Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 70, No. 433, November 1851

"What do I know about him? But, Monsieur, I have seen him, I am acquainted with him, I have spoken to him, and I tell you he is a charming man!"

"Where did you see him?"

"Did I not go to see him at Wiesbaden! Sir, there were thirty-nine of us – workmen, we called ourselves, though we were all masters – who went of our own accord to pay our respects to Henry V. The thing was briskly done, I beg you to believe. I spoke to him as I speak to you, sir, at this moment. At first I was received by M. de la Ferronnaye, his aide-de-camp. 'Good morning, Monsieur R.,' said he, 'how do you do?' – 'Very well, sir, I thank you,' answered I; and far from making me wait whole hours at the door, like those republicans of the Veille, he made me sit down beside him on the sofa, as affable as could be."

Mr Stahr inquired of the worthy coiffeur what had been the motive of his journey to Wiesbaden, which he seemed to look upon as a sort of North Pole expedition, and of whose fatigues and privations he drew a vivid picture. He wished to judge for himself, he said; to see whether the rightful heir to the throne was as ill-favoured as his enemies represented him to be. He found him, on the contrary, full of amiable qualities. He was a little lame, but his smile was irresistible. Warming with his subject, the enthusiastic Henriquinquist asked his customer's permission to relate all the particulars of his reception at Wiesbaden. This was just what Mr Stahr wished, and he duly encouraged his interlocutor.

"On our arrival," continued the hairdresser, "we presented ourselves to the aide-de-camp, as I have had the honour of informing you. He took down our names, and gave us each a number of rotation, according to which we were arranged in the afternoon at the general audience. We were formed in three ranks. The prince was informed beforehand of the name and trade of each number, so that he was able to address a few well-chosen words to everybody. When we were all drawn up in order, he came in, placed himself in the midst of us, at a few paces distance, and addressed us. 'Good day to you, my friends,' he said: 'believe me when I say that I am most sensible of the mark of sympathy you have so spontaneously given me, by quitting your families and occupations, and undertaking a journey into a foreign country to see and console me in my exile. Be sure that I will never forget what you have done for me.' Then he said, 'Come nearer, my friends!' We advanced a step. 'Nearer yet, my friends. You come from too far not to come nearer! I hope to see you all at eight o'clock to-night!'"

The hairdresser acted this scene as he related it, addressing himself and Mr Stahr alternately as the prince, by whose mandate to draw a step nearer he was evidently vastly flattered. The professor, immensely amused by the performance, still fancied he saw that the main cause of the fascination which Henry V. had exercised upon his devoted adherent was still undivulged. The sequel showed that he was not mistaken.

"In the evening," continued the coiffeur, "we returned to the Prince's residence; there we partook of refreshments, and the Prince had an amiable word for each and all of us. He talked about the state of affairs in France, and wished to know all our opinions of it. The next day some of us were received in private audience. I was of the number. But as we were numerous, and the Prince was very busy, I could not have much conversation with him. However, he gave me a silver medal, and – 'Mr R.,' said he, 'have you a comfortable bed at your hotel?' 'Monseigneur,' I replied, 'since you deign to ask the question, I am accustomed to sleep between two sheets, and as I do not understand a word of German, I have been unable to make them understand this at my hotel. They put the sheet sometimes over and sometimes under the blanket, but never more than one.' Sir," continued the delighted barber, addressing himself to Mr Stahr, whilst his face beamed with triumph, "that night I had two sheets upon my bed. Could anything be more amiable? Ah, sir, I have seen them from very near, those republicans of the Mountain, those members of the Provisional Government! – what blockheads! what boors! They aspired to command, and in their whole lives scarcely one of them had had as much as a servant at his orders! Sir, it was pitiable to behold."

Mr Stahr observed to the loyal hair-curler that he had seen the persons in question only after they had attained power, and that there are few more amiable people in the world than a pretender, before he has gained his object. He thought it possible that, once at the Tuileries, Henry V. might show himself in a less agreeable light, and trouble himself less about his adherent's bedlinen. The barber's sensible reply did him honour. But barbers, from Don Quixote's day downwards, have been men of good counsel.

"Monsieur," said the coiffeur, "I am not a fool. Do you suppose I shall go and plague him, when he is king? He will have other matters to mind then. I have no pretensions to be made minister or prefect, when there are people who have studied those things all their lives. I am a hairdresser, and I shall remain one. But I want to dress a great deal of hair, and under the republic I dress none."

"But," remarked Mr Stahr, "you dress more under the President."

The barber, however, was no admirer of the President, whom he had also been to see, before his election, and upon the appearance of whose head he passed a most unfavourable opinion. He was sulky, he said, and not conversable. The affairs of France could never go on well under a man who knew not how to talk. Moreover, nothing could suit him but Henry V. He was neither Buonapartist nor Republican. But when things were at the worst, he said, his cry had always been "Vive la France!" "Stick to that!" said a customer who just then stepped in. "France has a tough existence, and will outlive your Henri Dieudonné and all his kin, and the President to boot. And now have the goodness to curl my hair."

Whether fact or invention, this sketch has one truthful point: it gives a sound enough notion of the manner of reasoning of the French shopkeeper and petit bourgeois– a numerous and weighty class, without whose concurrence no state of things can long be permanent in France. With them the whole question, since they first awoke from the shock and folly of the February revolution, has been one of two sheets on their bed and more hair to dress. They will support any government under which they can sleep in peace and drive a good trade. Some of our readers will not have forgotten the sufferings and fate of poor Monsieur Bonardin.[4 - Blackwood's Magazine for December 1848.] The disasters and commercial depression of 1848 were a severe but perhaps a wholesome and necessary lesson to many thousands of Frenchmen. Unfortunately, as illustrated in M. Bonardin's case, the lesson was given to many who neither required nor deserved it. Wandering near Versailles, in the pleasant valley of Jouy, Mr Stahr and his companions were invited by a friendly dame, whose acquaintance they had made in the omnibus, to walk into her house and taste her grapes. She perhaps thought the object of the foreigners' pedestrian stroll was to purchase one of the pleasant country houses, surrounded by vineyards and orchards, which there abound; for she took them all through her kitchen-garden and vineyard, and through the copse of chestnuts and hazel bushes, to the fish-pond, and to the pleasant grotto, fitted up as a chapel, and even to the vine-dresser's cottage, from whose windows a lovely view repaid the ascent of the numerous terraces. During this tour of inspection the good lady's tongue was not altogether idle, and a melancholy page out of a Paris citizen's life was laid open to the Germans' eyes. The pleasant little domain they were rambling over was the fruit of five-and-twenty years' toil. "Monsieur Cendrell, a skilful gilder, had bought it a few years before the last revolution, and had laid out considerable sums in building and embellishment. The revolution broke out just as he had given up his business to a friend and assistant. He suffered heavy losses, and was now compelled, in spite of the general depreciation of all landed property, to part with his little estate. It was to be had for only thirty thousand francs, as it stood – garden and vineyard, dwelling-house and garden-cottage, shady copse, and pond well stocked with carp, and right of shooting over I know not how many acres. And how neatly and comfortably arranged was the house, with its bath and billiard-rooms, and its library with portraits of Louis Philippe and the Count de Paris – how cleanly kept was every room from the kitchen to the attics, the gardener's house and the stable included! There was nothing wanting, but – thirty thousand francs to buy it with, and as much more to live there quietly till the end of one's days. We sat full half-an-hour in the cottage on the hill, refreshing ourselves with the sweet grapes that clustered round the windows of the rush-matted room, whilst the kindly Frenchwoman told us her story. It is that of thousands of her class in Paris since the February revolution. Truly it grieved us, both for her sake and our own, that we could not purchase the pleasant country house." This, it will be said, is a common-place incident. There is certainly nothing in it very striking or dramatic. Every day somebody or other suffers losses, and is compelled to reduce his establishment, or to put it down altogether; to sell his last acre of sunny meadow and vineyard, and toil in an obscure lodging for daily bread. But there will be found in the picture something deeply affecting, if we suffer the mind to dwell upon it for a moment, recalling, at the same time, the well-known fact referred to by Mr Stahr, that, since the dreary days of 1848, the fate of the frame-gilder of Jouy has been that of multitudes of others who, like him, had passed a laborious manhood in earning, for their old age, a competency and a right to repose. Thus we obtain a glimpse of a mass of misery, of domestic happiness broken up, if not destroyed, of hallowed associations rudely ruptured – by no fault of the victims, but as a melancholy effect of the obstinacy of a selfish king, and of the rashness and precipitancy of a section of his subjects. But these material evils, deplorable as they are, sink, in our opinion, into insignificance, contrasted with the moral results of the last most ill-omened French revolution. These strike Mr Stahr in a very different light. The early part of the month of October was passed by him at the pretty village of Loges, near Versailles, whither he went to enjoy the beautiful scenery and the mellow autumnal weather, and to escape for a few days from the whirl and rattle of Paris. In the course of his walks, he and his friends not unfrequently visited a little rural inn on the way to Jouy, kept by a corpulent but active dame, who usually favoured them with her society and conversation, whilst they consumed a glass of her country wine and a slice of her fromage de Brie. She read no newspapers – none were received in her modest tavern – and knew but little of the intricacies of her country's dissensions; but she had political notions of her own, and was a warm republican. "We French," said she to Mr Stahr, "soon get tired of governments. They have driven away all that have been chosen since Napoleon; and when they were driven away the consequence always was a terrible shock, affecting all kinds of property. Now, in a republic, there is no one person to drive away with so much clatter, and that is why, for my part, I desire neither a Napoleon nor a king." "Query," exclaims Mr Stahr, "whether the woman is so much in the wrong? For my part, from no French politician have I yet heard a more striking remark with respect to the present circumstances of France. That France has no longer any king, any family ruling her by right divine, that is the chief thing won by the February revolution. The dynastic and monarchical illusion is completely eradicated from the people's mind, never again to take firm root." This prospect, in which the German radical exults, we, as staunch upholders of the monarchical principle, should of course deplore, did we attach any value to his predictions. But, after what has passed, we think anything possible in France, and should be no more astonished at a Bourbon restoration, than at a consolidation of the republic; at Joinville's presidency, than at Louis Napoleon's re-election. It needs more temerity than judgment to hazard a prophecy concerning what will or will not take place in a country which, as far as politics go, has become, above all others, le pays de l'imprévu. The title used to belong to Spain; and in the years of Continental tranquillity that preceded 1848, it was amusement for unoccupied politicians to watch the unforeseen crises constantly occurring in the Peninsula. It is infinitely more exciting to wait upon the caprices of a great and powerful country, whose decisions, however unreasonable, may influence the state of all Europe. They can but be waited upon, they cannot be foretold. Since the memorable 10th of December 1848, this has been our conviction. Before that date there was at least a certain logical sequence in the conduct of the French nation. Although often impossible to approve, it had always been possible to account for it. But the common sense of Europe certainly stood aghast when Louis Napoleon Buonaparte was elected ruler of France, by a majority so great as to attach a sort of ridicule to the petty minorities obtained by men who, in ability and energy, and, as far as two of them were concerned, in respectability, were infinitely his superiors. At that period, Louis Napoleon had never given one proof of talent, or rendered the slightest service, civil or military, to the nation that thus elected him its head. Twice he had violated, by armed and unjustifiable aggression, resulting in bloodshed and disgrace, the laws of his country. Pardoned the first time, on a pledge of future good conduct, he took an early opportunity of forfeiting his word. Notwithstanding the stigma thus incurred, four districts, when universal suffrage became the law of France, elected him their representative to the National Assembly. This may not be worth dwelling upon. There were stranger elections to the Assembly than that, after the February revolution. But when, out of seven millions of voters, five and a half millions gave their voices to a man whose sole recommendation was a name, – then did wonder reach its perigee. And thenceforward bold indeed must be the politician who attempts to foreshadow the possible whims of the fickle people of France.

THE SUBMARINE TELEGRAPH

Who will venture to make catalogue of the possible results of the "Submarine Electric Telegraph?" The more we meditate, the more new wonders open before us. We are running a race with Time; we outstrip the sun, with the round world for the race-course. – Yet, let us not boast: we do not run the race, but that more than a hundred million horse-power invisible to us, which was created with the sun. We are but the atoms involved, and borne about in the secrets of nature. And the secrets – what know we of them? – The facts only of a few of them: the main-springs of their action are, and perhaps ever will be, hidden. The world progresses; it has its infant state, its manhood state, and its old age – in what state are we now? and what is the world's age? Madame de Stael considered it quite in its youth – only fifteen – scarcely responsible! It seems, however, making rapid growth. Is it past the conceited epoch, and now cutting its wise teeth? We stand like spectators at the old fair-show; we see the motley, the ever busy, ever running harlequin and columbine; we are astonished at the fooleries, and are amazed at the wit, the practical wisdom, the magical wand power of the fantastic descendants of Adam and Eve, the masculine, and the feminine; and we laugh to behold the shuffling step of old Grandfather Time, as —

"Panting Time toiled after them in vain."

It is through the agency of mind that a few secrets are disclosed to us, and for our use. We call the recipient and the inventor Genius. It is given, as it is wanted, at the right time, and for the preordained purpose. We are sceptical as to "mute inglorious Miltons." Where the gift is bestowed it is used; and if it appear to be partially used, it is where partially given, that one man may advance one step, his successor another – and thus invention leads to invention. Genius for one thing arises in one age, and sleeps after his deed is done; genius for another thing succeeds him. Who shall dare to limit the number? One thing only we pause to admire – how seldom does the gift fall upon bad men!

There have been, perhaps, those who have had thrown in upon their minds a wondrous vision of things to come, which they were not allowed, themselves, to put forth in manifest action to the world. There have been seers of knowledge; and, perhaps, prophesiers in facts. No one will credit the assertion, therefore we make it not, that thousands of years ago steam was known, and applied to the purposes of life. We call, then, certain records the prophecies of Facts; that is, there was a certain practical knowledge, which in its description is prophetic of a new knowledge to be developed. Semiramis set up a pillar on which it was written, "I, Semiramis, by means of iron made roads over impassable mountains, where no beasts [of burthen] come." Did Semiramis prophecy a railroad – or were there Brunells and Stephensons then? When Homer spake, of the ships of the Phæcians, how they go direct to the place of their venture, "knowing the mind" of the navigator, "covered with cloud and vapour," had the old blind bard a mind's-eye vision of our steam-ships? Many more may be the prophecies of Facts; for in these cases doubtless there were facts, the prophecy being in the telling.

But there have been visions also without facts – that is, without the practical visions of an inward knowledge – wherein nature had given a mirror and bade genius look into it. Friar Bacon's prophecy is an example.

"Bridges," says he, "unsupported by arches, can be made to span the foaming current; man shall descend to the bottom of the ocean safely breathing, and treading with firm step on the golden sands never brightened by the light of day. Call but the secret powers of Sol and Luna into action, and behold a single steersman, sitting at the helm, guiding the vessel which divides the waves with greater rapidity than if she had been filled with a crew of mariners tolling at the oars. And the loaded chariot, no longer encumbered by the panting steeds, darts on its course with relentless force and rapidity. Let the pure and simple elements do thy labour; bind the eternal elements, and yoke them to the same plough."

Here is poetry and philosophy wound together, making a wondrous chain of prophecy. Who shall adventure upon a solution of that golden chain, which the oldest of poets told us descended from heaven to earth, linking them as it were together? Was it an electric fluid in which mind and matter were in indissoluble union?

What prophetic truths may yet be extracted from myth and fable, and come blazing like comets we know not whence, into the world's field! Hermes "the inventor," what is his wand, serpent-twined, and its meaning, brought into vulgar translation, and seen in the buffoonery of harlequinade? of what new power may it not be the poetical prototype? Who shall contemplate the multiplicity of nature's facts, and the myriads of multiplicities in their combination? Knowing that all that has ever been written or spoken, in all languages, is but the combination of a few sounds transferred to the alphabet of twenty-four letters, or even less, are we not lost in the contemplation of the possibilities of the myriads of facts, in their interchangings, combinations, and wonderful dove-tailings?

Perhaps, that we may not know too much before our time, facts are withdrawn from us as others are protruded. Memory may sleep, that invention may awake. Did we know by what machinery Stonehenge was built, we might have rested satisfied with a power inadequate to other and new wants, for which that power might have been no help. Archimedes did that which we cannot do, in order that we might do that which he did not. Who shall lift the veil of possibility?

Of this we may be sure, as the mind is made inventive, (and there is no seeming probability that a faculty once given will be taken away from our created nature,) there is a large and inexhaustible store-house, wherefrom it shall have liberty to gather and to combine. We do not believe that steam itself, the miracle of our age, is anything more than a stepping-stone to the discovery of another power – means superseding means. There is and will be no end, as long as the fabric of the world lasts.

There is an old German play, in which the whimsical idea of bringing the Past and Present together in dramatis personæ is amusingly embodied. We forget the particulars, but we think Cæsar or Cicero figure in the dialogue. The ridiculous is their laughable ignorance of the commonest things. The modern takes out his watch and puts it to his ear, and tells the ancient the hour of the day. This is but one out of many puzzling new things; but, even here, how little is told of the real post-Ciceronian inventions; for the object of the play is to show the skill of the Germans only; it is but an offering to the German genius of invention.

Could a tale of Sinbad's voyage have been read to the Roman – how, as he approached the mountain, the nails flew out of the ship, for lack of comprehension of the load-stone – he would have thought it only fantastically stupid; and if he had laughed, it would have been at the narrator's expense. And so, indeed, it has fared with discoverers: they have been before the time of elucidation, like Friar Bacon; and some for fear of ridicule have kept back their knowledge; but not many perhaps; for knowledge, when it is touched by genius, becomes illuminated and illuminating, and will shine though men may shut the door, and stay themselves outside and see it not, while it brightens up only the four walls of a small chamber as it were with the magic lantern in a student's hand. Whereas it ought, according to its power, to gild the universe. The secresy of invention is rather of others' doing – of an envious or doubting world of lookers-on, than of the first perceiving genius. Fortunately the gift of genius, as intended for the use of mankind, comes with an expansive desire of making it known.

If the memory of tradition fails, and some inventions are lost, that their detail may not hamper the faculty that should take altogether a new line, so have we what we may term false lines, that yet, nevertheless, lead into the true. Science may walk in an apparently unnecessary labyrinth, and awhile be lost in the wildest mazes, and yet come out into day at last, and have picked up more than it sought by the way. Wisdom herself may have been seen sometimes wearing the fool's cap. The child's play of tossing up an apple has ended in establishing the law of gravitation. The boy Watt amused himself in watching a kettle on the fire: his genius touched it, and it grew and grew into a steam-engine; and, like the giant in the show, that shook off his limbs, and each became another giant, myriads of gigantic machines, of enormous power, hundred armed Briareuses, are running to and fro in the earth, doing the bidding of the boy observant at his grandam's hearth. Is there an Arabian tale, with all its magic wonders, that can equal this? We said that Wisdom has worn the fool's cap; true, and Foolery was the object – the philosopher's stone; but in the wildest vagaries of her thought, there were wise things said and done, and her secretary, Common Sense, made notes of the good; and all was put down together in a strange shorthand, intelligible to the initiated; and the facts of value were culled, in time, and sifted from the follies, and from the disguises – for there were disguises, that strangers should not pry into them before the allowed hour. Alchemy has been the parent of chemistry – that "[Greek: epistêmê iera]," and its great mysteries, to reveal which was once death!! Secrets were hidden under numbers, letters, signs of the zodiac, animals, plants, and organic substances. Thus in the vocabulary of the alchemists, the basilisk, the dragon, the red and green lions, were the sulphates of copper and of iron; the salamander, the fire; milk of the black cow, mercury; the egg, gold; the red dragon, cinnabar. There is a curious specimen, in the work of the monk Theophilus, translated by Mr Hendrie, how to make Spanish gold: —

"The Gentiles, whose skilfulness in this art is probable, make basilisks in this manner: They have underground a house, walled with stones everywhere, above and below, with two very small windows, so narrow that scarcely any light can appear through them: in this house they place two old cocks, of twelve or fifteen years, and they give them plenty of food. When these have become fat, through the heat of their good condition, they agree together, and lay eggs. Which being laid, the cocks are taken out, and toads are placed in, which may hatch the eggs, and to which bread is given for food. The eggs being hatched, chickens issue out like hens' chickens, to which, after seven days, grow the tails of serpents, and immediately, if there were not a stone pavement, they would enter the earth," &c. &c. – "After this, they uncover them, and apply a copious fire, until the animals' insides are completely burnt. Which done, when they have become cold, they are taken out, and carefully ground, adding to them a third part of the blood of a Red Man, which blood has been dried and ground."

Doubtless it was the discovery of some such language as this which led to the popular belief that the Jews, who were great goldsmiths and alchemists, made sacrifices with the blood of children; and many a poor Jew suffered for the sin of mistifying knowledge. "The toads of Theophilus," says Mr Hendrie, "are probably fragments of the mineral salt, nitrate of potash, which would yield one of the elements for the solvent of gold; the blood of the Red Man, which had been dried and ground, probably a muriate of ammonia," &c. Such were the secrets of the "Ars Hermetica;" and their like may have been bidden in the wand of Hermes. Dragons, serpents, and toads! Awful the vocabulary, to scare the profane; but fair Science came at length unscathed out of the witches' cauldron: and thus it appeared that natural philosophy, like its own toad, ugly and venomous, bore a "precious jewel in its head."

Alchemy and magic were twin sisters, and often visited grave philosophers in their study both together. The Orphic verses and the hexameters of Hesiod, on the virtues of precious stones, exhibit the superstitions of science. They descended into the deeply imaginative mind of Plato, and perhaps awakened the curiosity of the elder, scarcely less fabulous Pliny, the self-devoted martyr to the love of discoveries in science. The Arabian Tales may owe some of their marvels to the hidden sciences, in which the Arabs were learned, and which they carried with them into Spain. Albertus Magnus, in his writings, preserved the Greek and Arab secrets; and our Roger Bacon turned them over with the hand of a grave and potent genius, and his touch made them metaphorically, if not materially, golden. His prophecy, which we have given, was, when uttered, a kind of "philosopher's stone."

Superstitions of science, of boasted and boasting philosophy! And why not? Is there not enough of superstition now extant – a fair sample of the old? Is the new philosophy without that original ingredient? It is passed down from the old, and will incorporate itself with all new in some measure or other, for the very purpose of misleading, that the very bewilderment may set the inventive brain to work, in ways it thought not of. Reasoners are every day reasoning themselves out of wholesome, airbreathing, awakening truths into the visionary land of dreams, and, speaking mysteriously like uncontradicted somnambulists, believe themselves to be oracular. Materialists have followed matter, driven it into corners, divided it, dissected it, and cut it into such bits that it has become an undiscernible evaporation; and they have come away disappointed, and denied its existence altogether. Thus, mesmerism is the bewildered expression of this disappointment, their previous misapprehension. They will not believe that the wand of Hermes represents two serpents intertwined – they see but one, though the two look each other in the face before them, and they are purblind to the wand and the hand that holds it. Even the "Exact Sciences," as they are called, are not complete; they lead to precipices, down which to look is a giddiness. The fact is, the action of the mind is as that of the body: mind and body have their daily outward work, and their times of sleep and of dreaming, and the dreaming of the one is not unfrequently the life of the other. The dream of the philosopher, be he waking or sleeping, is his refreshment, and at times suggestive of the to come. How know we but that "such stuff as dreams are made of" may serve for the fabrication of noble thoughts, and be inwoven into the habit of life, and become useful wear?

Perhaps magic was the first and needful life of philosophy – needful as a covering while it grew, and which it shook off as its swaddling-clothes, and became a truth. How few can trace invention to its germ, or know where the germ lies, and how that it fed upon reached it! The suggestion of a dream begetting a reality! They are no fools who think that good and bad angels are the authors of inventions. It is ingenious to suppose that we are rather the receivers and encouragers of our original thoughts than the authors of them. We may use the magnifying glasses of our reason or our passions, and do but a little distort them, or advance them to use and beauty, as we are good or bad in ourselves. And thus, from suggestions given, the imaginative genius, inventing, magnifies and multiplies by these his glasses and his instruments; and the thing invented requires much of this brilliant finery of our own to be removed before it be fitted for demand and use. Like wrought iron, the sparks must be beaten out of it while it is forming into shape. It must be off its red heat or white heat – be dipped in the cold stream of doubt, and look ugly enough to the eye of common opinion, and be long in the hand of experiment to try the patience of the inventor. And, after all, will the benefited be thankful? History has many a sad tale to tell on this subject. The "Sic vos non vobis" should be inscribed over the portals of the patent office. Yet sometimes, in pity to lost expectations, in the carrying out one great idea to – shall we say its final incompletion, to its last residuum of insanity? – some little scarcely noticeable matter in the machinery has been by some kind suggesting spirit held up to the eye of the philosopher, which has proved to be the magnum bonum of the whole scheme.

We once knew a tradesman who had spent the best years of his life, as well as his substance, to discover "perpetual motion." He sold off his goods when he fancied he had discovered it, and left his provincial town for the great metropolis and a philosopher's fame. As he travelled by the coach, going over in his mind the processes of his machinery, a portion of it struck him as applicable to a manufacture of common use, but of no very high pretensions. His perpetual motion failed. There was a good angel that whispered to him, "Descend from the ladder of your ambition – do not lose sight of it; but try the little interloping suggestion, and raise the means for prosecuting more favourably your perpetual motion." He did so. The action saved him from lunacy – the undignified and bye-sport, as it were, of his invention answered – from a ruined man he became rich, and his new business required of him so much perpetual motion bodily, that the idea of it, wonderful to say, was driven out of his speculative mind.

A sudden thought – a happy hit – we are too apt to call a lucky one. Will it be the worse if we give it a better name, and say it is a gift? The thankfulness implied in gift may make it a blessing. It was no deep study that brought the great improvements into our manufacturing machinery.

The poor boy Arkwright, in a moment of idleness or weariness, thought happily of a cog in the wheel; and that little cog, was to him and his posterity a philosopher's stone; realising the alchemist's hopes, by far more sure experiment than the dealings with "green" and "red lions" and "dragons" for a result never to be reached. How wonderful has been the result, even to the whole world, of that momentary thought – that simple invention!

We have often heard it remarked that this is an age of inventions. It is true: not that the inventive mind was ever wanting. It is a practical age; the necessities of multiplied life make it so. The well-known "century of inventions" of the Marquis of Worcester is a stock not yet exhausted. But to speak of this our age, how can it be otherwise? Not only are material means enlarged by geographical and other discoveries, but the inventive mind is multiplied because mankind are multiplied, whose nature it is to invent. A population – to speak of England, for it is of England we are thinking – of five millions, as it was in the time of Queen Elizabeth, cannot bear comparison with ours of nearer twenty millions. Then, if we enlarge our view, and take in England's transplanted progeny, whose activity and whose advancement in knowledge and science we share, under every facility for the transmission of knowledge, we may fairly speculate upon a very wonderful futurity. The glory of the German dramatist, with his watch, and perhaps, but we forget, his printing-press, (for it ought to be in the play,) is annihilated: the author himself would now stand in the place of his Cæsar or Cicero.

It would be a dream worth dreaming to bring back from his Elysian Fields Agricola, the Roman governor of Britain – he who first discovered that it was an island – to show him his semi-barbarians, whom he so equitably governed, (passing by, however, how far we are, any of us, their descendants.) We will imagine but an hour or two passed with him at the Polytechnic Rooms, to show him enormous iron cables twisted into knots, as if they were pieces of tape – to see vast ponderous masses suspended by magnetism only – to let him look into the wonders of the telescope and the microscope, besides a thousand marvellous things, too numerous and too often enumerated to mention. Nor would it be unamusing to dream that we return with him, and on his way accompany him, summoned to the court of Pluto and Proserpine to narrate the incidents of his sojourn above. We could believe the line of Homer verified, and that we see the grim and sceptical Pluto leap up from his throne in astonishment, and perhaps, as the poet would have it, fear lest our subterranean speculators should break in upon his dominions, and let in the light of our day. We have taken the humblest walk for the "surprise." What if we had accompanied the ex-governor of Britain to the Crystal Palace? That we will not venture upon. But had he continued his narrative of all he saw there, Pluto would have given a look – at which Cerberus would have growled from his triple throats – and that the unlucky narrator might escape the castigation of Rhadamanthus, he would have been ordered a fresh dip in Lethe, as one contaminated, and who had contracted the lying propensities of people in the upper air.

We know not if the wonder in us be not the greater that we have not the slightest pretensions to mechanical knowledge. But we confess that, when we suddenly came upon the mechanical department, and saw the various machinery at work, the world's life and all its business came out vividly upon the canvass of our thought, as the great poetry of nature. Yes, nature rather than art, for art is but the capability of nature in practice. We thought of Sophocles and his chorus of laudation of man – the inventor and the [Greek: pontoporos] – and how impoverished did the Greek seem, how tame and inadequate the description!

Shakspeare is more to the mark. The whole world is scarcely large enough for the exhibition of man's thought and deed, as Shakspeare sees him. There is no small talk of his little doings – how he passes over the seas and bridles the winds. Inimitable Shakspeare omits the doing to show the capacity; makes, for a moment of comparison only, the earth a sterile promontory, and man that is on it himself, and in his own bosom, the ample region of all fertility, in undefined thought and action. "What a piece of work is man! – how noble in reason! – how infinite in faculties! In form and moving how express and admirable! – in action how like an angel! – in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!" Behold man the inventor!

We have said that the increase of population must necessarily enlarge the stock of inventions, both by new and multiplied demands, and by the added number of inventors. But there is another cause in operation, that is seldom taken into the account – there are not only more millions of human hands to do the work, but there is an artificial working population, if we may call horse-power of steam a population as equivalent to hands.

In this view the working population, or working power, so far exceeds our actual population, that they can scarcely be named together. If it be said, this is not a power of mind, and therefore cannot be said to be inventive; it may be answered, that every instrument is a kind of mind to him who takes it up, improves, and works upon it, and with it: for, after all, it is mind that is operating in it. The man is not to be envied who in heart and understanding is dead to the manifold evolutions of this great workshop of the human brain, who cannot feel the poetry of mechanics. Is it not a creative power? – and is it not at once subjecting and civilising the world? Is not this poetry of mechanics showing also that man has dominion given him over the inert materials, as over other living creatures of the earth? We hail it in all its marvellous doings, as subject for creative dreams, scarcely untrue. Let those who will (and many there be who profess this blindness to the poetry of art and science) see nothing but the tall chimneys and the black smoke. To the imaginative, even the smoke itself becomes an embodied genie, at whose feet the earth opens at command; and they who yield themselves to the spell are conducted, through subterranean ways, to the secret chambers of the treasures of nature; and, by a transition to a more palpable reality, find themselves in a garden covered with crystal, to behold all beauteous things and precious stones for fruit, such as Aladdin saw, and fountains throwing out liquid gems, and fair company, as if brought together by enchantment – and this is the romance of reality. If we write rhapsodically, let the subject be the excuse, for the secrets of nature throw conjecture into the depths of wonder, and thought far out of the conveyance of language.

It was our purpose to speak of the Submarine Telegraph, and it is not surprising if we have in some degree been transported to great distances by its power.

The inventors, Messrs Brett, under every difficulty and discouragement, have at length succeeded. Our greatest engineers for a long while withheld their countenance; practical philosophers denied the probability. The possibility was tested by the first experiment. Fortunately no accident occurred in laying down the wire across the Channel, until communication by means of it had been made between France and England; and even the subsequent accident – the cutting the wire by the fishermen – has only served the good purpose of making more sure the permanent setting up of this extraordinary telegraph. The protection of the wires by the gutta-percha covering is considered perfect; but should it turn out otherwise, it will not affect the certainty of the invention: it must be permanent. A narrative of all the difficulties which beset the inventors, and which have delayed the experiment for years, would be curious. The discouragements and the expenses would have crushed men of less energy. Even at last, in making the cable, there was a disappointment and a hitch, arising from rival companies. We extract from the Times.

"On the 19th of July last, Mr Crampton undertook to construct and lay down a cable containing four electric wires, each insulated in two coatings of gutta percha, and the whole protected by ten strands of galvanised iron wire, on or before the 30th of September. The electric wires, covered with gutta percha, in length a hundred miles, were turned out by Mr Statham, at the works of the Gutta Percha Company, and nothing can be more perfect than the manner in which that order was executed. The wire covering was ordered from Messrs Wilkins and Weatherly; but unfortunately, a dispute respecting the patent for making wire ropes occurred between that firm and Messrs Newall, which seriously delayed the progress of the work, as an injunction was served by the latter to prevent Messrs Wilkins and Co. from proceeding with the order.

"This was eventually compromised, and the rope was made conjointly by the workmen of the two firms on the premises of Messrs Wilkins and Weatherly, at Wapping.

"The very hurried manner in which (from this unforeseen delay) the work had to be accomplished, prevented that close attention that ought to have been given to any fracture, however small, of the wire; and in consequence, the outer casing, though of great strength and solidity, was not made with the same exquisite nicety and care that had been bestowed on the core of the cable."

The weather was unpropitious, and was probably the cause, from the circumstance of the Blazer being driven somewhat out of her course, that the length of the wire cable was not sufficient. This defect was, however, only of a temporary kind, and was supplied by that which was intended for another purpose. We extract the interesting account of the proceedings from the Times: —

"Shortly after 7 o'clock the fastenings at the end of the cable at the Foreland were completed, and the Fearless started to point out the exact course to be followed by the Blazer, which was towed by two tugs, one alongside, and the other ahead of her.

"A third tug belonging to the Government was also in attendance.

"The arrangements for paying out the cable consisted simply of a bar fixed transversely above the hold, over which the rope was drawn as it was uncoiled from below, and a series of breaks acting by levers fitted to the deck, in order to arrest the passage of the rope in the case of too rapid a delivery. On reaching the stem the cable passed overboard through a 'chock' of a semicircular shape, lined with iron. On starting, the steam-tugs proceeded at much too rapid a pace, (from four to five knots an hour,) and consequently one of the fractured wires (before alluded to) caught in the friction-blocks, and, before the way of the vessel could be checked, one strand of the iron wire was, for a length of about eighteen yards, stripped from the cable. The steam-tug towing ahead was then ordered alongside, when the speed could be better regulated, and the rate was reduced to about one and a half to two knots an hour. About six miles from shore it was determined to test the wires; but, from a misapprehension of instructions, the telegraph instruments at the South Foreland were not joined up with those on board the Blazer. A steam-tug, with one of the engineers and directors on board, immediately returned to the Foreland, when communication was made by telegraph and fusees fired from the vessel to the shore, and from the shore to the Blazer.

"At about mid-Channel, in the midst of a heavy sea, and a strong wind from the SW., an accident occurred, but for which the enterprise would have been carried out with the most perfect success; this was the snapping of the towrope (an eight-inch cable) and the consequent drifting of the Blazer from her appointed course to the length of a mile and a-half. Notwithstanding the delay caused by this untoward incident, the Blazer arrived off Sangatte at about 6 o'clock. The evening was, however, too far advanced, and the weather too stormy to attempt a landing; and, after embarking most of her passengers on board one of the steamers that ran into Calais, she was anchored for the night about two miles from the shore.