birds are serenading one another; or surrender ourselves to that more pleasing sensation, when the serenity of Nature's silence imparts a congenial balm and tranquillity to the heart. Gazing on the face of Nature, we shall encounter no human passions no distrust no jealousy-no intermission of friendship or attraction; even her frowns are beautiful, and we need not fear that death shall tear her from us. We look upon an immortal countenance. A morning thus dedicated is an act of the purest piety; it is offering to the Deity a heart made happy by the contemplation of his works; and if I can prevail upon a single reader to detach himself for a time from crowds and enthralments, and betake himself to the sunny meadows or the green twilight of the woods, I shall felicitate myself on not having quite unprofitably employed the morning of "To-day."

experiments on phosphori, discovered that oyster shells thrown into a common fire, and calcined for about half an hour, and then brought to a person who had been previously some minutes in a dark room, many of them exhibit beautiful specimens of prismatic colours. Hence, Mr. W. contends, that these kinds of phosphori do not excite the light they had previously received, but that they are set on fire by the sun's rays, and continue for some time a slow combustion after they are withdrawn from the light. Hull, May, 1824. T. A. C.

SPIRIT OF THE

Public Journals.

POMPEII.

No. V.

LIGHTNING AURORA BO

REALIS.

PARTIAL flashes of lightning, aurora borealis, &c. are to be beautifully imitated by taking, in a spoon, about a drachm of the powder or seeds of liquipodium, and throwing it against a candle, all other light being excluded. Powdered resin is equally fit for the purpose, but from its adhesive quality sticks to the hand, or any thing on which it may fall. A very entertaining sort of corruscation of light is obtained by the use of phosphorised lime When a small quantity (twenty or thirty grains) is thrown into a glass of water, bubbles of gas are successively extracted from it, which, rising to the surface of the water, are inflamed in coming in contact with the air of the atmosphere, producing a flash of bright light; and as a succession of such bubbles is produced during a considerable time, a repetition of the flashes will continue for a quarter of an hour. In this experiment, the gas which is extracted from the preparation is a phosphorised hydrogen; and it is a property of this kind of gas to take fire the moment it comes in contact with the common or respirable air. As this gas has a disagreeable smell, it will be proper to place the glass either under a chimney or on the outside of a window, close to the sash. If a piece of thick brown paper be well rubbed in a dark room, the paper thus excited will dart flashes of electric light to the fingers, to a key, or to any other conductor of electricity that may be presented to it: but the paper must be thoroughly dry and warni. Wilson, in his

the sea, which once washed its walls, subsequently left it in the midst of one of these delicious plains made by nature for the dissolution of all industry in the Italian dweller, and for the common places of poetry in all the northern abusers of the pen; that it was ravaged by every barbarian, who in turn was called a conqueror on the Italian soil, and was successively the pillage of Carthaginian and of Roman; until at last the Augustan age saw its little circuit quieted into the centre of a colony, and man, finding nothing more to rob, attempted to rob no

more.

When man had ceased his molestation, nature commenced hers; and this unfortunate little city was, by a curious fate, to be at once extinguished and preserved, to perish from the face of the Roman empire, and to live when Rome was a nest of monks and mummers, and her cmpire torn into fragments for Turk, Russian, Austrian, Prussian, and the whole host of barbarian names that were once as the dust of her feet. In the year of the Christian era 63, an earthquake shewed the city on what tenure her lease was held. Whole streets were thrown down, and the evidences of hasty repair are still to be detected.

From this period, occasional warnings were given in slight shocks; until, in the year 79, Vesuvius poured out all his old accumulation of terrors at once, and on the clearing away of the cloud of fire and ashes which covered Campania for four days, Pompeii, with all its multitude, was gone. The Romans seem to have been as fond of villas as if every soul of them had made fortunes in Cheapside, and the whole southern coast was covered with

the summer palaces of those lords of the world. Vesuvius is now a formidable foundation for a house whose inhabitants may not wish to be sucked into a furnace ten thousand fathoms deep; or roasted sub aere aperto; but it was then asleep, and had never flung up spark or stone from time immemorial. To those who look upon it now in its terrors, grim blasted, and lifting up its sooty forehead among the piles of perpetual smoke that are to be enlightened only by its bursts of fire, the very throne of Pluto and Vulcan together, no force of fancy may picture what it was when the Roman built his palaces and pavilions on its side. A pyramid of three thousand feet high, painted over with garden, forest, vineyard, and orchard, ripening under the southern sun, zoned with colonades, and turrets, and golden roofs, and marble porticos, with the eternal azure of the Campanian sky for its canopy, and the Mediterranean at its feet, glittering in the colours of sunrise, noon, and evening, like an infinite Turkey carpet let down from the steps of a throne, all this was turned into cinders, lava, and hot-water, on (if we can trust to chronology) the 1st day of November, anno Domini 79, in the first year of the emperor Titus. The whole story is told in the younger Pliny's letters; or, if the illustration of one who thought himself born for a describer, Dio Cassius, be sought, it will be found that this eruption was worthy of the work it had to do, and was a handsome recompense for the long slumber of the volcano. The Continent, throughout its whole southern_range, probably felt this vigorous awakening. Rome was covered with the ashes, of which Northern Africa, Egypt, and Asia Minor, had their share; the sun was turned into blood and darkness, and the people thought that the destruction of the world was come.

At the close of the eruption, Vesuvius stood forth the naked giant that he is at this hour-the palaces and the gardens were all dust and air-the sky was stained with that cloud which still sits like a crown of wrath upon his brow-the plain at his foot, where Herculaneum and Pompeii spread their circuses and temples, like children's toys, was covered over with sand, charcoal, and smoke; and the whole was left for a mighty moral against the danger of trusting to the sleep of a volcano. All was then at an end with the cities below; the population were burnt, and had no more need of houses. The Roman nobles had no passion for combustion, and kept aloof; the winds and rain, robbers, and the malaria, were the sole tenants of the land; and in this way rolled

fifteen hundred years over the bones of the vintners, sailors, and snug citizens of the Vesuvian cities. But their time was to come; and their beds were to be perforated by French and Neapolitan pickaxes, and to be visited by English feet, and sketched and written about, and lithographed, till all the world wished that they had never been disturbed. The first discoveries were accidental, for no Neapolitan ever struck a spade into the ground that he could help, nor harboured a voluntary idea but of macaroni, intrigue, monkery, or the gaming-table. The spade struck upon a key, which, of course, belonged to a door, the door had an inscription, and the names of the buried cities were brought to light, to the boundless perplexity of the learned, the merciless curiosity of the blue-stockings of the 17th century, and all others to come, and the thankless, reckless, and ridiculous profit of that whole race of rascality, the guides, cicerones, abbés, and antiquarians.

But Italian vigour is of all things the most easily exhausted, where it has not the lash or the bribe to feed its waste, and the cities slumbered for twenty years more, till, in 1711, a duke, who was digging for marbles to urn into mortar, found a Hercules, and a whole heap of fractured beauties, a row of Greek columns, and a little temple. Again, the cities slumbered, till, in 1738, a king of Naples, on whom light may the earth rest, commenced digging, and streets, temples, theatres opened out to the sun, to be at rest no more.

So few details of the original catastrophe are to be found in historians, that we can scarcely estimate the actual human suffering, which is, after all, almost the only thing to be considered as a misfortune. It is probable that the population of, at least, Pompeii had time to make their escape. A pedlar's pack would contain all the valuables left in Pompeii; and the people who had time thus to clear their premises, must have been singularly fond of hazard if they staid lingering within the reach of the eruption. But some melancholy evidences_remain that all were not so successful. In one of the last excavations made by the French, four female skeletons were found lying together, with their ornaments, bracelets, and rings, and with their little hoard of coins in gold and silver. They had probably been suffocated by the sulphureous vapour. In a wine-cellar, known by its jars ranged round the wall, a male skeleton, supposed to be that of the master, by his seal-ring, was found as if he had perished in the attempt at forcing the door. another, a male skeleton was found with

In

try, and sufficiently filthy in their aspect; by which means they ensure a livelihood if they are moderately offensive, with the chance of a fortune where they are so lucky as to be unbearable. But the adventurers of evening consist entirely of females. Blind women, generally young, but always perfectly neat and clean, (loss of sight being an infirmity, from whatever cause, very common in this country,) and children from about four to eight years of age, picked out for this calling according to the degree of their personal beauty, and dressed to the greatest possible advantage, without any show of poverty at all. These night practitioners start altogether upon later lights than those of day, to interest (a laudable improvement,) instead of disgusting you out of your money. The blind women are commonly led about by some female of creditable appearance; one sister very frequently, in this way, accompanying another. Many of them are handsome, and these, I suspect, do well. A man can hardly see a fine girl, of nineteen or twenty years of age, with all circumstances of beauty and desirableness about her, completely destroyed by such a visitation as blindness, without feeling disposed to do something in her favour. As for the little girls of five years old (with their red shoes and broad sashes), they are not the children, I understand, of persons immediately in distress; but the lower orders, very constantly, where they have an interesting child, are content to make a living by this disgraceful exhibition of her. This is very disgusting, but it succeeds wonderfully; and, critically speaking, it ought to do so. Girls, upon every principle of mendicity, should make incomparably better beggars (for instance) than old men. I have been conquered myself, in London, a hundred times, by the sight of half-starved twins, though I knew perfectly they were none of the woman's that carried them; and have given a shilling to a match-girl of fourteen,-cant, and rags, and dirt, and all, when I should certainly have cried upon the beadle, if I had been waylaid by her great-grandmother.

This is not a season (1809) for amusements to flourish in Lisbon. There are no bull-fights now-in token of the national sorrow; nor any burning of here tics. Missing the first sight (except for once) does not vehemently distress me. I hate animal combats; and, still more, sports in which animals are tormented by men. Burney, in his "Musical Tour," (Germany, 1772,) gives a whimsical account, I recollect (from the "bill") of an exhibition of this kind at Vienna. After

enumerating a number of combats between different ferocious animals-first, a wild boar to be baited-next, a great bear to be torn by dogs-then, another boar to be baited by very hungry dogs defended by iron armour-he concludes with, "lastly, a ferocious and hungry bear, which has had no food for eight days, (or words to that effect,) will attack a wild bull, and eat him alive upon the spot; and if he should be unable to complete the business, a wolf will be ready to help him!" This is not so offensive to me as our fights between domestic animals-taking the dog from under our chair, and compelling him to be worried till he dies;-but I will no more endure such an exhibition even as this, or allow it to be justified (the state apology) by a tu quoque reference to the sports of the chase, than I will allow the sabring an enemy in a charge, or in the heat of fresh pursuit, to justify the cutting prisoners' throats, or torturing them to death after the heat of the battle is over. Indeed, among a tolerable variety of brutal entertainments, which, thank God, are something upon the wane in England; and which (what is worse) are all made the subjects of wager too, and so carried to the extreme of cruelty by the spirit of gain, the only excuse I could ever find for our famous sport of prize-fighting was not the courage which it demands for the bullfighter displays as much—but that the combatants certainly act advisedly (if not under durance) for the sake of a pecuniary recompense; add to which, in whatever way the contest may eventually terminate, the probability is, that two rascals get each of them a sound beating.

Diversions of an expensive cast, however, (I speak with reference to the Italian Opera,) can never be very successful here, for the multitude have not means to support them. If the people are not poor, looking at the extent of their own wishes, they are very poor, according to the estimate, and perceptions, of an Englishman. The mere climate of Portugal makes a man's wants one-half less than they are in Holland or in Germany and the arrangements of society make his artificial necessities very few, as compared with what they are with us. Your English travel-writer cries "out" these poor knaves for pride and indolence, because they will not labour for those luxuries which he (the greedy rogue! finds indispensable; but, in truth, a man here may be rich with a very little. It is not necessary that he should have five hundred a-year to be received into society, and treated as a gentleman. The whole course of his habits and pleasures→→→

on

politically, it would be better if the thing were otherwise, but certainly not better as regards the present comfort of individuals, the whole scale of his habits and pleasures is less costly than among us. A man considers, here, not how much he can earn, but how little he can live upon. And what is the feeling that actuates our Saint-Monday-keeping artizan? only that he does not chose (the Englishman) to live upon so little.

Take it as you will, it amounts only to a different extent of desire? Your loiterer of Lisbon loves to sit in the sunshine; your English loiterer loves to sit in the public-house. The pleasure of the first is to be idle; the pleasure of the last is to be drunk. This very propensity to expensive enjoyments (by the exertion which becomes necessary to gratify it) tends mainly, I believe, to keep up that energy, which is the distinguishing characteristic of the lower English, as the absence, generally, of desires, which cost much labour or peril to content them, sinks the people here into habits of imbecility, apathy, and indifference. J'enragé, however, notwithstanding that their prodigality will point no way but to the gin shop. That weddings or funerals holidays or facts all occasions of joy or sorrow of triumph or lament can serve as no other than so many pretences for the discussion of given quantities of strong liquor. A writer, I recollect, of the day of Charles II. treating of the English (he was himself a German) as the "soakers" of Europe, declares, that they have even a song which accounts a drunkard to be as great as a king. And, afterwards, to prove the satisfaction which prevailed in England on account of Charles's return, he notices that, in the first five years after the Restoration, thirty-one new tavern and ale-house licenses were granted! and that six hundred thousand barrels of ale were brewed in that five years, and consumed, more than had been disposed of in the five years preceding.

like the master-traits in a fine picture, are not to be discerned by vulgar eyes, that only are captivated with vivid colours and gaudy decorations. These are emanations of the mind which, like the vital spark of celestial fire, animate the form of beauty with a living soul. Without this, the most perfect symmetry in the bloom of youth only reminds us of a 'kneaded clod;' and with this, the features, that time itself has defaced, have a spirit, a sensibility, and a charm, which those only do not admire who want faculties to perceive.

It

By dress, beauty is adorned, and a want of that attraction is rendered less unpleasing. The rules of dress have been, not inaptly, compared to those of composition. must be properly adapted to the person, as, in writing the style must be suited to the subject. A woman of quality should not appear in doggrel, nor a farmer's wife in heroics. The dress of a handsome female should be epic; modest, noble, and free from tinsel and all the luxuriances of fancy. To the pretty woman_greater license may be allowed; she may dress up to the flights and fancies of the sonnet and the madrigal. One whose face is neutral, and whose personal charms reach no higher than genteel, should be epigrammatic in her dress,-neat, clever, and unadorned; the whole merit and attraction lying in the sting. But the ugly woman should by all means restrict her dress to plain humble prose; any attempt beyond that is mock heroic, and can only excite ridicule.

The Selector;

OR,

CHOICE EXTRACTS FROM NEW WORKS.

THE GRAND SIGNIOR. "I was present at the hour that the Grand Signior, named Mahomet, landed at Scutari, on the opposite side of the Bosphorus from Constantinople, to proceed to Mosque, which he is legally bound to do every Friday, and in order, it is said, that his subjects may have ocular demonstration that he is in existence. On this occasion he was seated in a superb state barge of great length, having the figure of a golden cock at the stern, and a seat encircled with a railing of solid silver, followed by other barges, in which were his ministers, treasurer, chamberlain, master of the horse, officers, janissaries, and a train of servants. On landing, the Grand Signior and his officers mounted horses gorgeously capari