The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 19, No. 540, March 31, 1832

27. A Philosopher. H. Wyatt. Admirably coloured: the flesh tints and deep expression of the features will not escape notice.

52. The Town of Menagio, on the Lake of Como. T.C. Hofland. A scene of beautiful repose in the artist's best style.

57. Portrait of Mrs. Davenport in the character of the Nurse in "Romeo and Juliet." James Holmes. Almost speakingly characteristic. You may imagine the actress drawling out, "awear—y," and her attitude admirably accords with "Fie, how my bones ache."

114. The Baptism. G. Harvey, S.A. Foremost among the attractions of the Exhibition, though of a serious turn. The quotation will best describe the subject:

"Here, upon a semicircular ledge of rocks, over a narrow chasm, down which the tiny stream played in a murmuring waterfall, and divided into two equal parts, sat the congregation, devoutly listening to their minister, who stood before them on what might well be called a small natural pulpit of living stone.... Divine service was closed, and a row of maidens, all clothed in purest white, arranged themselves at the foot of the pulpit, with the infants about to be baptized.

"The fathers of the infants, just as if they had been in their own Kirk, had been sitting there during worship, and now stood up before the minister.... Some of the younger ones in that semicircle kept gazing down into the pool, in which the whole scene was reflected; and now and then, in spite of the grave looks or admonishing whispers of their elders, letting a pebble fall into the water, that they might judge of its depth from the length of time that elapsed before the clear air-bells lay sparkling on the agitated surface."—Vide "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life."

155. His Most Gracious Majesty William the Fourth. H.E. Dawe. The King in his state robes: the likeness is excellent.

156. The Grecian Choirs at the Temple of Apollo. A sweet composition by W. Linton, from Petrarch; "representing the passage of the Choirs across the narrow strait between Delos and Rhenia, by a bridge magnificently decorated with gold and garlands, rich stuffs and tapestry," the splendour of which is enhanced by the brightness of a summer's morning.

162. "In peace love tunes the Shepherd's reed," a pretty composition from this line by Scott, painted by Mrs. John Hakewill. A rustic boy and girl are seated beneath a woody bank: the intent expression of the boy playing the pipe and of the listening girl are really delightful.

195. Edinburgh Castle from the Grass Market. D. Roberts. A fine picture of the associated sublimities of nature and art.

208. The Ettrick Shepherd in his Forest Plaid. J.W. Gordon. Correct in likeness, but strangely shadowed.

224. Coronation of William IV. The first picture of a series to represent the procession to the Abbey on the day of the Coronation of his present Majesty, containing the portraits of distinguished personages who attended on that occasion.—Painted for his Majesty, by R.B. Davis. This picture occupies comparatively as much length on the walls as its description would in our columns: it is some yards long, and perhaps four feet in height. It is but hastily painted. The framework is excellent, and well appointed for St. James's, Windsor, or Buckingham Palace. We hope the picture will be liked there as well as the frame.

244. Elizabeth relieving the Exile, by Miss A. Beaumont, is an interesting picture, from the well-remembered incident in the Exiles of Siberia.

296. Interior of a Gaming-house. H. Pidding. We take this to represent one of the salons of Frescati's, or other Parisian gaming-house, where females are admitted to participate in the game, and witness the madness and folly of the stronger sex. The party are chiefly about a rouge et noir table, and are in the highest stage of recklessness. One of them, a female, has flung herself from the lure across a chair, apparently in the last stage of wretchedness and despair. The excitement of the players is powerfully wrought up and contrasted with the sang froid of the croupier, who seems to treat all the world as a ball. Other persons are seeking fresh excitement at the hands of a liveried waiter. But we must leave the rest, which it would take a column or two to describe, especially as to our mind, a gaming-house furnishes an epitome of all the bad passions that rankle in the human breast.

301. The Reform Question. Thomas Clater. A pleasanter scene than the preceding picture. A village blacksmith is reading the newspaper, by a candle held by a boy, to a listening neighbour. The puzzling of the reader, the vacant stare of the candle-holder, and the intent expression of the absorbed listener, are excellent. Perhaps the light of the candle is objectionable.

311. Love in the Dairy. H.H. Hobday. A ticklish village amour: a young fellow importuning a buxom dairy-maid, and apparently on the verge of conquest; in the distant door-way stands a mar-loving, wrinkled old woman, whose crabbed face ought not to be trusted in a dairy.

466. The Lord Chancellor, seated in a chair, in his official robes, by J. Lonsdale. The likeness is excellent, as are the robes, wig, ruffles, &c. but the great seal and mace are even dingier than the orignals. We could have spared the books thrown on the floor, though the paper register in one of them almost comes out.

We reserve a few pictures for another visit. The Portraits, as might be expected, are numerous. The King's supporters are two ex-sheriffs: by the way, how many good turns does office yield to art; there is nothing like a portrait to perpetuate your brief authority. Works of imagination are scarce, especially as empainting the ideas of poets and passion-writers has become fashionable.

NOTES OF A READER

THE VEGETABLE WORLD

We pencil a few passages, at random, from Part 14 of Knowledge for the People—(Botany, concluded.)

Why does snow, when in contact with leaves and stems, melt more speedily than when lodged upon dead substances?

Because of the internal heat of the plants, heat being a production of the vegetable as well as animal body, though in a much lower degree in the former than the latter. Mr. Hunter appears to have detected this heat by a thermometer applied in frosty weather to the internal parts of vegetables newly opened. It is evident that a certain appropriate portion of heat is a necessary stimulus to the constitution of every plant, without which its living principle is destroyed.—Smith.

Why is fructification so important to plants?

Because it continues them by seeds, and, according to Sir James Smith, "all other modes of propagation are but the extension of an individual, and, sooner or later, terminate in its total extinction." Dr. Drummond is of a contrary opinion, and quotes the following fact:—"In South America there is a species of bamboo which forms forests in the marshes of many leagues in extent, and yet Mutis, who botanized for nearly twenty years in the parts where it grows, was never able to detect the fructifications."—Humboldt.

The produce of vegetable seeds in a hundred-fold degree is common, and many trees and shrubs bring forth their fruit by thousands. A single plant of the poppy will produce above 30,000 seeds; and, of tobacco, above 40,000; and Buffon remarks, that from the seeds of a single elm-tree, one hundred thousand young elms may be raised from the product of one year. Some ferns, it is said, produce their seeds by millions.

Why should seeds be uniformly kept dry before sown?

Because the least damp will cause an attempt at vegetation, when the seeds necessarily die, as the process cannot, as they are situated, go on.

Why, in summer, is continued watering required to newly sown seeds?

Because, if the soil is only moistened at the time of sowing, it induces the projection of the radicle, or first root, which, in very parching weather, and in clayey cutting soil, withers away, and the crop is consequently lost, for want of a continued supply of moisture.

Why is selection important for procuring abundance of genuine seeds?

Because we may then choose the most vigorous plants, which naturally prove of greater fecundity. Thus, in 1823, Mr. Shirreff marked one vigorous wheat plant, near the centre of a field, which produced him 2,473 grains. These were dibbled in the autumn of the same year, the produce sown broadcast the second and third years, and the fourth harvest produced forty quarters of sound grain. A fine purple-topped Swedish turnip produced 100,296 grains, which was seed enough for five imperial acres, and thus, in three years, one turnip would produce seed enough for Great Britain for a year.—Quarterly Journal of Agriculture.

Why are winds the great agents by which seeds are diffused?

Because seeds are, as it were, provided with various wings for seizing on the breeze. The thistle and dandelion are familiar examples of this mode of dissemination. "How little," Sir J.E. Smith observes, "are children aware, as they blow away the seeds of dandelion, or stick burs in sport upon each other's clothes, that they are fulfilling one of the great ends of nature." Dr. Woodward calculates, that one seed of the common spear thistle will produce "at the first crop, twenty-four thousand, and consequently five hundred and twenty-six millions of seeds, at the second."

Some plants discharge their seeds. Thus, a certain fungus has the property of ejecting its seeds with great force and rapidity, and with a loud cracking noise, and yet it is no bigger than a pin's head!

Why is a milky fluid found in the cocoa-nut?

Because in this case, as well as in a few others, all the fluids destined to nourish the embryo of the fruit does not harden, whence a greater or less quantity of this kind of mild emulsion is contained within the kernel.

Why are certain eatable roots unfit for the table when the plants have flowered?

Because the mucus or proper juice in the tubular cells being appropriated for perfecting the flower stem, the flower, and the fruit, is absorbed as the fructification of the stem advances; and, as these are perfected, the cells are emptied, and their sides become ligneous.

Why is the Jerusalem Artichoke so called?

Because of its corruption from its Italian name, Girasole Articiocco, sunflower artichoke, as the plant was first brought from Peru to Italy, and thence propagated throughout Europe.—Smith.

AMERICAN MANNERS

We suspect certain pages of Mrs. Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans to be highly coloured, but they are cleverly written, and will be read with considerable interest.

A Backwoodsman.

"We visited one farm, which interested us particularly from its wild and lonely situation, and from the entire dependence of the inhabitants upon their own resources. It was a partial clearing in the very heart of the forest. The house was built on the side of a hill, so steep that a high ladder was necessary to enter the front door, while the back one opened against the hill-side; at the foot of this sudden eminence ran a clear stream, whose bed had been deepened into a little reservoir, just opposite the house. A noble field of Indian corn stretched away into the forest on one side, and a few half-cleared acres, with a shed or two upon them, occupied the other, giving accommodation to cows, horses, pigs, and chickens innumerable. Immediately before the house was a small potato garden, with a few peach and apple trees. The house was built of logs, and consisted of two rooms, besides a little shanty or lean-to, that was used as a kitchen. Both rooms were comfortably furnished with good beds, drawers, &c. The farmer's wife, and a young woman who looked like her sister, were spinning, and three little children were playing about. The woman told me that they spun and wove all the cotton and woollen garments of the family, and knit all the stockings; her husband, though not a shoe-maker by trade, made all the shoes. She manufactured all the soap and candles they used, and prepared her sugar from the sugar-trees on their farm. All she wanted with money, she said, was to buy coffee, tea, and whiskey, and she could 'get enough any day by sending a batch of butter and chicken to market.' They used no wheat, nor sold any of their corn, which, though it appeared a very large quantity, was not more than they required to make their bread and cakes of various kinds, and to feed all their live stock during the winter. She did not look in health, and said they had all had ague in 'the fall' but she seemed contented, and proud of her independence; though it was in somewhat a mournful accent that she said, ''Tis strange to us to see company: I expect the sun may rise and set a hundred times before I shall see another human that does not belong to the family.'

"These people were indeed, independent—Robinson Crusoe was hardly more so, and they eat and drink abundantly; but yet it seemed to me that there was something awful and almost unnatural in their loneliness. No village bell ever summoned them to prayer, where they might meet the friendly greeting of their fellow-men. When they die, no spot sacred by ancient reverence will receive their bones—Religion will not breathe her sweet and solemn farewell upon their grave; the husband or the father will dig the pit that is to hold them, beneath the nearest tree; he will himself deposit them within it, and the wind that whispers through the boughs will be their only requiem. But then they pay neither taxes nor tithes, are never expected to pull off a hat or to make a curtsey, and will live and die without hearing or uttering the dreadful words, 'God save the king.'"

A Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati.

"It was in the middle of summer, but the service we were recommended to attend did not begin till it was dark. The church was well lighted, and crowded almost to suffocation. On entering, we found three priests standing side by side, in a sort of tribune, placed where the altar usually is, handsomely fitted up with crimson curtains, and elevated about as high as our pulpits. We took our places in a pew close to the rail which surrounded it.

"The priest who stood in the middle was praying; the prayer was extravagantly vehement, and offensively familiar in expression; when this ended a hymn was sung, and then another priest took the centre place and preached. The sermon had considerable eloquence, but of a frightful kind. The preacher described, with ghastly minuteness, the last feeble fainting moments of human life, and then the gradual progress of decay after death, which he followed through every process up to the loathsome stage of decomposition. Suddenly changing his tone, which had been that of sober, accurate description, into the shrill voice of horror, he bent forward his head, as if to gaze on some object beneath the pulpit, and made known to us what he saw in the pit that seemed to open before him. The device was certainly a happy one for giving effect to his description of hell. No image that fire, flame, brimstone, molten lead, or red-hot pincers could supply, with flesh, nerves, and sinews quivering under them, was omitted. The perspiration ran in streams from the face of the preacher; his eyes rolled, his lips were covered with foam, and every feature had the deep expression of horror it would have borne, had he, in truth, been gazing at the scene he described. The acting was excellent. At length he gave a languishing look to his supporters on each side, as if to express his feeble state, and then sat down, and wiped the drops of agony from his brow.

"The other two priests arose, and began to sing a hymn. It was some seconds before the congregation could join as usual; every upturned face looked pale and horror-struck. When the singing ended, another took the centre place, and began in a sort of coaxing, affectionate tone, to ask the congregation if what their dear brother had spoken had reached their hearts? Whether they would avoid the hell he had made them see? 'Come, then!' he continued, stretching out his arms towards them, 'come to us, and tell us so, and we will make you see Jesus, the dear gentle Jesus, who shall save you from it. But you must come to him! You must not be ashamed to come to him! This night you shall tell him that you are not ashamed of him; we will make way for you; we will clear the bench for anxious sinners to sit upon. Come, then! come to the anxious bench, and we will show you Jesus! Come! Come! Come!'