idea of the arrangement. The last word sees, in the last column, must be understood as sees into or comprehends.

In an appeal to the Privy Council of Madras, are the two following words, which appear to be names of estates: Arademaravasadeloovaradooyou; Kaminagadeyathooroosoomokanoogonagira. In the island of Mull, Scotland, is a locality called Drimtaidhvrickhillichattan. Llanvairpwllgwyngyll, a living in the diocese of Bangor, became vacant in March, 1850, by the death of its incumbent, the Rev. Richard Prichard, æt. ninetythree. The labor of writing the name on his benefice does not seem to have shortened his days.

The following are the names of two employés in the finance department at Madrid: Don Epifanio Mirurzururdundua y Zéngotita; Don Juan Nepomuceno de Burionagonatotorecagogeazcoecha.

There was, until 1851, a major in the British army named Teyoninhokarawen (one single name).

FOX AND GIBBON.

The following is taken from the fly-leaves of a copy of Gibbon's Rome, 1st vol. 1779, 8vo. :

The following anecdote and verses were written by the late Charles James Fox in the first volume of his Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

The author of this work declared publicly at Brookes's (a gaming-house in St. James' Street), upon the delivery of the Spanish Rescript in June, 1779, that there was no salvation for this country unless six of the heads of the cabinet council were cut off and laid upon the tables of both houses of parliament as examples; and in less than a fortnight he accepted a place under the same cabinet council.

ON THE AUTHOR'S PROMOTION TO THE BOARD OF TRADE IN 1779.

BY THE RIGHT HON. C. J. FOX.

King George in a fright

Lest Gibbon should write
The story of Britain's disgrace,

Thought no means more sure
His pen to secure

Than to give the historian a place.

But his caution is vain,

'Tis the curse of his reign,

That his projects should never succeed;

Tho' he wrote not a line,

Yet a cause of decline

In our author's example we read.

His book well describes

How corruption and bribes

O'erthrew the great empire of Rome;

And his writings declare

A degeneracy there,

Which his conduct exhibits at home.

SARDONIC SMILES.

A few words on the Téλws σapdávios, or Sardonius Risus, so celebrated in antiquity, may not be amiss, especially as the expression, "a Sardonic smile" is a common one in our language.

We find this epithet used by several Greek writers; it is even as old as Homer's time, for we read in the Odyssey, peídŋoe dè θυμῷ σαρδάνιον μάλα τοῖον, “ but he laughed in his soul a very bitter laugh." The word was written indifferently σapdávios and σαρδόνιος; and some lexicographers derive it from the verb σαίρω, of σéona, "to show the teeth, grin like a dog: " especially in σέση, scorn or malice. The more usual derivation is from σapdóviov, a plant of Sardinia (Zapdó), which was said to distort the face of the eater. In the English of the present day, a Sardonic laugh means a derisive, fiendish laugh, full of bitterness and mocking; stinging with insult and rancor. Lord Byron has hit it off in his portraiture of the Corsair, Conrad :—

There was a laughing devil in his sneer,
That rais'd emotions both of rage and fear.

In Izaak Walton's ever delightful Complete Angler, Venator, on coming to Tottenham High Cross, repeats his promised verse: "it is a copy printed among some of Sir Henry Wotton's, and doubtless made either by him or by a lover of angling." Here is the first stanza :

Quivering fears, heart-tearing cares,
Anxious sighs, untimely tears,

Fly, fly to courts,

Fly to fond worldling's sports,

Where strained Sardonic smiles are glossing still,

And Grief is forced to laugh against her will;

Where mirth's but mummery,

And sorrows only real be.

In Sir J. Hawkins's edition is the following note on the word "Sardonic " in these lines:

Feigned or forced smiles, from the word Sardon, the name of an herb resembling smallage, and growing in Sardinia, which, being eaten by men, contracts the muscles, and excites laughter even to death. Vide Erasmi Adagia, tit. RISUS.

Sardonic, in this passage, means "forced, strained, unusual, artificial;" and is not taken in the worst sense. These lines of Sir H. Wotton's brings to mind some of Lorenzo de Medici's, in a platonic poem of his, when he contrasts the court and country. I quote Mr. Roscoe's translation :—

What the heart thinks, the tongue may here disclose,

Nor inward grief with outward smiles is drest;

Not like the world-where wisest he who knows

To hide the secret closest in his breast.

The Edinburgh Review, July, 1849, in an article on Tyndale's Sardinia, says:

The Sardonic smile, so celebrated in antiquity, baffles research much more than the intemperie; nor have modern physiologists thrown any light on the nature of the deleterious plant which produces it. The tradition at least seems still to survive in the country, and Mr. Tyndale adduces some evidence to show that the Ranunculus sceleratus was the herb to which these exaggerated qualities were ascribed. Some insular antiquaries have found a different solution of the ancient proverb. The ancient Sardinians, they say, like many barbarous tribes, used to get rid of their relations in extreme old age, by throwing them alive into deep pits; which attention it was the fashion for the venerable objects of it to receive with great expressions of delight; whence the saying of a Sardinian laugh (vulgo), laughing on the wrong side of one's mouth. It seems not impossible that the phenomenon may have been a result of the effects of "Intemperie" working on weak constitutions, and in circumstances favorable to physical depression-like the epidemic chorea, and similar complaints, of which such strange accounts are read in medical books.

TRAVELLING OF OLD IN ENGLAND.

The history of travelling in this country, from the Creation to the present time, may be divided into four periods-those of no coaches, slow coaches, fast coaches, railways. Whether balloons, or rockets, or some new mode which as yet has no name, because it has no existence, may come next, one cannot tell, and it is hardly worth while to think about it; for, no doubt, it will be something quite inconceivable.

The third, or fast-coach period was brief, though brilliant. I doubt whether fifty years have elapsed since the newest news in the world of locomotive fashion was, that--to the utter confusion and defacement of the "Sick, Lame, and Lazy," a sober vehicle, so called from the nature of its cargo, which was nightly disbanded into comfortable beds at Newbury-a new post-coach had been set up which performed the journey to Bath in a single day. Perhaps the day extended from about five o'clock in the morning to midnight, but still the coach was, as it called itself, a “Daycoach,” for it travelled all day; and if it did somewhat "add the night unto the day, and so make up the measure," the passengers. had all the more for their money, and were incomparably better off as to time than they had ever been before. But after this many years elapsed before "Old Quicksilver" made good its ten miles an hour, in one unbroken trot to Exeter, and was rivalled by "Young Quicksilver" on the road to Bristol, and beaten by the light-winged Hirondelle, that flew from Liverpool to Cheltenham, and troops of others, each faster than the foregoing, each trumpeting its own fame on its own improved bugle, and beating time (all to nothing) with sixteen hoofs of invisible swiftness.

I do not know anywhere a more distinct account of the commencement and progress of a journey in England, two centuries ago, than is given in Taylor's (the Water-poet) narrative, in prose and verse, of his travels from London to the Isle of Wight, while