The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 19, No. 533, February 11, 1832

"'Tis yours," with accents mild the Genius cried,
Streams, as he speaks, o'er all the meadows glide,
A fresher green the fragrant shrubs display,
And every leaf in trembling cheers the day;
Slaking their raging thirst, the flocks are seen,
And new-born herbage clothes the earth in green.
"This trifling wish befits a little soul,
Let the great Ganges o'er my meadows roll!"

Thus Raschid spoke, and thus the God replies,
Rage, as he spoke, rode sparkling in his eyes:—
"Insatiate man, this boundless wish recall
Ere ruin whelm yourself, your flocks and all;
See you these sheaves?—Now mark this dreadful sword,
Those are the wise man's—this the fool's reward."

In vain he spoke; and hark, what meets the ear,
The raging flood is now approaching near;
Onward it rolls, o'erwhelming Raschid's plains,
All things it sweeps, and not a tree remains,
His flocks, his herds, the mighty stream o'erpours,
Himself (rash man) a crocodile devours.

A FRAGMENT

On a fork of lightning which sped through heaven,
He rode to space's naught,
And with the flash of a star which his flight had riven,
(The which in his hand of light he caught)
He writ with that flash his burning thought,
On the roll of darkness space had given.

USEFUL DOMESTIC HINTS

SHAVINGS

(For the Mirror.)

Disposed as we are to give the Scotch full credit for superior domestic economy, a practice which we had frequently an opportunity of observing, some five or six years since in Edinburgh, astonished us, we confess, not a little; and which, had we heard of, not beheld, we should rather have been inclined to attribute to our thoughtless Hibernian neighbours.

Every English housemaid knows, if every housekeeper does not, that shavings make a most valuable fuel; for lighting fires they are preferable to those faggots, small bundles of which fetch in London, and large provincial towns, what may be considered a high price, as they commonly swell the weekly expenditure of every family. In Edinburgh, at the period to which we allude, a great deal of building was going on, and it was impossible to walk the streets without passing, (especially in the immediate environs) new houses in various stages of completion; but invariably we found, that the custom of the workmen was, to collect in heaps the shavings from the carpenter's work, and burn with other rubbish, these, which might have been sold for fuel very advantageously; nor was the waste of this practice the only thing to be reprehended; it was dangerous, since such bonfires were lighted before the houses in the open streets, to the great peril of passengers, and at the risk of frightening horses and other cattle, as the high winds prevalent in our northern metropolis carried about in all directions the light, blazing shavings, and sparks.

M.L.B.

FEATHERS

(For the Mirror.)

Valuable as are feathers, and essential as is that article, a feather-bed, to the domestic comforts of the poor, who can rarely afford to purchase one, it has often struck us, as a singular want of thought and economy in humble cottagers residing on village-greens or commons, upon which much poultry is kept, that they should not collect, (a work easily performed by the youngest children) the numerous soft, short, downy feathers, which may be observed floating about. These in time would amount to a quantity worth consideration, but they are usually left, first to litter the land, and secondly to be destroyed by rain and passengers. This is particularly the case in Norfolk, celebrated as everybody knows as well for its geese as its turkeys, and where, it is asserted, that the former fowls undergo regular pluckings for the sake of their feathers, ere submitted to "the poulterer's knife." But experience, unfortunately, only confirms the old observation, that "the poor are the worst economists in the world," and the least obedient of any people to our Saviour's command: "Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost."

M.L.B.

TO TAKE INK OUT OF PAPER, AND STAINS OUT OF CLOTH, SILKS, &C

Mix one teaspoonful of burnt alum, 1/4 oz. of salt of lemons, 1/4 oz. of oxalic acid, in a bottle, with half-a-pint of cold water; to be used by wetting a piece of calico with it, and rubbing it on the spots.

S. AE.

THE SELECTOR; AND LITERARY NOTICES OF NEW WORKS

LADIES AND DWARFS

One of the oddest of all odd books that ever fell into our hands is Captain Colville Franckland's Narrative of a Visit to the Courts of Russia and Sweden, in 1830 and 1831. It is one of the hop-step-and-a-jump tours that your fashionable folks make for making acquaintances and then making books. The gallant author does not stay long enough in a place to be dull; for he is lively and flippant in every page, and throws a dash of the service into every chapter. He feels that Dr. Granville has left him nothing to say which may not be found in his two great big books; yet the Cholera and the Polish war have supplied him with two topics throughout the whole book; and, dull as these subjects are in themselves, they have enabled our tourist to produce a rambling, rattling, frolicsome work of seven or eight hundred pages. His attentions to the softer sex sparkle every where. At Hamburgh, "we dined at a most excellent table d'hote, but thought the ladies plain and dowdy." "We laughed much at the Holsteiner peasantry, the women being dressed like devils, and men like merry-andrews." Again,—

"One of the most pleasing characteristics of Hamburgh, is the neat little, rosy-faced, fair-haired soubrette, tripping along the Yungferstieg, with a basket under her right arm, covered with a handsome shawl of glowing colours. These enticing damsels look as happy and as coquettish as you can well imagine, and might induce many a traveller to pass a few weeks in Hamburgh who had time to dedicate to the pursuit of the fair nymphs of the Alster.

"But, alas! no good is unaccompanied by evil; hideously deformed dwarfs haunt the streets and promenades of the good town, and the eye of the observer, after having rested with complacency on the round and well-turned form of the smart soubrette, reverts with horror to the miserable Flibbertigibbets which abound in a frightful proportion to the whole population."

At Hamburgh he finds fun in every thing.

"I was a good deal amused to-day by the funeral cortège of some citizen of consequence. The bier was surrounded by men dressed in the old Venetian costume of black, with ruffs, well-powdered wigs, and swords by their sides. I regret to say that I must quit Hamburgh without seeing the Schöne Marianna; but I hear she is now rather passèe, and I must console myself for this mortification by gazing upon the first pair of bright eyes which I shall meet to-morrow on my route to Kiel."

The Russian dwarfs afford our Captain much amusement.

"Madame Divoff, like many other Russian ladies, has a dwarf in her house, who remains constantly with the company. He is less ugly and disagreeable than others of his species. La Princesse Serge Gallitzin has a little fellow of this sort; the Lisianskis have also one in constant attendance. The pretty Mademoiselle Rosetti, two evenings ago, kept caressing the dwarf at Madame Divoff's ball. ('Beauty and the Beast,' said I to her; 'Zemir et Azor.')

"At a very agreeable family party at the Prince Paul Gallitzin's were masks; and a party of male and female dwarfs; these droll little urchins were all very well made and good-looking; they frisked and frolicked about with the children of the house as if they themselves were not (as in reality they were) men and women, but children likewise. One of these poor little mortals, equipped as an officer of hussars, danced a mazurka with great grace and activity, and selected for his partner the Gouvernante, a fine, fat bouncing woman of twenty-five. He likewise, at my request, sang a Russian romance, which he accompanied on the piano-forte: his voice was a very plaintive, but weak barytone. The kindness of the Russian nobles to these unfortunate beings does infinite honour to the national character."

We have only time for another extract or two. At Moscow, he notes:

"I passed the remainder of the evening at the Princess Dolgorouki's; the young ladies were in great agitation on account of the sudden indisposition of their mother, Madame Boulgakow, who had, it seems, caught cold in her return from the monastery of Troitza, sixty wersts from hence, a renowned pilgrimage. She had better have stayed at home, for surely Moscow has sufficient churches in which bigots may pray as long as they please. When will superstition cease to usurp the place of true religion in the human mind? I did not pity the old devotee, but I felt for the young ladies, who seemed to be a good deal flurried and fluttered by this occurrence."

At St. Petersburg:

"June 8-20.—Weather hot and sultry. At two I walked to the Summer Gardens, which I found full of police-officers and soldiers. To-day there is a celebrated promenade, that in which the young fillies range themselves in two rows along the principal alley to be chosen by their future spouse. However, it was as yet too early for this exhibition, and there was nobody here except police-officers, the very sight of whom makes me sick; so off I set, and was caught near the Newski Prospekt in a tremendous thunder-storm, which forced me to take shelter, first under the arch of a porte-cochere, and secondly in the Casan Church, in which I discovered for the first time the bâton of Marshal Davoust, stuck up in a glass-case against one of the piers supporting the dome of the Church. Underneath the bâton, upon a gilded metal-plate, are two inscriptions, the one in Russ, the other in Latin, which state that the bâton is that of Marshal Davoust, taken near Crasnoe, 5th Nov. 1812; so there can be no doubt of the fact."

"I was a good deal amused with a bad painting over the simple unassuming tomb of the immortal Kutusoff, representing the Kremlin, the church of Ivan Blagennoi, and a procession of priests marching out of the former by the Holy Gate towards the latter. Kutusoff's tomb is shaded by banners taken from the Poles, the Prussians, and the French, having at the ends of their staffs, the eagles of the two former, and the horse of the latter."

LE JARDIN DES PLANTES

Mrs. Watts's charming Juvenile Annual, the New Year's Gift, furnishes the following admirable model of a descriptive letter from the French capital.

"The day following the one on which we were at Versailles, we spent in visiting the Garden of Plants; this institution (if I may so call it) is a little on the same plan as our Zoological Garden, and is said to be quite unrivalled in the whole world. It contains curiosities of every age, and from every quarter of the globe. The gardens, which cover more than a hundred acres of ground, are filled with every plant that can be reared in France, either naturally or by artificial means, from the lordly palm to the humble potato.

"One enclosure is filled with every specimen of shrub that is capable of being made to form a fence, from the prickly holly, of forty feet high, to the dwarf-box, scarcely an inch above the ground.

"In another place, we see specimens of all the various modes of training fruit, and other kinds of trees, which the ingenuity of man has been able to accomplish—this is peculiarly interesting. Here, a tree is trained to resemble a large basin, another is made to look like a gigantic umbrella, and a third like a lady's fan.

"In one enclosure are collected together all the various specimens of culinary vegetables that have usually been appropriated to the sustenance of mankind; these, you will readily believe, occupy no small space; and near them, are to be seen specimens of all the varieties of fruit trees of which France and its neighbouring kingdoms can boast.