it was bepraised and beworshipped by your papa and mamma! The legs, superlatively proud of bearing such a body, the feet speaking their conscious dignity of belonging to the legs, each wrinkle in the stockings, instep, and ham, seemed to say, 'how all these people are admiring me!' There were guards, and battleaxes, and shields, and spears, and a throne! Lawks me! I had never seen a throne before; that is to say, a real, genuine, bona fide throne, nothing but pictures of them in books. Sir reader, I would have sacrificed my dinner every day for the next month, even to have touched one of those blessed battle-axes, or to have clutched the shaft of one of those honoured spears! But the men that bore them! Oh! to their glorious state ambition could not dream of aspiring. Then the ladies, the angels, les déesses, for such to me they were, to be gazed on only at a distance, unapproachable, and immaculate! How beautiful! how very, very beautiful they were,-indeed they were, whether you call them women or goddesses! how much more than lovely! Mortality's touch, or the voice or breath of earthliness would have blasphemed them. * Amid the general clapping of hands, and thumping with sticks, and beating with hoofs, that followed anything which pleased or struck the multitude, I was dumb and motionless; I had no power to bring the palms of my hands in collision; the vis insita slept; mind had ceased to act on the body. There was one sympathetic and simple creature sitting next to me (not the one whose 'geawnd I had rucked ') motionless and mute as myself, but she found breath to whisper to me, 'Are they alive?' alluding to the beings on the stage. Oh, yes,' was all my reply, glad to give the information, and not a jot surprised at the question. But between the acts I was really agonised; what with the ugly change and impatience for the elevation of the cruel act drop-scene, I could scarcely endure myself. There was whistling and shouting, and hallooing to acquaintances, and cork drawing, all in a moment, from the descent of the act drop; ay, ore it had closed the view in entirely, the villany began ; and this from the very persons who, a second or two ago, were sitting with such hungry stillness and greedy attention! What are they made of? This was interstitial misery; but delight and ecstasy, choking, suffocating ecstasy, again took possession of me, as the compassionating screen withdrew its presence. What a bliss is ignorance! I am quite certain I could not now be bribed to sit through the play of 'Orestes, or the Distrest Mother,' as it was acted on that evening; everything was faultless, beautiful, divine then, because I had thought no more about the matter; I had examined no further into the qualities of acting than the rest of the public,-those who are in the habit of deciding the fate of a histrionist. In short, I had not learned to find fault.

"This body-clipping and mind-grasping subject of tragedy, was followed by the farce of Love laughs at Locksmiths,' and a glorious farce it is. Only to think of the effect it had on me! The very boards, the benches, the pillars, and walls, seemed built up and dove-tailed of laughs. I, who had been so full of the sympathies and passions of Orestes, alternately swelling, weeping, choking, and shivering, was as hearty a participator in the fun, as the wisest and ablest play-goer in the house. I screamed with laughter, to the excoriation of my trachea; my jaws ached with incessant cachinnation; my o'er-bubbling eyes would have swamped a jolly-boat, and my poor ribs complained of cracking with the repetition of peal on peal of my free, unsuppressed, uproarious, absolute relish of the humour! What a capital,

to the National Colleges and Schools of Ireland. Take the dissenters, and who are their great men? among the Methodists, Jabez Bunting is the sole modern representative of Wesley and Whitfield; among the IndepenIn the dents there is only Thomas Binney, -the Howe, Baxter, and Bunyan of the nineteenth century Scotch Church, Candlish is the only Man of the Time, -and in the Secession, George Gilfillan! The race of Irving and Chalmers seems. to have passed away. And yet Thomas Guthrie is a power in the North, and might have worthily been included in the Men of the Time. George Dawson is included, but James Martineau is omitted,-though perhaps the latter is entitled to be regarded rather in the light of a literary man than as a preacher.

In musicians and actors England is very poor. Bishop is the only musician named; though Wallace, Macfarren, and Loder, were worthy of notice. And of the representatives of the buskin, Macready alone is mentioned.

All the great names of England are to be found in Here we have not dethe class of literary men. generated. It has gained what the Legislature and the Churches have lost. The greatest legislators and the greatest preachers now, are those who reach the people through the medium of the Press. There is perfect freedom here. Macaulay retires from the Legislature to write history; and many men who are Members of Parliament, but are unnoted there, are nevertheless distinguished as highly able writers.

In poets, Britain still maintains her hereditary fame. Though the great Wordsworth has recently passed away, there still remain Samuel Rogers, the patriarch of the poets, Tennyson, the Brownings, Leigh Hunt, Barry Cornwall, John Wilson, and many highly promising writers. The following are the ages of our chief living poets:

Age.

40

81

92

Age.

Bailey (Festus)

36

C. Mackay...

Browning

40

J. Montgomery

Harvey

38

S. Rogers

L. Hunt..

68

A. Tennyson....

42

Sheridan Knowles

68

M. F. Tupper

41

77

Professor Wilson......

64

W. S. Landor

The list of scientific men in this volume is very imperfect. The only engineers named are Cubitt and Locke; but the greatest of living engineers are omitted, namely, Brunel and Stephenson. The latter is, certainly, a man of infinitely greater note than Chaplin the carrier, whose fame is here recorded. Rothschild is also entered among the Men of the Time; but what can you say of him, further than Yet Edwin that he is an enormous money-bag. Chadwick,-who has done more hard work, with a benevolent purpose, than perhaps any man of his day, -who gave birth to, and has kept alive for some fifteen years, the Health of Towns movement, giving rise to so many other excellent measures,-Edwin Chadwick is passed over in silence.

Nearly all the men of mark who are included in the list, are men who have risen from a comparatively low position in life. Adams, the discoverer of the planet Neptune, was the son of a poor farmer in Cornwall. Sir William Cubitt, when a boy, worked in his father's mill, in Norfolk. Locke's father was a breaksman at a Barnsley coalpit. Professor Lee, of Cambridge, was, in the early part of his life, a working carpenter. Lord Campbell and Dickens were both reporters for the Morning Chronicle. Gibson, the sculptor, was a cabinet-maker. Carleton was a poor Irish peasant's son, and has painted his own life in Cobden and Carlyle were both The Poor Scholar. sons of small farmers, the one in Sussex, the other in Dumfriesshire. W. J. Fox was, at an early part of his life, a weaver boy. Joseph Brotherton was a factory lad. Dr. Kitto was a poor cobbler. As an illustration of the style of article in this book, we quote the following, which is one of the most interesting specimens that has come under our notice :

66

'FARADAY, MICHAEL, England's most eminent chemist, was born in 1794, the son of a poor blacksmith. He was early apprenticed to one Ribeau, a Whilst bookbinder, in Blandford Street, and worked at the craft until he was twenty-two years of age. an apprentice, his master called the attention of one his customers (Mr. Dance, of Manchester Street) to an electrical machine and other things which the young man had made; and Mr. Dance, who was one of the old members of the Royal Institution, took him to hear the four last lectures which Sir Humphrey Davy gave them as professor. Faraday atter ded, and seating himself in the gallery, took notes of the lectures, and

at a future time sent his manuscript to Davy, with a short and modest account of himself, and a request, if it were possible, for scientific employment in the labours of the laboratory. Davy, struck with the clearness and accuracy of the memoranda, and confiding in the talents and perseverance of the writer, offered him, upon the occurrence of a vacancy in the laboratory, in the beginning of 1813, the post of assistant, which he accepted. At the end of the year, he accompanied Davy and his lady on the continent as secretary and assistant, and in 1815, returned to his duties in the laboratory, and ultimately became Fullerian professor. Mr. Faraday's researches and discoveries have raised him to the highest rank among European philosophers, while his high faculty of expounding to a general audience, the result of recondite investigation, makes him one of the most attractive lecturers of the age. He has selected the most difficult and perplexing departments of physical science, the investigation of the reciprocal relations of heat, light, magnetism, and electricity; and, by many years of patient and profound study, has contributed greatly to simplify our ideas on these subjects. It is the hope of the philosopher that, should life and health be spared, he will be able to show that the imponderable agencies just mentioned are so many manifestations of one and the same force. Mr. Faraday's great achievements are recognised by the learned societies of every country in Europe, and the University of Oxford, in 1832, did itself the honour of enrolling him among her Doctors of Laws. In private life he is beloved for the simplicity and truthfulness of his character, and the kindliness of his disposition."

In the above article, we have referred only to the subjects of British talent. But a large space is devoted to foreign celebrities, - such as Louis Napoleon, Kossuth, Cavaignac, Elihu Burritt, Windischgratz, &c. The editor, however, passes over very slightly the scientific men of foreign countries. For instance, there is no mention of Liebig, Reichenbach, Tiedeman, Müller, Strauss, nor Ranke; nor of any foreign painter whatever. But probably this defect may be remedied in succeeding editions of the book. As it is, the work will be found of much interest, and ought to succeed, as it deserves.

THE SHOEMAKER'S DAUGHTER.

BY FRANCES DEANE.

THE Rue St. Honoré, in Paris, is one of the longest streets in the world: it is the Oxford Street of the capital of France, and has more shops and houses between its extreme end of the Rue St. Denis and the Faubourg des Roule than even in the Boulevards. At no great distance from the Palais Royal, and between it and the church of the Oratoire, was, during the Reign of Terror, a small shoemaker's shop. It was kept by an Alsacian, a dry, droll, middleaged man, who, during those times of revolution and alarm, when heroic France, attacked by the whole civilized world, was apparently perishing in deaththroes-expiring in agonies, which were, however, to save, to raise and glorify it-paid little attention to anything save his business and his pretty little daughter. M. Leopold Mayer was a selfish man-a very selfish man. So bootmaking prospered, he did not care for anything else. If the country were attacked on all sides, foreign armies in every frontier, he little cared. The only inconvenience he did care about was the taxes: that was unpleasant; but, otherwise, public affairs were nothing to him. There are hundreds of such men everywhere; men whose

native town might be desolated by the plague, and who yet would be happy if they remained untouched -unhurt.

Leopold Mayer had a daughter, a very pretty girl, about twelve years old, with rosy cheeks, laughing eyes, a warm, expansive heart, and a character the very opposite of her father. She was as generous as he was selfish; as keen in her sympathies for the world as he was for his own private business-she had a corner in her heart for every one. Her mother had been like her, having sacrificed every consideration to that of pleasing her husband, who would not be pleased, of making happy a man who would not be happy.

M. Leopold Mayer did a very good business; and, it was said, had a great deal of money somewhere; but no man knew where.

Katerina Mayer sat in her father's shop and took the money; but, having plenty of leisure, she read, during the intervals of business, such books as she could find in a neighbouring circulating-library. German in her nature, with a warm, but somewhat contemplative character, she devoured history, philosophy, poetry, and the drama; was learned in Molière, Racine, Corneille, and even Montaigne, and doted on Philip de Comines; but she had her favourite author, too, and that, like Madame Roland, was the author of "Lives of Plutarch."

Of an evening she would read out to her father while he smoked his pipe, to which-like Germans and Dutchmen-he was a great devotee. Very often they were joined by a young officer, a lodger, who had not long been removed from a military school to a commission in the army, but who was, as yet, unattached. Paul (we must leave his name in blank, because of his aristocratic son, who would not forgive us publishing it) was a young man who had profited by his education; and a better guide for the girl could not well have been found. Of course he was a republican; all young men, not émigrés, were, in those days; and the contagion spread; for "a more audacious little sans-culotte than was Katerina," would

old Mayer say, never stepped in shoe-leather." The reign of terror very nearly shocked her; but she had good sense enough not to confound the bold crimes of Danton, the atrocities of Marat, of Hebert, and Charette, with the principles of the true friends of freedom.

Paul

and Katerina Mayer were the very best of friends. The young girl, so early mistress of a house, and so precocious in her studies, played the little woman, which made the man of twenty laugh and declare that, were he not a poor devil of an officer, with no other fortune save his sword, he would carry her before the maire and marry her at once; at which Katerina laughed, and bid him go and win the epaulets of a general first, and then she might listen to him. But the idea of a young adventurer, without a penny, talking of marrying the heiress of the richest shoemaker in Paris, was terribly audacious. And Paul called her an aristocrate; they laughed, and the matter ended.

About three months after the young man received his commission, he entered the shop of citizen Mayer in company with a brother officer. Katerina was at the counter. Citizen Mayer was overlooking his