From Punch.* A HANDFUL OF HAWTHORN. * We are pleased with you, too, on another point. You stick at nothing, and we like NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, author of the earnestness. Not content with smashing up Scarlet Letter and the House with the Seven Gables (you see we at once endeavor to create a prejudice in your favor), you are a 'cute man of buisness besides being a pleasing writer. We have often credited you with ́literary merit, and your style, dear boy, puts to shame a good many of our own writers who ought to write better than they do. But now let us have the new pleasure of congratulat ing you on showing that you are as smart a man, as much up to snuff, if you will pardon the colloquialism, as any Yankee publisher who ever cheated a British author. You have written a book about England, and into this book you have put all the caricatures and libels upon English folk, which you collected while enjoying our hospitality. Your book is thoroughly saturated with what seems ill-nature and spite. You then wait until the relations between America and England are unpleasant, until the Yankee public desires nothing better than good abuse of the Britisher, and then, like a wise man, you cast your disagreeable book into the market. Now we like adroitness, even when displayed at our own expense, and we hope that the book will sell largely in America, and put no end of dollars to your account. There was once a person of your Christian name, who was said to be without guile. Most American pedigrees are dubious, but we think you would have a little extra trouble to prove your descent from Nathaniel of Israel. In a word, you are a Smart Man, and we can hardly say anything more likely to raise you in the esteem of those for whom you have been composing. Come, there is none of the "insular narrowness," on which you compliment us all, in this liberal tribute to your deserts. You see that in spite of what you say," these people" (the English) do not all think so loftily of themselves and so contemptuously of everybody else that it requires more generosity than you possess to keep always in perfectly good-humor with them." You will have no difficulty in keeping in perfectly good-humor with us. 66 Punch evidently disapproves of such Consuls as make books against the people with whom they have been living. What was the name of the Irish Gentleman, late Consul at Boston? He wrote an unpleasant book.-Living Age. our male population in the most everlasting is an idolizer of the ladies, and is one of the most ready, fluent, accomplished talkers of lady-talk that ever fascinated a sofa-full of into a drawing-room, his pleasant assurance smiling beauties. His gay and airy entrance and graceful courtesy, his evident revel in the refined atmosphere of perfume and persiflage, are proverbial, and therefore he is thoroughly lish women. Consequently his tribute has a acquainted with the nature and habits of Engvalue which would not appertain to the criticisms of a sheepish person, either so inspired with a sense of his own infinite superiority, that he edges away from a lady, flounders or so operated on by plebeian mauvaise honte, and talks nonsense when compelled to answer her, and escapes with a red face, like a clumsy hobbadehoy, the moment a pause allows him to do so. No, no, this is the testimony of the lady-killer, the sparkling yet tender Livpool Lovelace, Nathaniel Hawthorne, to the merits of our English women. alike. They seem to be country lasses of "English girls seemed to me all homely sturdy and wholesome aspect, with coarsegrained, cabbage-rosy cheeks, and I am willing to suppose, a stout texture of moral principle, such as would bear a good deal of rough usage without suffering much detriment. But how unlike the trim little damsels of my native land! I desire above all things to be courteous." Courteous. Of course. How can the drawing-room idol be anything but courteous? He simply sketches our young ladies truthfully. Indeed he says so :— "Since the plain truth must be told, the soil and climate of England produce femi-moral and intellectual force than she can nine beauty as rarely as they do delicate fruit, fairly claim. Her visage is usually grim and and though admirable specimens of both are stern, seldom positively forbidding, yet calmly to be met with, they are the hothouse amel- terrible." iorations of refined society, and apt, moreover, to relapse into the coarseness of the original stock. The men are manlike, but the women are not beautiful, though the female Bull be well enough adapted to the male." "The female Bull." Cow would have been neater, and more entertaining, perhaps, to Broadway; but one would not mend after a master. But our matrons. We rather, in our weakness, piqued ourselves upon our matrons, with what we've thought their handsome faces, ready smiles, cheerful kindness, and tongues that talk freely because the hearts are innocent. Thanks to our Lovelace-Adonis, we now know that we must abandon this superstition. Here is his sketch of the English married lady of middle age:— "She has an awful ponderosity of frame, not pulpy, like the looser development of our few fat women, but massive with solid beef and streaky tallow so that (though struggling manfully against the idea) you inevitably think of her as made up of steaks and sirloins. When she walks, her advance is elephantine. When she sits down, it is on a great round space of her Maker's footstool, where she looks as if nothing could ever move her. She imposes awe and respect by the muchness of her personality, to such a degree that you probably credit her with far greater Calmly terrible. Is not this a momentary weakness, Nathaniel? Can any created woman be terrible to you? Away, eater of hearts. You don't fear any matron. You show it in your next passage: "You may meet this figure in the street and live, and even smile at the recollection. But conceive of her in a ball-room, with the bare, brawny arms that she invariably displays there, and all the other corresponding development, such as is beautiful in the such an overblown cabbage-rose as this." maiden blossom, but a spectacle to howl at in Well painted, Nathaniel, with a touch worthy of Rubens, who was we think, your great uncle, or was it Milton, or Thersites, or somebody else, who, in accordance with American habit, was claimed as your ancestor. Never mind, you are strong enough in your own works to bear being supposed a descendant from a gorilla, were heraldry unkind. Mr. Punch makes you his best compliments on your smartness, and on the gracious elegance of your descriptions of those with whom you are known to have been so intimate, and he hopes that you will soon give the world a sequel to Transformation, in the form of an autobiography. For he is very partial to essays on the natural history of half-civilized animals. AN excellent and glossy wash for the walls of rooms is thus prepared : Mix oxide of zinc with common size, and apply it with a brush as ordinary whitewash of lime. After this, apply a wash in the same manner of the chloride of zinc, which will combine with the oxide, and form a smooth cement with a shining surface. Wall-paper after a time absorbs deleterious substances and becomes unhealthy. TO REMOVE GREASE OR INK SPOTS FROM WHITE MARBLE.-Take one ounce of oxalic acid, dissolve it in a gill of water, and apply it with a clean rag or sponge, having first washed off the marble with soap and water. After the oxalic acid has been applied, and drawn out the grease, wash it off with clean water, etc. In order to restore the polish of the marblewhich will be impaired somewhat by the acid— take very fine whiting, and rub it over the spots touched. MESSRS. NISBET AND Co. announce "Bp. Wilson's Journal," letters addressed to his family during the first nine years of his Indian episcopate, edited by his son; "Review of Ten Years' Missionary Labor in India, between 1852 and 1861," by Dr. Mullens; "The Rebellion in America," by Baptist Noel; and an authentic Life of Stonewall Jackson," by Professor Dabney of Richmond, Virginia. From The Spectator. made sensible, I do not know how, that someTHE GOD OF EARTHQUAKES. thing uncommon is going to happen; everyTHE recent earthquake at Manilla had, like thing seems to change color; our thoughts almost all earthquakes, a very striking reli- are chained immovably down; the whole gious aspect. There is no other natural phe-world appears to be in disorder; all nature nomenon which strikes the masses of ignorant looks different to what it was wont to do, and men as so exclusively supernatural. Mr. we feel quite subdued and overwhelmed by Buckle, as is well known, considered them some invisible power. Then comes the terone of the great sources of Spanish supersti- rible sound, distinctly heard, and immediately tion and as snapping by their imaginative the solid earth is all in motion, waving to and terrors the chain of civilization. Even the fro like the surface of the sea. Depend upon Greeks, by no means apt to take the charac-it, a severe earthquake is sufficient to shake teristic attributes of their gods from the more the firmest mind." And, no doubt, its pheterrible of earthly events, gave to their god nomena are more apparently preternatural of the ocean, Poseidon, the epithet of the than those of any other human event. The Earthshaker; while the Jews, possessed by a ground assumes the appearance of running truer inspiration, spoke of God as the root of water,-indeed, does transmit tidal waves as all that was most fixed and enduring-the distinctly as the ocean itself. Not only are Rock of Ages who had made" the round earth valleys exalted, and hills made low, but naso fast that it cannot be moved." Elijah was ture appears to be working out on an awful expressly taught that "God was not in the and tragic scale the wonders of a pantomime. earthquake," and though the Psalmists fre- After the great earthquake of Quito in 1797, quently ascribe the tumbling of the earth and many whom the earthquake surprised in the the failing foundations of the hills to His es- town of Riobamba were found as corpses on pecial wrath, yet they never fail to conclude the top of a hill separated by a river from the the picture of storm and chaos by one of peace place, and several hundred feet higher than and deliverance, and, like Elijah, see the the site of the town. The place was shown earthquake passing away before the tranquil to Humboldt where the whole furniture of one voice of divine promise. But this, as Mr. house was found buried beneath the ruins of Buckle warns us, has not prevented the close another, and it could only be accounted for by association of the earthquake with divine supposing that it had sunk into the earth at power in the Christian ages. That there is one spot, and been disgorged at that other. something in this phenomenon which, more In Calabria, 1783, whole estates were literally than any other, expresses with awful power shuffled, so that, for example, a plantation of the collapse and nothingness of human things mulberry-trees was set down in the middle is obvious enough. Even the lower animal of a cornfield, and a field of lupines was recreation perceive its approach, as some of them have been said to discern and quail before disembodied spirits, or at the approach of death. In the earthquake at Naples, in 1805, the sheep and goats rushed in dismay against their folds before any human being had felt a shock; the dogs howled, the horses became furious in their stalls, the cats' hair bristled with terror, rabits and moles rushed from their holes, the birds rose scared into the air, the fish crowded to the shore, the ants abandoned their ant-hills, the locusts crept through the streets towards the sea,-and all this before the danger became sensible to any observer. But even men become sensible of horror before they become sensible of danger. A gentleman of Copiapo wrote to Captain Basil Hall: "Before we hear the sound, or, at least, are fully conscious of hearing it, we are moved into the middle of a vineyard. For several years after, lawsuits were actively carried on in the courts of Naples to reclaim landed property thus bodily conveyed, without legal forms, from one man to another. Who can wonder that people who thus see what Englishmen emphatically call real property flying like shadows before their eyes, prostrate themselves before the great Earthshaker in paroxysms of fear and superstition? But it is not only superstition which these If terrible phenomena contrive to elicit. Catholic countries did not happen to have two or three specially holy days in every week, it would be rather curious that the most memorable earthquakes have so often surprised the crowds kneeling in their churches and cathedrals, so that the rocking earth has availed itself, as it were, of the picturesque piety of Not many minutes after, the same spectator returned to the spot where the cathedral had the masses to bury them in hosts among the Europeans. There is at all times a striking sacred ruins. The great Lisbon earthquake, devoutness displayed in the churches, but this in 1755, which buried or destroyed some six-struck me especially on this evening, no doubt ty thousand persons in a few minutes, oc- because of the solemnity of the occasion. curred on "All Saints' Day," a high festival How many were in the building I cannot say, among the Portuguese; and every altar was but the number was very great, for though blazing with wax tapers, when the sun grew the cathedral was exceedingly large, I could dim, and the Palace of the Inquisition fell in. not see a space large enough for a single adThe conflagration which succeeded the earth-ditional person beyond a few feet from the quake was thus directly due to the universal door by which I entered. Some notion may ritual illumination. The less fatal, but al- be formed of the number present, from the most more scenic catastrophe, in Caraccas, the fact that at this time there were not less capital of Venezuela, on the 26th March, than twenty-five priests officiating in different 1812, occurred on Holy Thursday. The parts of the sacred edifice. The air was so priestly processions were just about to start, bad that I did not remain more than two or and "the crowds assembled in the churches three minutes, though the service had not were so numerous that between three and four long begun." thousand persons are said to have been crushed by the downfall of their vaulted roofs." And the effect upon the mind of the people was stood. Not a dozen people, he thinks, had naturally enough that of a religious rather escaped out of the building before it came than of an earthly catastrophe: "People crushing down upon the two or three thouapplied themselves to the exercise of those re- sand which its walls alone must have conligious duties, which, in their opinion, were tained. The scene to which he was witness most fitted to appease the wrath of Heaven. was one of no common order. "When I Many assembled, and passed through the reached the ruins," he says, "men and streets in processions singing funeral hymns; women were already working at those parts others, thrown into a state of distraction by where appearances indicated the possibility of these calamities, confessed their sins aloud in most speedily reaching bodies. The largest the streets; numerous marriages were con- group was collected round a chapel, a small tracted between persons who for many years portion of which was upheld by the peculiar had neglected to sanction their union by the way in which a beam had fallen. Women sacerdotal benediction; children found par- were sobbing, and men were listening anxents by whom they had not been acknowl- iously at a small opening, where a window edged up to that time; restitutions were had formerly been. . . . Faint groans issued promised by persons who had never been ac- from it, and I could hear a voice-that of a cused of fraud or theft; families, which for girl, I thought, but it turned out to be one of many years had been estranged from one an- the choristers*-asking piteously for help and other by enmity and hatred, were drawn to- deliverance. Then a low but deep bass voice, gether by the tie of common suffering." And doubtless that of the priest who was officithis summer in Manilla, the fearful earth-ating at the time of the calamity, uttered quake similarly found the population on its the well-known words, Blessed are the dead knees, on the eve of the Fête de Dieu. The which die in the Lord. Yea, saith the Spirit, prayers of thousands appeared to be answered by the sudden crashing of the masonry and collapse of the earth. "After dressing," says an eye-witness, who describes what he saw in All the Year Round of last week, "I walked slowly homeward, and, having to pass near the cathedral, I went in. Being the eve of the Fête Dicu I found it crowded with worshippers. Men and women of every hue of color were mingled with children whose fairer skins contrasted strongly with that of the elders, especially those whose parents were wards. 6 for they rest from their labors.' As these words came forth, those outside burst into a passion of tears, which was soon choked, in order that they might hear if the voice spoke again. There were some deep groans, apparently wrung from the speaker by intense pain, and then the same voice spoke in a calm and even tone, as though addressing a congregation, For the Lord himself shall deseend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the *He was dug out alive seven or eight hours after archangel, and with the trump of God.' Si- faith, but to call out and bring to light what lence followed for some minutes, and then a is already inspired,-to shake not merely the deep voice came forth which was so low that earthly supports, but all the external scaffoldonly I and a few others near the hole could ing of the mind, and throw it back on its true hear it, Father, into thy hands I commit nakedness or its truc strength. There are, my spirit, and with the utterance of those probably, crises for most men and all nations words of faith and prayer the spirit must have in which God appears somewhat as the God left the tortured body, for not a sound was of earthquakes, shaking everything which is heard after this, except the piteous prayers not at the very centre of their life to its founof a child." It is not easy to imagine a sub-dations, and solving pretty decisively for limer instance of the faith which, encounter- them the problem whether they have anying in His own visible person the awful Earth- thing to lean on or not. Are there many, shaker and destroyer, can see in Him nothing even of our more "enlightened" faith, as we but the Eternal Rock of stability and of peace. truly call it, who would be found firm on the The voice comes in the earthquake, but the living Rock when the earth seemed melting earthquake does but disguise to the priest's away beneath their feet, and every vestige of glazing eyes the still small voice which bids human aid and support, and graceful associhim rest from his labors. It reminds him ation, and emblematic promise had been scatonly of that greater earthquake which rent in tered into ruins, and they could hear, through twain the veil of the Temple, when a deeper pain and the darkness and the suffocating dismay was vanquished, and a greater work air, nothing but groans of terror and cries for was finished. help? Was there any voice as tranquil raised to the crowd of miners who, for nearly a week, were dying in hope of succor in the Hartley Colliery? It is seldom that the God of earthquakes, when he has shattered all the artificial growths of association which we mistake for faith, finds at the kernel of the soul that spirit, one clear glimpse of which by other men turns the most destructive and negative of outward calamities into the most creative act of divine love. Thero is something profoundly impressive about the manner in which this poor Spanish priest encountered the horror of such a situation. The kind of faith which great catastrophes are apt to inspire is something very different, indeed, from this priest's. For that is, as Mr. Buckle teaches, a poor, superstitious sort of thing, impeding civilization and paralyzing the human confidence which is the root of all industry and energy. But the religious use of great catastrophes is not to inspire MR. A. W. BENNETT will publish early in the approaching season a second volume of "Howitt's Ruined Abbeys and Castles of Great Britain and Ireland,' illustrated with photographsone of its chief features being Kenilworth Castle; a volume of Wordsworth's Poetical Descriptions of the scenery of the English Lake Country, also illustrated by photographs of the scenery described, a compinion volume to Scott's " Lady of the Lake," published by him last year; and a new tale by Mary Howitt, entitled "Mrs. Rudd's Grandchildren," forming a fresh volume of Howitt's Juvenile Series." warehouseman of the name of Hutchinson, in Warwick Street, Regent Street, has recently come into possession of the two Selkirk relics, the cup and the chest. The former, which is made of cocoa-nut, rudely carved, was put upon a stalk and mounted with silver by Sir Walter Scott, and so almost loses its identity and interest; but the latter is a curiously dovetailed piece of ingenious workmanship by the "monarch of all he surveyed." These relics, up to the present time, have been in the possession of Selkirk's descendants in Largo, Fifeshire, where he was born. WHAT IS A FOG? Professor Tyndall says it is ALEXANDER SELKIRK's name is always asso- a cloud resting upon the earth; and he defines, ciated with De Foe's noble creation of "Robinson also, a cumulus "as the visible capital of an inCrusoe." We may therefore record that a Scotch | visible column." |