The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827

Sandrart, whose work was published in 1675, also mentions the paintings of Holbein at Whitehall. Is it credible, that three travellers, two of whom were distinguished artists themselves, should have been at Whitehall, and seen there the paintings of Holbein, without taking notice of the "Dance of Death," if it had been in that place?

Holbein died of the plague in London, 1554.—Westminster Review.

When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and, this for awhile, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose; but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really received one.—Burke.

If we must lash one another, let it be with the manly strokes of wit and satire; for I am of the old philosopher's opinion, that if I must suffer from one or the other, I would rather it should be from the paw of a lion, than from the hoof of an ass.—Addison.

THE CENTRAL MARKET, LEEDS

As one of the most elegant and useful buildings of the important town of Leeds, and as characteristic of the public spirit of its inhabitants,[2 - Too much praise cannot be conferred on this and similar instances of provincial improvement; while it is much to be regretted that such praise cannot be extended to the metropolis of England; for, strange to say, LONDON is still without a market-place suitable to its commercial consequence. Hence, Smithfield market is almost a public nuisance, while its extensive business is settled in public-houses in the neighbourhood; and the hay market, held in the fine broad street of that name, but ill accords with the courtly vicinity of Pall Mall and St. James's. It is, however, to fruit and vegetable markets that this observation is particularly applicable: for instance, what a miserable scene is the area of Covent Garden market. The non-completion of the piazza square is much to be lamented, while splendid streets and towns are erecting on every side of the metropolis. How unworthy, too, is the market, of association with Inigo Jones's noble Tuscan church of St. Paul, "the handsomest barn in Europe." To quote Sterne, we must say "they manage these things better in France," where the halles, or markets are among the noblest of the public buildings. Neither can any Englishman, who has seen the markets of Paris, but regret the absence of fountains from the markets of London. They are among the most tasteful embellishments of Paris, and their presence in the markets cannot be too much admired. Water is, unquestionably, the most salutary and effective cleanser of vegetable filth which is necessarily generated on the sites of markets; but in London its useful introduction is limited to a few pumps, and its ornamental to one or two solitary jets d'eau in almost unfrequented places. It should be added, that in Southwark, an extensive and commodious market-place is just completed, and the tolls are proportionally increasing. A similar improvement is much wanted in Covent Garden, by which means many of the evils of that spot would be abated, and instead of seeing Nature's choicest productions huddled together, and being ourselves tortured in the scramble and confusion of a crowd, we might then range through the avenues of Covent Garden with all the comfort which our forefathers were wont to enjoy on this spot, or certainly with comparative ease.—ED.] the above engraving cannot fail to prove acceptable to our readers; while it may serve as an excitement to similar exertions in other districts.

The Central Market, is erected on the site of the old post-office, at the north-east corner of Duncan-street, the foundation stone of which was laid in 1824. The whole site was excavated, and is divided into cellars, arched and groined, with a spacious area round the whole, for the convenience of access to each, and lighted by powerful convex lenses from the interior of the building. Over these is the principal building—an enclosed market-house, with twenty shops round the exterior for butchers and others, and twenty others corresponding in size with them, fronting the interior. The space within these, on the ground floor, is fitted up with twenty single stands for fruit and vegetables. Three sides of the square form a spacious gallery, commodiously fitted up with thirty-six stands of convenient dimensions, as a Bazaar. The interior is lighted and ventilated by three rows of windows, one row on the Bazaar floor, and two rows in the roof. The roof, the carpentry of which has been pronounced a master-piece, is supported by twelve cast-iron columns and sixteen oak pillars, and is 34 ft. 6 in. high; the height from the floor to the upper point of the ceiling being 54 ft. 4 in. The size within the walls is 138 ft. by 103 ft. The principal entrance is at the south front from Duncan-street, on each side of which are three large shops fronting the street, with a suite of six offices above. Over this entrance is an entablature richly embellished with fine masonry, and supported with two Ionic columns, and two pilasters or antaes, 30 ft. high. In the centre of the front, as well as within the market, it is intended to place a clock. The outer boundary of the market, which forms three sides of the square, and is separated from the enclosed market by a carriage road, consists of twenty-five shops devoted exclusively to butchers and fishmongers. At the south-west corner of these is an hotel; at the south-east corner, near Call-lane, are two shops, with offices above; and, in another part, a house for the clerk of the market. There are four pumps on the premises, and the floor of the interior is so contrived and fitted up with proper drains, that it can be washed down at pleasure. The whole will be lighted with gas.

The architect of the Central Market is Francis Goodwin, Esq., and it is but justice to say, that it is highly creditable to his taste and skill. The front is of the Grecian order, and perhaps the largest piece of masonry in the county of York, with the fewest observable joints. It is expected to prove an advantageous investment.

THE SELECTOR; AND LITERARY NOTICES OF NEW WORKS

RISE AND FALL OF NAPOLEON

With his passions, and in spite of his errors, Napoleon is, taking him all in all, the greatest warrior of modern times. He carried into battle a stoical courage, a profoundly calculated tenacity, a mind fertile in sudden inspirations, which by unhopedfor resources disconcerted the plans of the enemy. Let us beware of attributing a long series of success to the organic power of the masses which he set in motion. The most experienced eye could scarcely discover in them any thing but elements of disorder. Still less let it be said that he was a successful captain because he was a mighty monarch. Of all his campaigns, the most memorable are,—the campaign of the Adige, where the general of yesterday, commanding an army by no means numerous, and at first badly appointed, placed himself at once above Turenne and on a level with Frederick; and the campaign in France in 1814, when, reduced to a handful of harassed troops, he combated a force of ten times their number. The last flashes of imperial lightning still dazzled the eyes of our enemies; and it was a fine sight to see the bounds of the old lion tracked, hunted down, beset, presenting a lively picture of the days of his youth, when his powers developed themselves in the fields of carnage.

Napoleon possessed, in an eminent degree, the faculties requisite for the profession of arms; temperate and robust, watching and sleeping at pleasure, appearing unawares where he was least expected, he did not disregard details to which important results are sometimes attached. The hand which had just traced rules for the government of many millions of men would frequently rectify an incorrect statement of the situation of a regiment, or write down whence two hundred conscripts were to be obtained, and from what magazine their shoes were to be taken. A patient and easy interlocutor, he was a home questioner, and he could listen—a rare talent in the grandees of the earth. He carried with him into battle a cool and impassable courage; never was mind so deeply meditative, more fertile in rapid and sudden illuminations. On becoming emperor he ceased not to be the soldier. If his activity decreased with the progress of age, that was owing to the decrease of his physical powers.

In games of mingled calculation and hazard, the greater the advantages which a man seeks to obtain, the greater risks he must run. It is precisely this that renders the deceitful science of conquerors so calamitous to nations. Napoleon, though naturally adventurous, was not deficient in consistency or method; and he wasted neither his soldiers nor his treasures where the authority of his name sufficed. What he could obtain by negociations or by artifice, he required not by force of arms. The sword, although drawn from the scabbard, was not stained with blood, unless it was impossible to attain the end in view by a manoeuvre. Always ready to fight, he chose habitually the occasion and the ground. Out of fifty battles which he fought, he was the assailant in at least forty.

Other generals have equalled him in the art of disposing troops on the ground. Some have given battle as well as he did; we could mention several who have received it better; but in the manner of directing an offensive campaign he has surpassed all.

The wars in Spain and Russia prove nothing in disparagement of his genius. It is not by the rules of Montecuculii and Turenne, manoeuvring on the Renchen, that we ought to judge of such enterprises. The first warred to secure such or such winter-quarters; the other to subdue the world. It frequently behoved him not merely to gain a battle, but to gain it in such a manner as to astound Europe and to produce gigantic results. Thus political views were incessantly interfering with the strategic genius; and to appreciate him properly we must not confine ourselves within the limits of the art of war. This art is not composed exclusively of technical details; it has also its philosophy. To find in this elevated region a rival to Napoleon, we must go back to the times when the feudal institutions had not yet broken the unity of the ancient nations. The founders of religions alone have exercised over their disciples an authority comparable with that which made him the absolute master of his army. This moral power became fatal to him, because he strove to avail himself of it even against the ascendancy of material force, and because it led him to despise positive rules, the long violation of which will not remain unpunished.

When pride was hurrying Napoleon towards his fall, he happened to say, "France has more need of me than I have of France." He spoke the truth. But why had he become necessary? Because he had committed the destiny of the French to the chances of an interminable war; because, in spite of the resources of his genius, that war, rendered daily more hazardous by his staking the whole of his force, and by the boldness of his movements, risked in every campaign, in every battle, the fruits of twenty years of triumph; because his government was so modelled that with him every thing must be swept away, and that a re-action proportioned to the violence of the action must burst forth at once both within and without. The mania of conquest had reversed the state of things in Europe; we, the eldest born of liberty and independence, were spilling our blood in the service of royal passions against the cause of nations, and outraged nations were turning round upon us, more terrible from being armed with the principles which we had forsaken.

At times, this immense mass of passions which he was accumulating against him, this multitude of avenging arms ready to be raised, filled his ambitious spirit with involuntary apprehension. Looking around him, he was alarmed to find himself solitary, and conceived the idea of strengthening his power by moderating it. Then it was that he thought of creating an hereditary peerage, and reconstructing his monarchy on more secure foundations. But Napoleon saw without illusion to the bottom of things. The nation, wholly and continually occupied in prosecuting the designs of its chief, had previously not had time to form any plans for itself. The day on which it should have ceased to be stunned by the din of arms, it would have called itself to account for its servile obedience. It is better, thought he, for an absolute prince to fight foreign armies, than to have to struggle against the energy of the citizens. Despotism had been organized for making war; war was continued to uphold despotism. The die was cast; France must either conquer Europe, or Europe subdue France.

Napoleon fell: he fell, because with the men of the nineteenth century he attempted the work of an Attila and a Genghis Khan; because he gave the reins to an imagination directly contrary to the spirit of his age, with which nevertheless his reason was perfectly acquainted; because he would not pause on the day when he felt conscious of his inability to succeed. Nature has fixed a boundary, beyond which extravagant enterprises cannot be carried with prudence. This boundary the emperor reached in Spain, and he overleaped it in Russia. Had he then escaped destruction, his inflexible presumption would have caused him to find elsewhere a Baylen and a Moscow— History of the War in the Peninsula, from the French of General Foy.

ROBINSON CRUSOES

At one of the islands belonging to Juan de Ampues, the pilot ran away. Cifuentes and his crew, all equally ignorant of navigation, made sail for San Domingo, were dismasted in a gale of wind, and driven in the night upon the "Serrana" shoals; the crew, a flask of powder and steel, were saved, but nothing else. They found sea-calves and birds upon the island, and were obliged to eat them raw, and drink their blood, for there was no water. After some weeks, they made a raft with fragments of the wreck, lashed together with calf-skin thongs: three men went off upon it, and were lost. Two, and a boy, staid upon the island—one of whom, Moreno, died four days afterwards raving mad, having gnawed the flesh off his arms: the survivors, Master John and the boy, dug holes in the sand with tortoise-shells, and lined them with calf-skins to catch the rain. Where the vessel was wrecked, they found a stone which served them for a flint; this invaluable prize enabled them to make a fire. Two men had been living upon another island two leagues from them, in similar distress, for five years; these saw the fire, and upon a raft joined their fellow sufferers. They now built a boat with the fragments of the wreck, made sails of calf-skins, and caulked her with their fat, mixed with charcoal: one man and the boy went away in her: Master John, and one whose name has not been preserved, would not venture in her: they made themselves coracles with skins, and coasted round the shoals, which they estimated at twelve leagues long. At low water there were seventeen islands, but only five which were not sometimes overflowed. Fish, turtle, sea-calves, birds, and a root like purslane, was their food. The whites of turtle-eggs, when dried and buried for a fortnight, turned to water, which they found good drink: five months in the year these eggs were their chief food. They clothed themselves and covered their huts with calf-skins, and made an enclosure to catch fish, twenty-two fathoms long, with stones brought out of the sea—and raised two towers in the same laborious way, sixteen fathoms in circumference at the base, and four in height, at the north and south extremities of the island: upon these they made fires as signals. To avoid the crabs and snails which tormented them at night, they slept in the day time.

Three years after the other went way, John's sufferings began to affect his reason: in a fit of despair, he applied to the devil for that relief his prayers had failed to bring; and, rising in the dark, he fancied the devil was close to the hut. John awakened his companion, and taking a crucifix for protection, ran praying to the other end of the island. About a fortnight afterwards, John thought he heard his visiter again, but did not see him. And it now pleased God to relieve them: they saw a ship, and made a great smoke upon their tower, which was seen. John and his companion were carried to the Havannah, where their appearance and story attracted great attention. John was twice sick during the eight years, both times in August, and both times bled himself.—Southey's Chronological History of the West Indies.

FIRST APPEARANCES OF MISS STEPHENS AND MR. KEAN

During this memorable era of the British Stage, Mr. Hazlit was engaged as theatrical reporter to the Morning Chronicle, newspaper, then conducted by Mr. Perry, and printed on the exact site of the MIRROR office: in his Table Talk he gives the following portraiture of their theatrical successes:—

What squabbles we used to have about Kean and Miss Stephens, the only theatrical favourites I ever had! Mrs. Billington had got some notion that Miss Stephens would never make a singer, and it was the torment of Perry's life (as he told me in confidence) that he could not get any two people to be of the same opinion on any one point. I shall not easily forget bringing him my account of her first appearance in the Beggar's Opera. I have reason to remember that article: it was almost the last I ever wrote with any pleasure to myself. I had been down on a visit to my friends near Chertsey, and, on my return, had stopped at an inn at Kingston-upon-Thames, where I had got the Beggar's Opera, and had read it overnight. The next day I walked cheerfully to town. It was a fine sunny morning, in the end of autumn, and as I repeated the beautiful song, "Life knows no return of spring," I meditated my next day's criticism, trying to do all the justice I could to so inviting a subject. I was not a little proud of it by anticipation. I had just then begun to stammer out my sentiments on paper, and was in a kind of honey-moon of authorship.

I deposited my account of the play at the Morning Chronicle office in the afternoon, and went to see Miss Stephens as Polly. Those were happy times, in which she first came out in this character, in Mandane, where she sang the delicious air, "If o'er the cruel tyrant Love," (so as it can never be sung again,) in Love in a Village, where the scene opened with her and Miss Matthews in a painted garden of roses and honeysuckles, and "Hope thou nurse of young Desire," thrilled from two sweet voices in turn. Oh! may my ears sometimes still drink the same sweet sounds, embalmed with the spirit of youth, of health, and joy, but in the thoughts of an instant, but in a dream of fancy, and I shall hardly need to complain! When I got back, after the play, Perry called out, with his cordial, grating voice, "Well, how did she do?" and on my speaking in high terms, answered, that "he had been to dine with his friend the duke, that some conversation had passed on the subject, he was afraid it was not the thing, it was not the true sostenuto style; but as I had written the article" (holding my peroration on the Beggar's Opera carelessly in his hand) "it might pass!" I could perceive that the rogue licked his lips at it, and had already in imagination "bought golden opinions of all sorts of people" by this very criticism, and I had the satisfaction the next day to meet Miss Stephens coming out of the editor's room, who had been to thank him for his very flattering account of her.

I was sent to see Kean the first night of his performance of Shylock, when there were about a hundred people in the pit, but from his masterly and spirited delivery of the first striking speech, "On such a day you called me dog," &c. I perceived it was a hollow thing. So it was given out in the Chronicle, but Perry was continually at me as other people were at him, and was afraid it would not last. It was to no purpose I said it would last: yet I am in the right hitherto. It has been said, ridiculously, that Mr. Kean was written up in the Chronicle. I beg leave to state my opinion that no actor can be written up or down by a paper. An author may be puffed into notice, or damned by criticism, because his book may not have been read. An artist may be over-rated, or undeservedly decried, because the public is not much accustomed to see or judge of pictures. But an actor is judged by his peers, the play-going public, and must stand or fall by his own merits or defects. The critic may give the tone or have a casting voice where popular opinion is divided; but he can no more force that opinion either way, or wrest it from its base in common-sense and feeling, than he can move Stonehenge. Mr. Kean had, however, physical disadvantages and strong prejudices to encounter, and so far the liberal and independent part of the press might have been of service in helping him to his seat in the public favour.

THE GATHERER

"I am but a Gatherer and disposer of other men's stuff."

    —Wotton.

INSANITY

A French physician, in a recent work on the moral and physical causes of insanity, noticing the influence of professions in promoting this affliction, brings forward a curious table, showing the relative proportion of different professions in a mass of 164 lunatics. It runs thus:—merchants, 50; military men, 33; students, 25; administrateurs et employés, 21; advocates, notaries, and men of business, 10; artists, 8; chemists, 4; medical practitioners, 4; farmers, 4; sailors, 3; engineers, 2. Total 164.

Never were the afflictions of Insanity more vividly portrayed than in the following lines from Churchill's Epistle to Hogarth:—

Sure 'tis a curse which angry fates impose,
To mortify man's arrogance, that those
Who're fashioned of some better sort of clay,
Must sooner than the common herd decay.
What bitter pangs must humble genius feel,
In their last hour to view a Swift and Steele!
How must ill-boding horrors fill their breast,
When she beholds men, mark'd above the rest
For qualities most dear, plung'd from that height,
And sunk, deep sunk, in second childhood's night!
Are men indeed such things? and are the best
More subject to this evil than the rest,
To drivel out whole years of idiot breath,
And sit the monuments of living death?
O galling circumstance to human pride!
Abasing thought! but not to be deny'd.
With curious art, the brain too finely wrought,
Preys on herself, and is destroyed by thought.
Constant attention wears the active mind,
Blots out her pow'rs and leaves a blank behind.

MACADAMIZATION

The cost of converting Regent-street, Whitehall-place, and Palace-yard, into broken stone roads, has been £6,055 8s. 3d.

Value of old pavement taken up and broken for that purpose £6,787 7s. 0d.

Total: £12,842 15 3

Parliamentary Papers

SILK

According to a late statement of Mr. Huskisson, the silk manufacture of England now reaches the enormous amount of fourteen millions sterling per annum, and is consequently after cotton, the greatest staple of the country.

NEW LAMP