They may help the besieged to hold out longer in time of siege, but this is all; thirteen or fourteen hours of work in a close room cannot be borne without hurt both to soul and body; and we little know the power of hunger in loosening principle, where principle has taken root. We must reduce the number, to reduce the temptations of women; and if we treat them as so many "hands," the business-like and mechanical view of the sex, we find, that while we have an excess at home, there is a great demand for these living implements of industry abroad. Our colonies ask for female immigration. The last of the colonization circulars issued by government, furnishes us with the most authentic accounts of the want of women, while so many thousands are pining in England for the very scantiest subsistence. In New Brunswick we are told that "labor, such as the business of the country requires, is both scarce and dear; and that 1000 good and healthy laborers (with their families, equal to 5000 souls) would find employment." Of South Australia it is said, that "young unmarried females, who emigrate to South Australia without friends or relations on board, are, on arriving in the colony, at once removed from the vessel bringing them to a house in Adelaide, where every necessary comfort is in readiness for their recep tion. of such property. The matter should be more looked into; country squires may profitably traverse their estates, and inspect the accommodation which their cottages afford. In such an inspection they will find much to shock them; and, doubtless, many will be moved to lessen the evils which, for want of inquiry, they little suspect to exist. In large towns, so great is the number of friendless and orphan girls who live by the needle, and are condemned to hide themselves in wretched comfortless attics, that we feel, if more cheerful and more comfortable houses could be provided for them after their work, many would be saved from the ways of sin. A model-lodging for needlewomen would, we conceive, be a great boon; and if there were a common hall for breakfast and tea, they might, by their combined resources, have sufficient nourishment as well as fellowship. Such a house placed under rule, and conducted on good principles, might save many a lonely girl from seeking for false excitement, and hurrying from her silent dreary garret to gay scenes of dissipation. We will not venture to do more than allude to the more religious preventives that are now urgently required: more schools, increased pastoral visitation and watchfulness, plainer speaking in our pulpits on the lusts of the flesh, according to Apostolic examples, warmer religious instruction in the schools we raise, longer and more careful preparation for confirmation-these are points which press themselves into our minds, but on which we will not trust ourselves to speak at length. They are placed under the immediate control of a matron; and a committee of ladies have benevolently undertaken to assist them in finding suitable employment;" this is proof enough of the demand. In New Zealand we read that "dairy women and While we are thus hopefully busying ourrespectable female servants were much selves with fair schemes for the prevention of wanted." When we come to wages, we female vice, we feel ourselves drawn back to have evidence of the want, not of needle- the consideration of their state who have women, but of servants. In New South already fallen. Preventive measures may Wales, a plain cook's wages vary from 241. benefit the children that are growing up in to 281. per annum; dairy-maids, from 17. the perilous atmosphere of the lower walks to 251.; housemaids, from 181. to 281. In of life, but there are thousands already sick Van Diemen's Land the same class of ser- in soul, already under the power of sin, alvants varies from 107. to 251. per annum; ready leprous and unclean. What is to be and needlewomen in that colony can obtain done for that large mass of women, young in 201. to 301. a year. To a well-governed years, yet deeply steeped in sin? We have system of female emigration we therefore considered the palliating circumstances under look, as the means of raising the price of fe- which so many fall; we have required that male labor here to such a height as to supply these circumstances should be fairly weighed at least the necessaries of life, and to prevent in the measurement of their guilt, under the the exhaustion of the frame by over-work. full impression that the just and candid conAs regards the female population that re-sideration of their case would rouse pity and mains at home, many measures for its improvement present themselves. Increased provision in the dwellings of the poor, better arrangement and subdivision of rooms, are points deeply to be considered by all owners. deep compassion; we are sure that these feelings of pitifulness will rise in those who have hitherto too hastily condemned or left the fallen to lie in the pit, as though it were a wilful and self-chosen fall. But if there is cause for compassion, then surely it is not enough for us to sigh over our fallen sisters, at the thought of all the wasted beauty, and youth, and health yielded to purposes most vile and draggled in the dirt. It is not enough to have aching hearts, as amid our own safe houses, with all the privileges of our holy faith, our thoughts turn to those perishing multitudes who have been beaten down by temptations we have never known. Surely Christian pity is not to end in sighs or bitter thoughts; surely, with all this sin and wretchedness, these beginnings of hell in the midst of us, we need vigorous, energetic, self-denying compassion; we need some great and active endeavors to lift up them that are fallen, in the name of Him "who receiveth sinners," to search out with all earnest love the stray sheep caught in the thickets of this evil world and almost dead. The Church must be up and doing in this cause; the members of the Church must hasten to give holy shelter to those who can be fetched back. All that we can see of practical compassion is here and there some dismal house at the outskirts of a town, entitled 'a penitentiary," and calculated to receive but a scanty fellowship of penitents. If we put all these penitentiaries together, we find them utterly unequal in magnitude to the evil with which they cope, ill-supported, scraping on from year to year with a sort of consumptive life, and attracting little sympathy or interest. An increase of penitentiaries is loudly called for, as the first step of practical pity. The sentence of utter, final excommunication passed by the world on fallen women, must not be allowed any longer to violate the plain terms of the covenant of grace; mercy must practically be shown, and places of refuge, houses of mercy, supplied for those who are moved to rise up and confess their sins. The Church cannot without peril shrink from taking this cause in hand. It has been pushed aside too long. The subject is not to be dropped by common consent; souls are perishing; a great burden of neglect is on us. A plain duty is plainly. put before us. CHARLOTTE CORDAY. SEE PLATE. THERE lived at Caen, in the department of | Calvados, a young woman, named Marie Anne Charlotte Corday. She was five-andtwenty years of age. Her father, a decayed gentleman, was still living, but she had left him to reside with an aunt at Caën. This young woman was a grand-daughter of the great dramatist, Pierre Corneille, and the spirit of the grandsire lived in his descendant. Her form was tall and graceful, her features regular and beautiful; but there was mingled with a woman's softness of expression, something of the resolve which marks a manly face. Her complexion was illuminated by the freshness of youth, beauty, and health; her dress was suited to her moderate means; her habits were temperate and simple. Though brought up in a con vent, she was no stranger to the philosophical ideas which were then spreading over France; for even the bars of the convents could not keep out the books which were in vogue. Her early religious impressions were replaced by the philosophy of Jean Jaques Rousseau; and her exalted imagination was raised to the heroic pitch by the ever-living portraits of Plutarch. She embraced the revolution with ardor; she dreamed, as the wife of Roland had dreamed, of a republic in which simplicity and virtue should reign. But the excesses of the Jacobins had dispelled the pleasing illusion, and the men of the Gironde, who once seemed destined to realize her happy visions, were imprisoned or fugitives. Petion, Louvet, Barbaroux, and other deputies, had come to Caën to stir up the departments of the north, and to combine the elements of resistance to the convention. The reign of terror had already commenced in Paris; the guillotine was receiving its tribute of victims, and the horrid engine was expected to make the tour of France. One name above all others was associated with the guillotine, the name of him who had for years called for heads, and measured his demands only by thousands. The unquiet mind of Charlotte required action; and she meditated a deed of vengeance against the greatest culprit in France. She resolved to go to Paris. She had two interviews with Barbaroux, and she asked and obtained from him a letter of introduction to a member of the convention who could introduce her to the minister of the interior. She pretended that she had a petition to present to the government, in favor of Mademoiselle Forbin, who had been the friend of her youth. Barbaroux gave her a letter to Duperret, one of the 73 deputies of the party of the Gironde. She went to see her father, and told him she was going to England. On the 9th of July, early in the morning, she made up a little packet, which she put under her arm, quitted her aunt's house, and journeyed to Paris in a conveyance, which, as she said, contained some "good Montagnards." She reached Paris on the 11th of July, and went to the Hôtel de Providence, in the Rue des Vieux Augustins, where she slept soundly from five in the afternoon till next morning. She called on Duperret the next day, but could not see him till the evening. She asked him to introduce her to Marat, the minister of the interior; but this was only a pretext. In her letter to Baradoux she said she was sorry that she had called on Duperret, for this very evening, by a decree of the convention, the seals were placed on all the movables of Duperret, as one of the suspected, and her visit put him in danger. Duperret came the next day, and went with her to Marat, but the minister could not see them, and Duperret took leave of her at the door of her hotel. She had learned that Marat did not now go to the convention, for her first design was to kill him there; he was suffering from illness, but still scribbling at home with his wonted unwearied diligence. After leaving Duperret, Charlotte found her way to the Palais Royal, not to admire or to be amused. She looked for a cutler's shop, where she bought a strong knife, with an ebony handle, and concealed it under her neckerchief. She returned to her lodgings, and wrote a letter to Marat, in which she told him that she was from Caen, and .could give him important information, and she would be with him at one. She went, but could not see him; upon which she left a second letter, well calculated to sharpen the jealous curiosity of the friend of the people; it was dated the same day: "I wrote to you this morning, Marat; have you received my letter? I cannot believe it, because they refused me your door. I hope you will grant me an interview to-morrow. I repeat it, I am just from Caën; I have to reveal to you secrets of the utmost importance for the safety of the republic. Besides, I am persecuted for the cause of liberty; I am unfortunate, and that is enough to give me a right to your protection. Charlotte Corday." Charlotte said in her letter to Barbaroux, "I confess that I employed a perfidious artifice to induce him to receive me; all means are good in such circumstances." She left her hôtel at seven in the evening, and knocked at Marat's door. The woman who kept the door would hardly let her in, and tried to prevent her from going up stairs. The noise brought Marat's mistress out, who refused to admit her into the apartments. A loud altercation ensued, and Marat, who judged, from what was passing, that the visitor was the writer of the two letters, called out to let her in. Marat, wasted with disease, horrid and disgusting to look at, was in his bath, covered with a dirty piece of linen, all but the upper part of his chest and right arm. He was writing on a rough plank, which rested on the bath, a letter of denunciation to the convention. Marat asked about Normandy, and he took down the names of the deputies there, and of the administrators of Calvados, who were at Evreux. He told Charlotte, by way of consolation, that they should all be guillotined. These words decided his fate. She drew the knife from her bosom, and with a strong arm plunged it to the hilt in his body. He cried out once, and no more. The water was dyed red; Marat was bathed in his own blood. From Tait's Magazine. THE EXPEDITION OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT TO THE OASIS OF JUPITER AMMON. ONE of the most singular incidents in the history of Alexander the Great is his visit to the temple of Jupiter Ammon. What it was undertaken for everybody knows. Dissatisfied with being reputed the son of Philip, the great leader of the Macedonians resolved to discover for himself a greater father; and fixed, for this purpose, on no less a personage than the Ammon, of the Egyptians. In developing a great system of conquest, men have employed different instruments, according to the character of the age in which they lived. Alexander placed much reliance on superstition; and had his lot been cast in earlier times, when the primitive faiths of nations had as yet received no wound from scepticism, there can scarcely be a doubt that not only would the story of his celestial parentage have obtained credit, but he himself would have been raised to the rank of a divinity, and received the adoration of the whole pagan world. But the son of Philip found himself cramped, in the development of his genius, by the sarcastic incredulity of the times. The philosophers had been so long and so successfully engaged in a war with Olympus, that the gods and goddesses, once so ingenuously believed in, had been obliterated almost entirely from the thoughts of men, and come to be regarded as mere poetical creations, pleasant to read about, but nothing else. Alexander, however, determined upon making trial of whether it were possible to revive a decayed superstition. He pretended devoutly to believe in his own divine origin; and, after the battle of Issus, and the conquest of Syria and Egypt, while the whole civilized world was resounding with his name, and illuminated, as it were, by the glory of his victories, he seized on what appeared to him the auspicious moment for consulting the greatest oracle in Africa, in order to impress his troops and subjects generally with that profound reverence for his person which philosophy and the spirit of Grecian politics had rendered it so difficult to inspire. There seems to us to have been yet another motive for Alexander's visit to the Oasis, which none of his historians, ancient or modern, has yet, so far as we are aware, discovered. He knew that a great part of the prosperity of Egypt depended upon commerce; and as his ambition was not purely military, but embraced every form of civilization, he was desirous of laying open the route to the interior of Africa, and probably of extending his dominion over the whole of that continent. But as in antiquity an intense dread of the dangers to be encountered in the desert already prevailed, he wished to make an experimental march through a portion of the wilderness, that, with his own eyes, he might ascertain the real state of the case, and afterwards abandon or carry out his design, according as this attempt should prove fortunate or otherwise. The ancients, though not quite so ignorant as we suppose them, were yet far from being acquainted with the geography of Africa. Unknown regions, as well as unknown powers, are apt to inspire dread; and their imagination consequently peopled the wastes of Lybia with monsters, and chimeras, and invisible influences destructive of human life. Poets do not always invent. They often only give expression to popular opinion. We may judge, therefore, of the degree of awe with which the African wilderness had inspired the civilized natures of those ages by the fabulous horrors which the fancy of poets spread like a cloud over the whole interior. Alexander himself, though the disciple of Aristotle, and nurtured to a certain extent in scepticism, was not altogether proof against the spirit of his age. Incredulity by no means implies the absence of superstition. A man may, by study, uproot from his mind the religious creed of his contemporaries; but, while engaged in this process, may suffer his imagination to be impregnated by other princi ALEXANDER'S EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION. [June, ples no less at variance with philosophy. | so early as the age of Alexander of Macedon. Paganism, in its loftier and more poetical It was apparently at a much later period, forms, died out with the republics; but when the Greek colonies of Cyrenaica had there still remained in Macedonian times, an invincible faith in terrestrial wonders, in population, that the idea suggested itself of been filled with a hardy and enterprising miracles of physical nature, and whatever extending the domains of agriculture over appeared to lie beyond the boundaries of these seemingly sterile wastes. Experience mere national traditions. there is moisture there is fertility; and that, had taught them that, in Africa, wherever consequently, by the aid of irrigation, the desert may be made to bloom like the rose. They also discovered that, for at least one hundred and fifty miles from the Mediterranean, rain falls constantly at certain seasons of the year in lesser or greater quantities, which, being received in water-tight tanks, may, by artificial means, be preserved from evaporation, and distributed over the country, so as to convert the otherwise fleeting dust into a prolific soil. At the present hour the southern and eastern skirts of the Lybian desert are in many places fringed with vegetation, where the peasants retain sufficient courage to develop their industrial instincts. Water is conveyed from the Nile through small channels, and distributed over the sand, which, while moist, is sowed with the seed of cucurbitaceous plants, which, creeping, and spreading around their large thick leaves, assist in retaining moisture in the soil. It was the same plan, doubtless, which was followed in this part of Marmaribers, pumpkins, prepared the way for vineca. Melons, water-melons, gourds, cucumyards and palm groves. everywhere formed in the hollows, vineyards Gardens were on the slopes, until cultivation had imparted enriched by the congregation and presence a second life to the soil, which was further of men and animals. For this reason Alexander's army could scarcely, by any authority, have been induced to undertake an expedition to the desert for political purposes. But over these rude men, though not over their leaders, paganism exerted an irresistible sway. What religion commanded, they would cheerfully undertake; so that, when their general gave out that his design was to consult the oracle, a lively enthusiasm was kindled among his followers, who unmurmuringly prepared to accompany him. Unfortunately, the historians of antiquity, with the exception, perhaps, of Herodotus, are little apt to indulge in explanations; so that events and circumstances which would be perfectly intelligible if we knew in what they originated, and how they were brought about, now, at this distance of time, appear marvellous, or altogether past belief. We are told, however, that the escort for it seems to have been nothing more--which accompanied Alexander to Ammonium, carried a supply of water and provisions on camels; and that, through accident or negligence, they were, at the end of four days, nearly perishing with thirst, and would in all likelihood have been cut off but for the timely occurrence of a storm of rain. Those whose experience of the desert has been acquired much further inland, are surprised to hear of rain, and almost inclined to treat it as a fable. But Mr. Bayle St. John,* the latest traveller who has visited the Oasis, and, with the exception of Browne, the only Englishman who has ever been at Siwah, speaks, in his highly interesting and instructive work, of vast cisterns, tanks, and reservoirs cut in the solid rock, which in old times retained the produce of the showers for the purpose, chiefly, of irrigation. But this system would not appear to have been adopted "Adventures in the Lybian Desert and the Oasis of Jupiter Ammon." By Bayle St. John. London: Murray, 1849. The style of this volume is easy, polished and elegant, and its descriptions full of freshness and poetry. Every word used is introduced for a special purThere is no redundancy. pose; and the reader, when arrived at the end, wishes it were twice as long. This is praise which can be bestowed on very few books indeed, but the "Adventures in the Lybian Desert" highly deserve it. ner in which these wastes of sand were renNo historical record remains of the mandered prolific; but, by studying the processes elsewhere followed, and carefully considering the remains of civilization still existing, we may form what will probably be a tolerably correct idea of the extent to which tillage was carried, as well as of the St. John is a very able and careful observer, manner in which it was pursued. Mr. Bayle der the Great, was not so dazzled by the and, while following in the track of Alexanglory of his military exploits as to neglect the relics of the less showy but more valuapart of the desert throw great light on Alexble arts of peace. His researches in this der's movements. slowly than the Macedonians, he and his Travelling much more companions had leisure to observe, and would |