the one may be habitually numerous, those of the other scanty; the one may be excellently supported by his colleagues or subordinates, the other may be constantly thwarted by the jealousy or incompetence of his allies; the one may be general of a state habitually chary of its blood and treasure; the other, like Napoleon, may unite in himself the highest military with the supreme civil command, and wield the whole energies of the state for the support of his troops in the field. We will not, therefore, attempt any further comparison between the merits of Marlborough and Wellington; for though in their case the difficulty is lessened by their being generals of the same nation, and opposed by the same enemies, yet this is counterbalanced by the fact of their belonging to different ages and different systems of warfare. Nations had not then learned to put forth their full military strength; it was reserved for the rise of the Democratic principle to pour forth to the battle myriads where formerly there had only been thousands. The growth of wealth, and triumphs of mechanical science, did not then render possible the rapid transmission of large bodies of troops, and military tactics had then to be subordinated to this difficulty. In his celebrated invasion of Russia, Charles XII. of Sweden had as much difficulty with the materiel and commissariat of his forty thousand men, as Napoleon had afterwards with an army of half-a-million. The events of the War of Succession were on a minor scale to those of the Revolutionary contest. The leaders in the former were, perhaps, as great men as those in the latter; but in the beginning of the eighteenth century it was a war of governments-at its close, it was a war of peoples. This it was which gave such gigantic proportions to the last Continental struggle, and this it was which will produce triumphs, convulsions, and defeats more stupendous still, when Europe again plunges into the purgatory of warfare.

The resemblances which we have thus traced between the opening epochs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, proves that time makes little change in the national characteristics, and none in human nature. And let it be remembered that what we say of nations applies still more emphatically to the Church of Rome. The name it

rejoices in is "the unchangeable." In respect to its subtle policy and daring ambition, at least, we concede the justness of the title; and we suspect that, in these matters, our own age is yet destined to furnish a closer parallel to the era of Marlborough than any that has yet intervened. The cruel bigotry which established the Inquisition in Spain and Italy-which banished the Moriscoes, and slaughtered or exiled the Huguenots; which rolled back the tide of Protestantism in Germany, and attempted to re-impose the shackles of Rome on Britain, is once more rearing its crested head. The snake has been "scotched, not killed," and now awakes refreshed from a sleep of more than a century. It leagued with Despotism in the days of Marlborough, and it is leaguing so again. Look at the Continent, and you will descry a dark cloud creeping over the crimsoned land. For years it has been advancing slowly, stealthily, making its presence known only by the blighting chillness it dif fuses; but now the period of incubation is over, and the storm is ready to burst. Behind the red mantle of Despotism stands revealed the black cowl of the Priest. Neither finds he can any longer stand alone, and hence the portentous alliance. They have both a common cause, and they have both a common foe. LIBERTY is the noble quarry they fly at, and they are now hunting her down over the breadth of the Continent. It matters not whether she incarnate herself in the State or in the Church-whether she demand the liberty of the subject, or the freedom of conscience-she is alike doomed. Four years ago, Democracy was rioting or triumphing throughout Europe, and enthusiasts deemed that we were re-entering the Golden Age of mankind, yet what is the spectacle now? To say that liberty of every kind is dead in Italy, is to say nothing. Look into Austria, and you see a new and unmitigated system of autocracy established, the rule of the sword predominant, our missionaries expelled, and Bibles seized. In France, the centralised despotism of the Empire has been revived; the press and free discussion are in abeyance; the Romish Church reappearing in her pomp; and, in the unity of opinion sought after, dangerous symptoms of reviving intolerance. In the lesser States of Germany, the popular institutions of 1848 have been

suppressed, in some cases by the help of Austrian troops; and even in Prussia, Protestantism is growing lifeless, and Constitutionalism falling into disrepute. Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, are the last asylums of civil and religious liberty on the Continent; and against the two last of these, assaults from without have already been made. The crusade of intolerance has commenced, and we have our own forebodings as to whether the "good cause" will not succumb in the strife; whether the fair image of Divine Liberty will not temporarily be shaken from her pedestal. Even in our own island, there is enough to cause disquiet to the thoughtful. As to the power and ambitious aims of Romanism in Ireand, we need say nothing, for they are patent; but Great Britain, hitherto the citadel of the Reformed faith, is no longer free from the taint. Not to speak of that modified Romanism now prevalent in the Church of England, and which is furthering the interests of Rome as much as ever did the "High Church" principles in the days of Queen Anne-look at the swarms of Papal militia we are yearly landing on the British shores, pouring in thousands into Glasgow and Liverpool, and thence spreading through the country, and accumulating in formidable masses in all the large towns. Many a place in Great Britain, at this moment, fancies itself thriving and increasing in population-when the whole truth is, that for the last decade its closes and courts have been filling with the most ignorant and needy of Erin's progenyready to engage in any riot, ready to do the bidding of any priest. Ireland, in fact, has been for years past a social Propaganda of Rome-a vast hive, which is annually casting off swarms to inoculate other countries with the leaven of Romanism, and to form in them a Papal militia, formidable alike from its numbers and its recklessness.

Louis XIV. was just permitted to witness the extinction of the war which his over-reaching ambition had kindled. He expired on the fourteenth anniversary of his grandson's accession to the throne of Spain, and at the very time when the Jacobite insurrection in Scotland was apparently opening the way for the restoration to the throne of the Stuarts, whom he had so nobly sheltered in their misfortune. Independent of the public calamities which had

marked the latter years of the war, he had been severely stricken by domestic bereavements. His son and daughterin-law, the Duke and Duchess of Burgundy, and their son, the heir of the monarchy, were carried off by the small-pox within a few days of each other. A single funeral service, at which the aged monarch assisted, was performed for the father, mother, and son. Though Louis bore this grievous calamity with his wonted firmness, it sank deep into his heart, and all the efforts of the courtiers were unable to divert his settled melancholy. Apprehensive of the extinction of the male line of the Bourbons, he, by an edict of 15th May 1815, called his natural sons, now legitimised (the Duke of Maine and the Count of Toulouse), to the throne, failing his grandson. When death was visibly approaching, the aged monarch ordered his infant heir, afterwards Louis XV., to be brought to his bedside, and, placing his lean and withered hand on his head, he said with a firm voice-"My child, you are about to become a great king; but your happiness will depend on your submission to God, and in the care you take of your subjects. To attain that, you must avoid, as much as you can, engaging in wars, which are the ruin of the people. Do not follow, in that respect, the bad example which I have given you. I have often engaged in wars from levity, and continued in them from vanity; do not imitate me, but become a pacific prince." Memorable words!to be wrung by bitter experience from the dying lips of the Grand Monarque. He breathed his last, at five in the morning, on the 1st of September. "The King is dead, gentlemen!" cried the Chamberlain, when the feather no longer moved before his lips; the sumptuous doors of the apartment were thrown open, and an infant of five years old, adorned with the cordon bleu, thrown over a violet velvet dress, advanced into the chamber of death, amidst cries of "Vive le Roi Louis XV., notre seigneur et maitre!"

The wheel of life is ever turningand ere his old rival thus departed from this scene of empty glory, the star of Marlborough was once more in the ascendant. Foiled by his energy and precautions in their attempt to raise the Pretender to the throne, on the death of Anne, Ormond and Bolingbroke anticipated an impeachment for

high treason, by flight to France; and, on the 1st of August 1714, Marlborough re-entered London amidst the feu-de-joies of the troops, and the shouts of an immense concourse of citizens. "One day effaced the traces of years of injustice-the death of a single individual had restored the patriotic hero to the situation in which he stood after the battle of Blenheim." Nevertheless, he declined to re-enter the Cabinet, and it was only at the earnest solicitations of his friends that he resumed the office of commander-in-chief.

Marlborough was now sixty-five years old, but his remaining years were not to pass by ingloriously. The Jacobite Rebellion immediately broke out, and the Pretender landed on the Scottish coast; and it was by his prompt and skilful measures for crushing the insurrection that Marlborough added the last wreath to his crown of fame. The rebellion was crushed in Lancashire, averted in Devonshire, and in Scotland was brought to a conclusion by General Cadogan, who had long served under Marlborough on the Continent. Marlborough had now an opportunity of putting in practice an opinion which he expressed years before in Flanders:

"That if he ever commanded against the Highlanders, he would never be at the trouble of following them into their hills, to run the risk of ruining an army by fatigue and want, but would post himself so as to starve them if they kept together, or till, by their natural inconstancy, they separated; after which, every one would do his best to get terms. In Scotland, few prisoners of note were taken; and the annals of its courts are not stained by unnecessary or lamentable severity. But it was otherwise in England; and Walpole, who was Prime Minister-though by no means, as his subsequent long career proved, inclined to severity deemed the risk run too great, the escape made too narrow, to permit lenity to be extended to the prisoners. Two noblemen-Lords Kenmure and Derwentwater-and twenty-four Commoners were condemned to death, and died with equal dignity and resolution on Tower-hill, already stained by the blood of the first and the noblest in English story. These executions call forth from Mr. Alison some excellent remarks on the expedience of all civilised nations revising their civil code, and abolishing the punishment of death in purely po

litical offences. says, "of dealing with such offences, is to take vigorous measures, more so than are now generally adopted, against the commencement of insurrections, or the propagation of incitements which lead to them; but when the conflict once begins, to treat the captives as prisoners of war, or at most pronounce sentence of banishment or transportation upon them. Death, or confiscation of property, seems altogether unsuitable for a civil struggle for power, almost as much as it is for a national contest for territory. If an insurrection commences with murder, pillage, and conflagration, its authors should be dealt with, not as rebels, but as pirates-as enemies of the human race; but if it is conducted according to the laws of civilised warfare, its leaders should be dealt with by the same code."

"The true way," he

Though taking little part in general politics, Marlborough was once more at the pinnacle of honest fame; but now, in his old age, he was made to experience, as his great contemporary Louis had already done, the truth of Solon's saying, that "no man should be called happy till the day of his death." In the spring of 1714, his daughter, the Countess of Bridgewater, was cut off after a short illness; and within a short month afterwards another daughter, the Countess of Sunderland, was carried off with equal suddenness. Marlborough himself soon received warning of approaching death. He had long suffered under headaches, and heat in the head-the well-known result of undue mental exertion, and the precursor of dissolution to many of the greatest of the human race; and on the 28th May 1716, he was seized with a fit of palsy, so severe as to deprive him, for a time, alike of speech and resolution. He recovered, however, and a gleam of returning light shone upon his mind, when he visited Blenheim on the 18th October. He expressed great satisfaction at the survey of the place, which reminded him of his great achievements, and in which he had always felt so deep an interest; but when he saw, in one of the few rooms which were finished, a picture of himself at the battle of Blenheim, he turned away with a mournful air, murmuring, "Something then, but now On the

27th November 1721, he made his last appearance in the House of Lords; and in the following June, he was again

attacked with paralysis, so violent that he lay for some days nearly motionless, though in perfect possession of his faculties. To a question from the Duchess, whether he heard the prayers read as usual at night, on the 15th June, in his apartment, he replied, "Yes; and I joined in them." These were his last words. On the morning of the 18th he sank rapidly, and calmly breathed his last at four o'clock, in the seventy-second year of his age. His Countess long survived him-dying in 1744, at the advanced age of eightyfour. Her brilliant talents, immense fortune, and undiminished beauty, rendered her, long after the death of her illustrious husband, the object of impassioned admiration to a variety of suitors. But she refused all offers of marriage; and to a proposal of the Duke of Somerset, she replied with a worthy spirit "That if he were the conqueror of the world, she would not permit him to succeed in that heart

which had been devoted to JOHN DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH."

Having thus followed our hero from boyhood to his tomb, we draw to a conclusion. In the opening of our article, we criticised the merits of his biographer's work; and in tracing his eventful career, and in picturing the aspect and spirit of the times in which he lived, we have given a fair summary of the contents of his Life. If the reader do not recognise these to be in the highest degree interesting, the fault is ours, and not the author's. The critic, unfortunately, can only indicate, not describe, the beauties he meets with-he cannot copy, on his narrow canvas, the grand forms and colouring, the powerful lights and shadows, of the works he analyses. He can only give of them a faint and miniature reflection; but such as it is, in the present instance, the reader can hardly fail to perceive the lineaments of a grand and engaging original.

GOLD, like almost all metals, occurs in rocks called by the geologist granite, gneiss, mica slate, chlorite slate, clay slate, &c., &c.; sometimes dispersed in small crystals, or flakes, through the mass of such rocks, but more frequently in veins. These veins we may consider as great cracks or crevices in the rock, varying from a few inches to many feet in width, which cracks, having been open when first formed, have been subsequently filled (we won't attempt to explain how) by minerals, in a more or less pure or unmixed state, frequently, indeed commonly, assuming their natural condition of crystals, or definite geometrical forms. One of the most common minerals found in these veins is quartz (pure flint it may be called), occurring commonly as a white, compact, very hard stone. Gold, where it occurs, is very often associated with this quartz, occurring in little nests, lining small cavities, or dispersed through it in various ways, sometimes in a state of such extremely minute subdivision as to be invisible to the eye. It is said, moreover, to occur

sometimes disseminated in other rocks, such as limestone, for instance; but that does not appear to be frequently the case.

Now, the geologist knows that all countries are more or less covered with superficial clays, sands, gravel, or detritus; which are, in fact, nothing else than- pieces of the solid rocks that have been detached from them by the action of running or breaking water, washed, rolled, ground down, and deposited by it, where they are now found. In by far the greater majority of cases, the waters which exerted this action were those of the sea. All that is now land has once been under water, and, as it emerged, by slow degrees, of course every inch of ground was once subject to the action of the breakers, and the wearing and transporting power of tides and currents, of every variety of strength and direction. This action would gradually accumulate a plaster of water-worn materials over the greater part of what is now land; and this plaster, together with the solid rocks, where they happened to be left uncovered, have, ever since

the land has been lifted high and dry into the air, been subject to all the skyey influences, the rain and the wind, everywhere, and the frost and snow, in climates where sufficient cold is possible. It follows from these facts, that wherever gold originally existed in the rock, it must, when the rock was broken up and worn away, have been washed out of it, and the fragments carried and deposited wherever the water had power to sweep them to. We find gold, therefore, not only in the veins of the rocks, but in gravel, sand, or clay, or, in other words, the water-worn materials derived from the rocks.

Now, water has power to transport all such materials as will not float upon its surface, in proportion to their size and weight. To move a large block of stone requires a torrent of great force and velocity; if it were broken into smaller fragments, a current of less power would roll them onwards; ground down into sand, any ordinary river or tidal current washes it along; and triturated into mud, the gentlest stream can half float, half propel it along its bottom; and it only finally settles when the water has been some time at rest. Gold, however, is, at least, seven times the weight of stone-that is, a cubic inch of solid gold will weigh seven times as much as a cubic inch of the heaviest stone: similarly with any other size or shape, bulk for bulk. A current of water, therefore, capable of rolling onwards grains of gold the size of peas, will be capable of washing away pebbles of rock seven times that size, as well as all smaller fragments, and, of course, all sand or mud. Again, in a current of water, washing along fragments of rock, &c., together with fragments of gold, the gold will sink to the bottom first, and remain at rest, while the other matters are carried away.

From these considerations we can perceive the reason why it is that sand or gravel, especially just where it rests upon the rock, is often richer in gold than the actual rock-vein itself; because the currents of water formerly have done for the great mass of rock just what the miner does now-namely, break it up into fragments, wash it, let the gold fall to the bottom, and sweep off and throw away the upper portion, which will contain nothing but fragments of rock or other matters,

much lighter than gold. We see why it is, moreover, that gold is often found in the sand of rivers, because river currents are perpetually wearing away, sifting, and carrying forward particles of the matters that form their banks; and, therefore, when they traverse sand or gravel, they are always resifting matters that have already once undergone that process by the action of the sea. It follows, too, that the farther we recede from the primitive site of the gold, the finer do its particles become, both on account of the general current becoming less strong, and because the larger fragments will all have been caught in holes, or against rocks, or wherever the force of the current may have received temporary checks. The sands on the bars of auriferous rivers, therefore, are generally the fullest of gold, as also the inside curve of bends, where the force of the current has been shot to the opposite side.

Having premised these few hasty and sketchy words, as to the mode of occurrence of gold generally on the surface of our globe, let us take a peep at the Australian gold fields our own little property-where our friends get up when we are going to bed, and Christmas Day is the hottest of the year. Let us first take a look at the outside of the country, and sail up along the coast of New South Wales, into Sydney Harbour. We approach the coast from the south, with a fresh eas terly breeze blowing, a bright sky over head, and the long, rolling swell of the south Pacific beneath us. On our left, or, as a sailor would say, "on the port hand," we gradually discern through the thin haze of the horizon, the dim ghost-like forms of a long range of mountainous hills-not with rounded tops, regular peaks, or gentle slopes, but of many queer fantastic forms, long flat-topped tabular hills, ending suddenly in steep indented precipices, sometimes apparently overhanging or turned up at the edges; hills like chests, hills like houses with chimney tops, hills like hats or conical caps; a ridge like a housetop, projecting now and then from the main body, at no particular angle, as if it had been dropped in a hurry when they were going to build the mountains; and hills of all sorts and sizes, in a state of ridiculous and most mutinous-looking confusion. As we draw near the coast,