though we do not feel any very sanguine expectation of persuading the gin purveyors, the gas-lamplighters of the palaces, nor even the Sir Felix Booths of this world, of the advantage of our speculation. But four-and-twenty millions of money swallowed in the shape of liquid fire! The thought is more incendiary than another great fire of London. Well may the Sir Felixes of this world keep mansions in the Portman places of mankind, bathe in turtle-soup, and wash their spaniels in Burgundy. Yet we wish that the teetotallers would make a grand invasion of the distillery, and after boiling a few of the concoctors of conflagration in their own vats, let in the Thames to liquify the whole plant. With all this, we are aware of the respect due to vested interests. The physicians, to whom apoplexies are rent-rolls; the surgeons, who live on the broken bones of humanity; the undertakers, who keep themselves in their own houses, by removing every one else from theirs; and last, and most grasping of all, the Chancellors of the Exchequer, who tax the tombstones, and lay their hands upon every thing above and under ground. The slightest check on the national propensity for gin would be answered by a general wail from the whole multitude who live on the sad varieties of human wo. The work house would exhibit the portly matrons and pampered clerks who preside over the distribution of the six millions of pounds sterling which go in potatoes and cheese to the pauperism of Britain, lank as the mice that roamed their empty halls. The turnkeys of the county jails would grow melancholy, and toy with handcuffs no longer. Jack Ketch would pronounce his occupation o'er; and the "drop itself might be sold for old furniture not required at present by the owner."

But the calamity would not end here. Themis herself might give up her last breath in a groan that would shake the land from Westminster Hall to the Lizard. The judges would find their circuits reduced to the important duty of marching into the counties with a posse of clowns before them, and the sheriff's carriage to make up the show. The leanness of the courts would soon reduce the corporiety of the lawyers, and a speedy mortality, or a general recruiting for the East

India Company's service, would be the only resources against eating each other. With the barristers the solicitors must go, that active race, whose smaller dimensions by no means preclude their rival activity in extracting their subsistence from whatever they can fix on. The generation of clerks and law subalterns of all shapes, sizes, and stings, who live by the superior genera, must be reduced to the famine point without delay.

"So, naturalists say, a flea

Has smaller fleas that on him prey,
And they have smaller still to bite 'em,
And so proceed, ad infinitum,”

All must perish alike; and lawyers, even to the grade invisible and next the worm, must go together to oblivion.

With the consciousness of so sweep. ing a calamity before him, who can wonder that little Spring Rice should have proposed to take off the spirit license tax from the gin-shops, "in the full and undoubting confidence that the increased gin-drinking therefrom would make up the loss to the revenue?"

The memory of Napoleon is inexhaustible in France. His career was so vivid, his exploits were so various, and the space over which his military life extended was so comprehensive, adventurous, and interesting, that we should not wonder if it supplied the gossipry of France with materials for a century to come. Of all lives the life of a great soldier is the most fertile in reminiscences of this order. Napoleon, one day the chief of cabinets, another day controlling camps-one day deciding the fate of empires in council, another day deciding the fate of wars in the field a statesman by office, a soldier by profession, and from the cradle to the grave a preeminently brilliant, stirring, and audacious spirit-Napoleon was made to be the central figure of the most showy of all romances-the romance of history.

But his character was more developed in what may be called the private life of camps than in those larger scenes which belong to thrones and fields of battle. He had a singular power of addressing himself to the feelings of the soldiery; and this is the more singular, from its seeming incompatibility with the character of his

mind. If ever man was haughty and arrogant, bent upon high things, and contemptuous of human feelings-if ever man would have made a bridge of human heads and hearts to power, and would have immolated a generation on the altar where he set up himself as the idol-that man was the profound, subtle, and remorseless Napoleon. Yet never General of modern times-nor, perhaps, of ancient-had more the skill of reaching the heart of the soldier, more identified the glory of the soldier with his own success, or more combined the affections of a comrade with the dignity of a leader.

The latest work which has been published is a collection of anecdotes, entitled "Evenings with Cambacérès;" for the authenticity of the source the French publisher sufficiently pledges himself; and unlike as the whole communication is to what might occur in the intercourse of a retired minister amongst ourselves, there is no improbability whatever in its occurrence amongst our Gallic neighbours. The most vigorous life in France has a prodigious tendency to trifling. Under despotic government, trifling only is safe; and it is perfectly evident that trifling was the chief employment permitted to the two coadjutors of the First Consul. The prodigious genius of Napoleon not merely threw the faculties of his copartners in power into the shade, but utterly stripped them of all responsibility. If Cambacérès had been netting purses and Le Brun combing lap-dogs all the term of their natural lives, they could not have been less importantly employed than while they followed in the train of the First Consul. In these evenings, whether the anecdotes were transmitted direct from the lips of the Ex-Chancellor, or collected by the editor from his remembrances, we probably have the chief materials of his meditations during the career of the great JacobinDespot and Republican- Monarch of France. We give one of those anecdotes, as curiously characteristic of Napoleon en campagne.

During one of the campaigns in Germany the Emperor, wrapped in his grey great-coat, was riding about in the environs of Munich, attended only by two orderly officers. He met on the road a very pretty-looking female, who, by her dress, was evidently a vivandière. She was weeping, and

was leading by the hand a little boy about five years of age. Struck by the beauty of the woman, and her distress, the Emperor pulled up his horse by the road-side, and said, "What is the matter with you, my dear ?" The woman, not knowing the individual by whom she was addressed, and being much discomposed by grief, made no reply. The little boy, however, was more communicative, and he frankly answered, "My mother is crying, sir, because my father has beat her.' "Where is your father?"" Close by here; he is one of the sentinels on duty with the baggage." The Emperor again addressed himself to the woman, and enquired the name of her husband; but she refused to tell, being fearful lest the captain, as she supposed the Emperor to be, would cause her husband to be punished. "Malpeste, your husband has been beating you; you are weeping; and yet you are so afraid of getting him into trouble, that you will not even tell me his name. This is very inconsistent. May it not be that you are a little in fault yourself?". -"Alas, Captain! he has a thousand good qualities, though he has one very bad one-he is jealous, terribly jealous: and when he gets into a passion, he cannot restrain his viclence."- "But that is rather serious: in one of his fits of jealousy he may inflict on you some serious injury; perhaps kill you."-" And even if he did, I should not wish any harm to come to him; for I am sure he would not do it wilfully; he loves me too well for that."- "And if I guess rightly, you love him?"-"That is very natural, Captain. He is my lawful husband, and the father of my dear boy." So saying, she fondly kissed her child, who, by the way in which he returned her caresses, proved his affection for his mother. "Well," said he again, turning to the woman, "whether you and your husband love each other or not, I do not choose that he should beat you. I am one of the Emperor's aides-de-camp, and I will mention the affair to his Majesty. Tell me your husband's name."-" If you were the Emperor himself, I would not tell it you; for, I know, he would be punished." "Silly woman! I want is to teach him to behave well to you, and to treat you with the respect you deserve." "That would make me very happy, Captain; but

All

The late Sir Humphrey Davy was a man of fine talent for chemistry, and might have been alive at this moment if he had not read an article in the Edinburgh Review, which recommended that every clever man should be an universal genius. Jeffrey set the example, by curling his hair, and learning quadrilles. The late Dr Young, who was by nature almost a Universalist, and fond of settling every thing, from a chess-board to the Copernican system, actually learned sleight-of-hand from Mr Ingleby the emperor of the conjurors, and very nearly broke his neck in exhibiting as Harlequin at an opera-house masquerade. We remember a chemical professor of some notoriety in London, who suddenly astonished his friends, and amused the public at that period, by displaying his head covered with curls, many and exquisite enough to have done honour to any wig-block in the shop of the celebrated artist, who has passed down to history under the title of Barber-rossa. Sir Humphrey limited his ambition to poetry and piebald waistcoats, and certainly perpetrated very curious performances in both, yet without much success in either, his poetry being prose, and his waistcoats patchwork. But these were his follies. All have their follies, and he redeemed his by some of the most showy possible discoveries in chemistry.

But at present we have to do with his authorship. As he wrote prose, which he mistook for poetry, he wrote poetry, which he mistook for prose. In his Salmonia he thus describes the advantages of angling to the philosopher, the lover of nature, and the man of feeling! "It carries us into the most vivid and beautiful scenery of nature, among the mountain lakes, and the clear and lovely streams that gush from the highest ranges of elevated hills, or that make their way through the cavities of calcareous strata. How delightful, in the early spring, after the dull and tedious time of winter, to wander forth by some clear stream, to see the leaf bursting from the purple bud, to wander upon the fresh turf below the shade of trees, whose bright blossoms are filled with the music of the bee, and on the surface of the waters to view the gaudy flies sparkling like gems in the sun

beam, to hear the twittering of the water-birds," with many similar sights and sounds, and to finish all by hooking a salmon, and carrying him home in a basket.

All this is very well for Sir Humphrey. Yet, as Esop says, if lions could paint, or salmon either, we should probably hear a different account of the rapturous nature of human huntings and fishings. We premise that we are not Quixotic enough to venture a syllable against the humanity, wisdom, and necessity of angling; that we are not so utterly ignorant of human nature as to expect that an angler can be converted any more than a Jacobin; or so singularly illogical as to argue, that fish can feel a hook through a jaw or a nostril; or that whether they can feel or not, the question should in the least impede the sport of either gentlemen or ladies in hooking them for the mere sport of the angler. Yet without attempting to rival the picturesque of the philosopher, may we not suppose a salmon with the pen in his gills inditing some such state of the case as this.

"After having wintered in the central region of the Atlantic, in a depth of about ten miles, which no storm could disturb, and where the smoothness of the sands, the calmness of the water, and the luxuriant richness and variety of vegetation made the most delightful life for nine months of the year, while all on the surface was raging tempest or bitter frost, the necessity of providing for my offspring in the river in which I first saw the light, drove me most reluctantly upwards. As our column of about a hundred millions approached the shores, we found sufficient reason to regret the delightful regions which we had left below. Instead of the pure water in which it was a luxury to move, we shrunk from the half warm, half corrupt surface; we were disgusted by the smell of the decayed vegetation poured down by the rivers, and were all but choked by the mire which discoloured the emerald clearness of the ocean for leagues. At last we reached our allotted rivers; but here new evils awaited us; vast troops of dog-fish, sharks, and seals awaited our coming, rushed upon us, and devoured thousands before our eyes. But our numbers were incaleulable, and we pushed on. At length I shot up my native stream, and on glid