who, when her husband (the Beloved Tox- | advice. You are to rub your temples with otius) died, was inclined to despair, yet castor-oil, or to drink marigold and sage "checkt the ill-suggestion." She it was pounded and infused in white wine. "A who was charged with madness, and was secret to obtain a good memory is to take greatly tempted to give her accusers back a swallow's heart," mixed with various "unhandsome Language," yet restrained other things, and eat a piece "as big as a her tongue, remembering for Whose sake nut" every morning for a month. And she suffered such injuries. We may smile our dictionary adds, "You may carry about at the simplicity of these things, but can you the Wing of a Hoop or Lapwing, the we mend their piety? "Ah! how duskish Tooth of a Badger, or his left Paw with the are my thoughts in this house of Clay!" Nails on; though there are those who says the quaint old writer of the "Chris- think these are trifling things." tian Sacrifice;" and each generation gropes, after its own fashion, through the dim twilight, and up the dark steps that lead to the Eternal Father, seeking, "if haply they might feel after him and find him."

We are also supplied with cooking receipts, and recipes for cordials and homemade wines. I have just come upon one of the latter, which I hear is still made abroad, and is quite excellent, very superior to our English elderberry wine as a remedy for colds and coughs :

bottle it.

The last book on the shelf is one which Elizabeth must have been given only a "ELDER FLOWER WINE." year or two before her death. It is the "Dictionaire Economique, or the Family twelve gallons of water. Boil till two galThirty pounds single loaf sugar to Dictionary, Done into English." It is lons be wasted, "scumming it well" the full of information on household matters, while. Let it stand till it "be as cool as and gives us a great many interesting Wort." Then add two or three spoonfuls hints. For example, under the heading of yeast, and when it works add two of Age, we are favored with a number of receipts for prolonging life. We are ad- quarts of elder-blossom, picked from the vised to drink of some decoction "two stalks. Stir every day until it has ceased handsome glasses every morning fasting," Strain it and put it into a vesssel. Tie it "working, which will be in five or six days. in which case we shall reach a great age. down, and let it stand two months. Then We are told what to do when a certain "distemper" attacks our hens and makes them appear "pensive and melancholick." We can learn here how to make "Apricock Wine," and how to cure asthma by "taking a handful of common wood-lice," wrapping them in a cloth, and steeping them in a pint of white wine, which is afterwards to be given to the patient to drink. A child with the whooping cough should wear round its neck the root of garden flag newly gathered; for epilepsy the sick person is recommended to wear a girdle of wolf-skin, or to hang round his throat some mistletoe from an oak, some coral, or an emerald, or the "Forehead Bone of an Ass." "A ring made of the foot of an Elk, worn upon the fourth Finger, not only cures the falling sickness, but also convulsions, and all contractions of the nerves."

There are also "Cosmeticks, Ornaments, or Washes for the Fair Sex," among which we find receipts for "an unguent that brings the skin to exquisite beauty," and for an "admirable Cosmetick to make a pleasing ruddy complexion." To take wrinkles out of the face, "anoint with oil of myrrh, and cover over with a waxed cloth." And for those who lose their memory there is a great deal of good

Such are the books that compose the library of a lady of the seventeenth century. The choice of books is small, nor are any of them remarkable as works of literature. Yet they sufficed Elizabeth, and it may be that though she read little she thought all the more. And for us, too, these superannuated books have a value if they serve to lift, be it ever so little, the veil that shrouds the daily life of two hundred years ago.

ANNE FELLowes.

From The Army and Navy Magazine.
VALENTINE BAKER.

THE name of Baker Pasha as a soldier is a household word in Europe. Born in 1825, the scion of a family distinguished for services rendered to their country so far back as the reign of Edward III., Valentine Baker entered the British army as a cornet in the 12th Lancers in 1848. So vast is the British Empire that the epoch rarely comes round when every portion of it can boast of absolute tranquillity. The public mind had just begun

to rest from the recital of the bloody and | It may readily be gathered from the forehardly contested battles on the Sutlej in 1846, when it was startled by the news that Sir Harry Smith, who, for his services in the Sikh War, had been nominated governor of the Cape, was engaged in a contest, almost for existence, with the Kafirs. To the Cape, then, in 1852, the 12th Lancers were despatched, and it was in fighting with his regiment there that Valentine Baker first gave an example of the cool, calm courage, the presence of mind in danger, the quickness of thought under fire, which specially characterized | him when in later years he commanded an army in Bulgaria. It is related of him that on one occasion he was engaged in close conflict with a powerful Kafir when his horse was disabled and fell under him. Baker had just time to disengage himself when he found that his first opponent had been joined by several comrades. Two of these he promptly despatched with his lance; a third was killed by a corporal who had run to his assistance, the rest made off. Young as he was, he had not lost his head, and a position, full of danger to a man liable to be flurried, was turned to good account by the coolness and calmness in danger which are the first necessities of a soldier who aspires to command. In 1856 Baker obtained his troop, and in 1859 his majority. He then exchanged into the 10th Hussars, became lieut.-colonel, and commandant of that regiment in 1860. That command he held for thirteen years. Over and over again did men of his own branch of the service inform me that whilst in theoretical knowledge he was not to be surpassed, he possessed that rare quality of coolness and self-possession which enables a man when under the roar of cannon and the fire of musketry to think and act as though he were on a peaceful parade. Many used even to indicate him as the future leader of a British army, and it must be admitted that, having regard to his conduct in Bulgaria when leading under most trying conditions a Turkish army, he displayed the qualities which would have justified his nomination even to so important a post.

going remarks that throughout his regimental career Baker had acted on the principle which guided the Austrian fieldmarshal. He had considered himself ignorant of his profession so long as any knowledge of it remained to be acquired. For several years it had been his practice to note the defects and improvements in his branch of the service which thought and experience forced upon him. Only two years after the close of the Crimean War (1858) he had written a work on "The British Cavalry, with Remarks on its Practical Organization." Two years later, at the time when the government were hesitating as to the manner in which they should treat the great national question of the defence of the country, Baker stimulated their action by the timely publication of a pamphlet entitled "Our National Defences Practically Considered," full of wise suggestions. In 1869 he published a pamphlet on Army Reform." This pamphlet is well worthy of perusal at the present day; for it is remarkable as suggesting the mode of enlistment through the constabulary which, amid the many nostrums for the improvement of the enlisting system which have been tried since that period, is the one which has proved most effective. His book on the "War in Bulgaria" is a record which every soldier should study. There are few more splendid feats of arms recorded in history than his retreat from Ottukoi to Constantinople in the face of vastly superior forces. As a piece of military work it was absolutely faultless. In Egypt, in the Soudan, his disinterestedness, his devotion, his daring, warmed towards him every heart in England capable of feeling sympathy. Has he not suffered suffi ciently? Is it possible to atone more fully; and if it is, what further form of atonement is possible? Or is the punishment to be eternal? I cannot believe that the high authority in whose hands the decision rests will lay down a principle, the reverse of the principle laid down in the gospel, that there is a civil offence for which there is no forgiveness.

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From The Quarterly Review.
THE MALAY ARCHIPELAGO.*

this fairy region. Earth has no lovelier panorama to display, no realm more faTHAT the whole vast expanse of the vored with her choicest gifts, none more southern Pacific Archipelago, with all its lovely to sight, more precious to the hav island worlds, from the tropical luxuriance ing. Land and sea, climate and sky, all of New Guinea and the Polynesian groups, unite to charm; human nature itself, down to the extremest glacier-capped flawed and incomplete as it everywhere peaks of New Zealand and the ice-belted | is, here wears a gentler and almost attracvolcanoes of Antarctic desolation, is por- tive aspect; here, if anywhere, is the tion and parcel of our own destined inher- Golden Region of the earth. itance, as a field for British enterprise and a mart for British trade, is what must Two ladies, each a writer of well-earned now no longer be regarded as a theory, a fame both for accuracy of delineation and prophecy, an anticipation, but an actual brilliancy of local coloring, have done fact, already half .accomplished, soon to their best, in the works the titles of which be entirely so. This truth, long since ap- head this article, to make us in some prehended by navigators and colonists, at measure familiar with these "Fortunate first vaguely, then with increasing dis- Islands" of the East; Miss Bird, now tinctness of outline, has indeed hitherto Mrs. Bishop, for the Malay Peninsula, found but imperfect acceptance in the and Mrs. Bridges for the wonderful, and home-staying English mind, by which it in some respects unique, island of Java. has been either neglectfully disregarded, If their writings be supplemented, as they or viewed with somewhat of suspicion, or should be, by Mr. Burbidge's valuable even dislike. Now at last boldly formu- but more specialistic "Gardens of the lated in ministerial ears by the manifesto Sun," a work principally concerned with of the great Sydney Conference a few the varied flora of Borneo, and by the months since, it has crystallized into an older and more substantial researches of axiom, henceforth to be accepted, wel- Mr. A. Wallace, co-extensive with the come or unwelcome, not by ourselves totality of the southern Malayan Archionly, but by all the colonizers whatever of pelago from Sumatra to New Guinea, and the civilized world, Old or New. We lastly by those of Mr. F. Jagor in the may, if we choose, regret it; we may, in Philippines, an idea faint and incomcompany with the pseudo-philanthropists, plete, doubtless, as all book-derived ideas decry it, protest against it; we cannot of places and men necessarily are, yet disclaim nor abolish its reality, fast grow-sufficiently correct in the main may be ing into complete accomplishment. formed even by the fireside Englishman of these equatorial portals of the Pacific.

Such considerations as these create a new interest in the vast and fair archipelago, which links south-eastern Asia with our own Australasian colonies. The shores and islands, which formed the furthest limit of ancient geography, have now become, in the course of modern enterprise, a chief gateway to the Pacific. Nor is their interest less for the sake of their own varied beauty. Artist, naturalist, ethnologist, lover of scenery, lover of science, the searcher after knowledge, the pursuer after mere pleasure, have each and all ample space and marge enough in

True, no pages read, no pictures or photographs studied, can adequately image forth to the mind that beauty of landscape and detail, compared with the reality of which Spenser's fancied "bower of bliss" would show as a rough-grown shrubbery. Yet we will, at whatever risk of failure, ourselves attempt the task of description, and pass in review the prin cipal lands and waters that combine to make up this wonderful landscape from west to east; in hopes thus also to convey, if only incidentally, some notion of the degree in which British energy has already impressed its own peculiar mark on those regions, and of the possession which destiny seems to reserve to our