n rear of the mansion; and overcoming, though with terrible slaughter, those who possessed the house, made themselves masters of it, and of the person of the baron.

"Whither are you conducting me ?' said he to the stout band of yeomen, who had bound him upon a horse, which they led in the direction of his castle. To our master, and to your's, my lord baron,' replied the leader; know you not that when you came out against the castle of our chief, he returned the compliment by going straight to your own? There, please God, he now bears supreme sway; wherefore, see, proud boaster, that you vaunt no more of a strength which is no match against cunning!

"This news was, indeed, true. Ironhand fancying, from the inertness, ignorance, and carelessness of his neighbour, that he should obtain over him and his possessions a victory as rapid as easy, had, instead of levying succours from powerful chieftains with whom he was in alliance, left his own place, in bring ing a force against Littlefence, almost unprotected, little dreaming of the craft which would deprive him of it for ever! Of this Greenwood had been fully apprized by his ally, Sir Wilfred, who, shocked at the ungenerous proceeding of Ironhand, was resolved to afford every possible assistance to his intended victim. "As a victor, Greenwood was generous, merely banishing the treacherous baron, when he might have struck off his head; but, as he had gained by stratagem this castle of Ironhand's, he had inscribed upon its gates and windows the legend, Witte winneth the Warre: so that it hath been called ever since, Winneth War, or Winwar Castle-and proves, even unto this day, that cunning is the strength of the weak, and that the strong man may, in the pride of his power, be brought to naught by a very little craftiness. And this, sir, is the whole legend, and real true history, of the ruined place before you."

M. L. B.

the pageants erected to adorn the procession, with verses and orations. là

It was from the top of the corner house, Chancery Lane, Fleet Street, that several cherubim flew down and presented the queen with a crown of laurels and gold, together with some verses, when she was going into the city upon a visit to Sir Thomas Gresham.

"The King's (James I.) royal and magnificent entertainment in his passage through the citie of London, in March, 1603. London, 4to. The six triumphal arches were designed by Stephen Harrison, joiner and architect." The speeches &c. were compiled and written by Ben Jonson, and were reprinted among his works, vol. iii. page 203.

"The whole magnificent entertainment given to King James and Queen Anne, his wife, and Henry Frederick, the prince, upon the day of his majesty's triumphal passage (from the Tower) through his honourable citie and chamber of London, being the 15 of March, 1603, as well by the English as by the strangers, with the speeches and songs delivered in the several pageants, and those speeches that before were published in Latin, now newly set forth in English, by Thomas Dekker." London, 1604. 4to.

"Civitatis Amor. The City's Love. An Entertainment by water, at Chelsea and Whitehall, at the joyful receiving of that illustrious Hope of Great Britain, the high and mighty Charles, to be created Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Earl of Chester, &c." Lon don, 1616.

"Ovatio Carolina. The Triumph of King Charles; or, the triumphant manner and order of receiving his majesty into his City of London, Thursday, 25th November, A. D. 1641, upon his return safe and happy from Scotland; with Master Recorder's speech to his majesty, and his majesty's most gracious answer." London, 1641. 4to..

"The Entertainment of his most excellent majesty, Charles II. in his passage through the City of London to his Coronation; containing an exact ac

triumphal arches and cavalcade, delineated in sculpture, the speeches and

ROYAL CITY ENTERTAINMENTS.

(For the Mirror.)

"The Passage of our most sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth, through the City of London to Westminster, the day before her Coronation." London, 1558. 4to.

This contains an account of all

these are added, a brief narrative of his majesty's solemn coronation; with his magnificent proceeding and royal feast in Westminster Hall." By John Ogilby. London, 1661.

"Aqua Triumphalis; being a relation of the Honourable the City of London entertaining their sacred majesties

upon the River Thames, and welcoming them from Hampton Court to Whitehall, expressed and set forth in several shews and pageants, the 23rd day of August, 1662. Engraved by John Tatham, gent." London, 1662, folio.

"London's Anniversary Festival, performed on Monday, October 29, 1688, for the entertainment of the Right Honourable Sir John Chapman, knight, Lord Mayor of the City of London; being their great year of Jubilee; with a panegyric upon the restoring of the Charter, and a Sonnet provided for the entertainment of the King." London,

1688. 4to.

P. T. W.

REPORT RELATING TO THE CITY FEAST GIVEN TO THEIR MAJESTIES, IN THE YEAR 1761.

(For the Mirror.)

THE following is extracted from the "Report of the Committee appointed by the Common Council, to provide the entertainment :'

"In the preparations for the intended feast, your Committee omitted no expense that might serve to improve its splendour, elegance, or accommodation; whilst, on the other hand, they retrenched every charge that was not calculated to that end, however warranted by former precedents. Their Majesties having expressed their royal inclinations to see the procession of the Lord Mayor to Guildhall, the Committee obtained Mr. Barclay's house, in Cheapside, for that purpose, where proper refreshments were provided, and every care taken to accommodate their Majesties with a full view of the whole cavalcade.

"The Great Hall and adjoining apartments were decorated and furnished with as much taste and magnificence as the shortness of the time for preparation, and the nature of a temporary service, would permit; the hustings, where their Majesties dined, and the new Council Chamber, to which they retired both before and after dinner, being spread with Turkey carpets, and the rest of the floors over which their Majesties were to pass with blue cloth; and the whole illuminated with nearly three thousand wax-tapers, in chandeliers, lustres, girandoles, and sconces.

"A select band of music, consisting of fifty of the best hands, placed on a superb gallery, erected on purpose at

the lower end of the Hall, entertained their Majesties with a concert during the time of dinner, under the direction of a gentleman celebrated for his great musical talents; whilst four other galle

ries (all covered with crimson, and ornamented with festoons) exhibited to their Majesties a most brilliant appearance of life of the principal citizens of both

sexes.

"Their Majesties' table was served with a new set of rich plate, purchased on the occasion, and covered with all the delicacies which the season could furnish, or expense procure, and prepared by the best hands.

"A proportionable care was taken of the several other tables provided for the foreign ambassadors and ministers; the lords and gentlemen of his Majesty's most honourable privy council; the lord chancellor and judges; the lords and ladies in waiting; the lord mayor, aldermen, sheriffs, and common council; and many others, both of the nobility and gentry: the whole number of guests within the Hall, including the galleries, being upwards of twelve hundred; and that of the gentlemen pensioners, yeomen of the guards, and servants attendant upon their Majesties and the Royal Family, and who were entertained at places provided in the neighbourhood, amounting to seven hundred and twentynine."

The particulars of the expenditure, with the bill of fare, &c. were attached to the report; and may likewise be seen in Pennant's London-"The city procession (says Brayley) was on this occasion distinguished by a most unusual display of magnificence and pageantry, in which the different companies strove to excel in splendour. The banquet was conducted with great order; and the tables were profusely spread with every delicacy that the season could furnish, or expense procure.'

Notes of a Reader.

THE QUARTERLY REVIEW.

The

(Just published.) THIS number (86) is altogether of important and striking character. papers on the Decline of Science in England-the Bank of England-the Greek Question-and France, especially merit this distinction. There is, too, a delightful paper on Southey's Life of John Bunyan, and a review of Mr. Lyell's new work on Geology. Of course we can only seize a few points interesting to the general reader :

Decline of Science in England. "After a brief sketch of the honours which have been conferred by princes on those illustrious men, by whose la bours the temple of modern science has

been reared, in which enumeration England holds a very subordinate place, the reviewer continues: Her liberality to Newton is the only striking instance which we have been able to record, because it is the only one in which the honour of a title was combined with an adequate pecuniary reward. Sir W. Herschel, indeed, was made a Hanoverian knight, and Sir Humphry Davy a baronet; but the comforts which these distinguished men enjoyed, and the stations which they occupied in society, were neither derived from the sovereign nor from the nation. No monument has been reared to their memory, and no honours have descended to their families. Nor are these the only instances of national ingratitude. The inventive genius of Wollaston, and the talents and literature of Young, have passed like a meteor from our sight. No title of honour has illustrated their name, and no tribute of affection has been pronounced over their grave. He who buckled on the weak arm of man a power of gigantic energy; who taught his species to triumph over the inertia of matter, and to withstand the fury of the elements; who multiplied the resources of the state, and poured into the treasury the spring tide of its wealth the immortal Watt, was neither acknowledged by his sovereign, nor honoured by his ministers, nor embalmed among the heroes and sages of his country.

"There is not at this moment, within the British isles, a single philosopher, however eminent have been his services, who bears the lowest title that is given to the lowest benefactor of the nation, or to the humblest servant of the crown! "There is not a single philosopher who enjoys a pension, or an allowance, or a sinecure, capable of supporting him and his family in the humblest circumstances!

"There is not a single philosopher who enjoys the favour of his sovereign or the friendship of his ministers !

"Mr. Dalton, the most distinguished chemist in Britain, and the man who has given to chemistry her numerical laws, has been allowed to spend the flower of his days in the drudgery of teaching the elements of mathematics at Manchester, and has never been honoured by a single mark of national gratitude. Mr. Ivory, the first mathematician in England, after exhausting the vigour of his life as a mathematical teacher at Marlow, has retired, as his humblest colleague would have done, on a superannuation, and has been allowed to spend his latter years in comparative poverty and obscurity.

"When the eldest and the most illus trious of our sages have been thus neglected, need we inquire into the condition of those younger men who are destined to succeed them? Need we ask what mark of respect has been conferred upon Brown, the first botanist of the age; on Herschel, the morning star of our science; on Babbage, the inventor of a machine which seems to be actuated with almost intellectual power; on Kater, Barlow, Christie, and South, who have extended the boundaries of physical science; on Thomson, Henry, and Faraday, who have shone in the field of chemical discovery; or on Murdoch and Henry Bell, who first introduced into actual use the two greatest practical inventions of modern times? Of the two last, it has been the fortune of Mr. Murdoch to rise to wealth and consideration in the field of commercial enterprise ; but Henry Bell has been preserved from starvation only by the private contributions of his fellow citizens.

"Were not the detail likely to prove tedious, we might unfold to our readers a series of grievances of the most afflicting kind. We might point out English inventions rejected at home and adopted abroad. We might adduce the cases of ingenious men, who, when denied public aid, have exhausted upon their inventions their private resources, and terminated their days in poverty, or in prison. We might bewail those melancholy examples where youthful enthusiasm has been chilled by the apathy of power, and where disappointed hope has turned the luxuriance of genius into the wild shoots of mental alienation. Every day indeed we meet with the victims of our patent laws, that fraudulent lottery, which gives its blanks to genius, and its prizes to knaves-which robs the poor inventor of the wealth which he has either earned or borrowed, and transfers it to the purse of the attorney-general and the keeper of the great seal of England.”

It is to be hoped that something will be done to wipe away this national obloquy.

suggested the reward of science and A popular contemporary has literature by honours of an especial order. The "Royal" Institution, we perceive, is rallying in its newly-featured journal; but great-names are, it is to be feared, the mock suns of human great

ness.

The Bank and the Treasury. "For the trouble taken in receiving

We are happy to observe that, since the first part of this article was printed off, the honour of knighthood has been conferred on Mr. South. Note to a subsequent page.

the taxes, paying the interest of the public debt, and conducting the various other pecuniary transactions of the exchequer, the bank now receives a per centage, or commission, which amounts annually to about 260,000.; to which must be added, the profit derived from the use of a floating balance due to the public, never less in amount than four millions sterling. This balance, employed in discounting mercantile bills at the rate of four per cent. yields a revenue of 160,000l. per annum, which being added to the commission of 260,000l. gives a total of 420,000l. as the profit which the proprietors of bank stock derive every year from the connexion subsisting between that establishment and the treasury."

Niagara.

"The fall of Niagara is an instance of the power running water may exercise in altering the features of a country. It is calculated that, by the sap and fall of the hard limestone rock, over which the river is precipitated into a softer shale formation beneath, the cataract retrogrades towards Lake Erie at the rate of fifty yards in forty years. The distance already travelled by it, from the lower opening of the narrow gorge it has evidently cut by this process, is seven miles, and the remaining distance to be performed, before it reaches Lake Erie, is twenty-five. Had the limestone plat

form been less extensive, this enormous

basin might have been already drained, as it must ultimately be, when the fall has receded to its margin, its average depth being far less than the height of

the cataract."

Immense Rafts on the Mississippi. "One of the most interesting features of this river is the enormous rafts of drift timber it floats towards the sea, occasionally depositing them for a time, together with vast beds of mud and gravel, in some of its deserted channels. One of these rafts is described by Darby, in 1816, as ten miles in length, about two hundred and twenty yards wide, and eight feet deep. It is continually increasing by the addition of fresh driftwood, and rises and falls with the water on which it floats-evidently waiting only an extraordinary flood to bear it off into the gulf of Mexico, where far greater deposits of the same kind are in progress at the extremity of the delta.

"Opposite the opening of the Mississippi large rafts of drift timber are met with, matted into a network, many yards in thickness, and stretching over hundreds of square leagues. They after

wards become covered with a fine mud, on which other layers of trees are deposited the year ensuing, until numerous alternations of earthy and vegetable matter are accumulated. The geologist will recognise in this relation of Darby the type of the formation of the ancient lignites and coal-fields.”

Devastations of the Ocean.

"Proofs of the great power of the waves of the sea in removing masses of rock of enormous weight, are found in the Shetland isles, which are both battered by the waves of the Atlantic, and ground down by a strong current. A block of nine feet by six, and four feet thick, is described by Dr. Hibbert as having been, in the winter of 1818, hurried up an acclivity to a distance of one hundred and fifty feet, with many other equally striking facts of the same nature. Indeed, the erosive force acting on the western coasts of Britain and Ireland is far more powerful than that which attacks the other side; though the coast being composed of harder rocks, the degradation is perhaps not so rapid. The remarkable ragged sea-line of the western isles, the Shetlands, Orkneys, and the west coast of Scotland and Ire

land, as well as of Norway, is no doubt chiefly attributable to their exposure to the violence of the westerly swell of the west current that sets directly against Atlantic, and the equally powerful norththem. Hence these coasts are worn to a mere skeleton, the hardest rocks offering the longest resistance, and projecting in bluff capes and islands, or clusters of needle-shaped rocks, the last shreds of masses once continuous. Even these appear, from the observations of Dr. Hibbert, to suffer perceptible degradation by almost every storm. We learn from the same source that lightning cooperates on this coast with the violence of the ocean in shattering solid rocks, and heaping them in piles of enormous fragments both on dry land and beneath the water.

"In the isle of Sheppey fifty acres of land, from sixty to eighty feet above the sea, have been swept away within the last twenty years. The church of Minster, now near the coast, is said to have been in the middle of the island only fifty years ago; and it is computed that, at the present rate of destruction, the whole of the island will be annihilated in another half century! The tradition that the Goodwin Sands were once the estates of Earl Goodwin, points, no doubt, to the former existence of an island or extension of the coast in that

direction, which, like Sheppey, has been washed away; and the idea of the former union of England with France gains an appearance of probability from the proofs of rapid degradation still occurring on our coasts, collected by Mr. Lyell.The French side of the channel is equally corroded by the violence of the great tidal current which flows up this passage in the manner of a vast river."

Icebergs.

"Icebergs are probably active instruments in the transportation of gravel and rocks, from the mountainous shores against which they form in high latitudes, to the bottom of the distant seas where the ice is dissolved. 6 Scoresby counted five hundred icebergs in latitude 69 deg; and 70 deg. north. Many contained strata of earth and stone, or were loaded with beds of rock of great thickness.' Such ice islands, before they are melted, have been known to drift from Baffin's Bay to the Azores, and from the South Pole to the neighbourhood of the Cape."

Volcanoes.

"The number of principal volcanoes known to be occasionally in eruption is upwards of two hundred; but thousands of mountains of similar form and structure, and bearing the marks of (geologically speaking) exceedingly recent activity, are scattered around and between them, the fires of which, though to all appearance slumbering, are likely in many instances to break forth again, since nothing can be more common than the renewal of eruptions from volcanic hills which had never been in activity within the range of traditon. The subterranean fire is observed to shift its outward development capriciously from one point to another, occasionally returning again to its earlier vents, according to circumstances, with some of which we are probably not yet acquainted, but which seem chiefly to consist in the accumulation both of congealed lava and ejected fragments, by which every habitual vent tends continually to block up its channels of discharge."

We entreat the reader not to content himself with these extracts from the paper on Lyell's Geology, but to turn to the Review, read it, and judge for himself. In matter and manner, the article to which we have alluded can scarcely be surpassed: at least such is the impression it has left on ourselves.

We reluctantly break off here; but hope next week to proceed, pencil-inhand, for the gratification of all who delight in the pursuit of knowledge.

NAPOLEON'S CHAIR.

WHEN the late Mr. Huskisson was in office, he was presented with the chair which the exiled emperor usually sat in during his dismal sojourn at Longwood. This relic Mr. Huskisson appeared to set a great value on, and a place was appropriated for it in his library. He had a small brass plate affixed to the chair, on which were engraved the following lines from Byron's Ode to Napoleon :— Nor till thy fall could mortals guess, Ambition's less than nothinguess.

Atlas.

SHERIDAN'S "DUENNA." THERE is an anecdote connected with which the press has not hitherto told. the first appearance of the Duenna, The last rehearsal but one was just over. when Sheridan said to Linley, as they quitted the boards-❝ Sir, I admire all your music, except the friars' glee,

This bottle's the sun of our table.' I can't sing, but if I could, it would not be such a tune as yours, under the cir

cumstances in which those reverend and

good-living fathers are placed." "My dear friend," said Linley, "why did you not mention your objection before? it is now too late for alteration. The opera "Not comes out to-morrow night." too late at all," replied Sheridan, "imbibe a little inspiration from a flask of your best Burgundy, and the task will be done." In walking home from the theatre, a new air struck the composer; he reduced it to score on his return, sent the parts early to the singers, and in the morning it was tried at the last rehearsal with the new arrangement. Sheridan heard it with evident pleasure "My dear Sir," said he, "that is the very tune I had in my mind when I wrote the words; but unfortu nately, my musical education was too meagre to allow of my reducing it to crotchets and quavers. Be assured, Sir, it will grind;" meaning that it would be so popular as to get on to the barrelorgans in the streets. And he was prophetic-it was encored at night, and was soon heard in every corner of London.-Spectator Newspaper.

Fine Arts.

FRIENDSHIP'S OFFERING FOR 1830. WE have received a dozen India proofs of the embellishments of this beautiful Annual, which from its commencement, has maintained a character for pictorial merit of high order. Among the present collection, (for each set of "the