24

pray, where is the luck? I have lost a good horse, and I have got a booby of a groom still to keep." . . . The queen, by long studying and long experience of his temper, knew how to instil her own sentimentswhilst she affected to receive his majesty's; she could appear convinced whilst she was controverting, and obedient whilst she was ruling; and by this means her dexterity and address made it impossible for anybody to persuade him what was truly his case-that

AND QUEEN CAROLINE.

[Lord JOHN HERVEY, political and memoir writer.

Born 1696; died 1743. He is the "Sporus" satirized by

Pope, with whom he had a long and bitter controversy.

Our extract is from his "Memoirs of the Reign of George

II., from his Accession to the Death of Queen Caroline."]

Many ingredients concurred to form this reluctance in his majesty to bestowing. One was that, taking all his notions from a German measure, he thought every man who served him in England overpaid; another was, that while employments were vacant he saved the salary; but the most prevalent of all was his never having the least inclination to oblige. I do not believe there ever lived a man to whose temper benevolence was so absolute a stranger. It was a sensation that, I dare say, never accompanied any one act of his power; so that whatever good he did was either extorted from him, or was the adventitious effect of some selfinterested act of policy: consequently, if any seeming favour he conferred ever obliged the receiver, it must have been because the man on whom it fell was ignorant of the motives from which the giver bestowed. I remember Sir Robert Walpole saying once, in speaking to me of the king, that to talk with him of compassion, consideration of past services, charity, and bounty, was making use of words that with him had no meaning. . . . I once heard him say he would much sooner forgive anybody that had murdered a man, than anybody that had cut down one of his oaks; because an oak was so much longer growing to a useful size than a man, and consequently, one loss would be sooner supplied than the other: and one evening, after a horse had run away, and killed himself against an iron spike, poor Lady Suffolk saying it was very lucky the man who was upon him had received no hurt, his majesty snapped her very short, and said: 66 Yes, I am very lucky, truly:

giving up her opinion and her will to his, she was always in reality turning his opinion and bending his will to hers. She managed this deified image as the heathen priests used to do the oracles of old, when, kneeling and prostrate before the altars of a pageant god, they received with the greatest devotion and reverence those directions in public which they had before instilled and regulated in private. And as these idols consequently were only propitious to the favourites of the augurers, so nobody who had not tampered with our chief priestess ever received a favourable answer from our god: storms and thunder greeted every votary that entered the temple without her protection - calms and sunshine those who obtained it. The king himself was so little sensible of this being his case, that one day, enumerating the people who had governed this country in other reigns, he said Charles I. was governed by his wife, Charles II. by his mistresses, King James by his priests, King William by his men, and Queen Anne by her women- -favourites. His father, he added, had been governed by anybody that could get at him. And at the end of this compendious history of our great and wise monarchs, with a significant, satisfied, triumphant air, he turned about, smiling, to one of his auditors, and asked him: And who do they say governs now?' Whether this is a true or a false story of the king, I know not, but it was currently reported and generally believed. . . . She was at least seven or eight hours tête-à-tête with the king every day, during which time she was generally saying what she did not think, assenting to what she did not believe, and praising what she did not approve; for they were seldom of the same opinion, and he too fond of his own for her ever at first to dare to controvert it (Consilii quamvis egregii quod ipse non afferret inimicus'—' An enemy to any counsel, however excellent, which he himself had not suggested.'-Tacitus).

She used to give him her opinion as jugglers do a card, by changing it imperceptibly, and making him believe he held the same with that he first pitched upon. But that which made these tête-à-têtes seem heaviest was that he neither liked reading nor being read to-unless it was to sleep: she was forced, like spider, to spin out of her own bowels all the conversation with which the fly was taken. However, to all this she submitted, for the sake of power, and for the reputation of having it; for the vanity of being thought to possess what she desired was equal to the pleasure of the possession itself. But, either for the appearance or the reality, she knew it was absolutely necessary to have interest in her husband, as she was sensible that interest was the measure by which people would always judge of her power. Her every thought, word, and act therefore tended and was calculated to preserve her influence there; to him she sacrificed her time, for him she mortified her inclination; she looked, spake, and breathed but for him, like a weathercock to every capricious blast of his uncertain temper, and governed him -if such influence so gained can bear the name of government-by being as great a slave to him thus ruled as any other wife could be to a man who ruled her. For all the tedious hours she spent, then, in watching him whilst he slept, or the heavier task of entertaining him whilst he was awake, her single consolation was in reflecting she had power, and that people in coffee-houses and ruelles were saying she governed this country, without knowing how dear the government of it cost her.

LORD HERVEY.

25

In studying this subject, persons who have only a superficial knowledge of astronomy, though firmly believing in a plurality of worlds, have felt the force of certain objections, or rather difficulties, which naturally present themselves to the inquirer. The distance of Jupiter from the sun is so great, that the light and heat which he receives from that luminary are supposed to be incapable of sustaining the same animal and vegetable life which exists on the earth. If we consider the heat upon any planet as arising solely from the direct rays of the sun, the cold upon Jupiter must be very intense, and water could not exist upon its surface in a fluid state. Its rivers and its seas must be tracks and fields of ice. But the temperature of a planet depends upon other causes-upon the condition of its atmosphere, and upon the internal heat of its mass. The temperature of our own globe decreases as we rise in the atmosphere and approach the sun, and it increases as we descend into the bowels of the earth and go further from the sun. In the first of these cases, the increase of heat as we approach the surface of the earth from a great height in a balloon, or from the summit of a lofty mountain is produced by its atmosphere; and in Jupiter the atmosphere may be so formed as to compensate to a certain extent the diminution in the direct heat of the sun arising from the great distance of the planet. In the second case, the internal heat of Jupiter may be such as to keep its rivers and seas in a fluid state, and maintain a temperature sufficiently genial to sustain the same animal and vegetable life which exists upon our own globe. These arrangements, however, if they are required, and have been adopted, cannot contribute to increase the feeble light which

TED?

[Sir David Brewster, an eminent natural philoso

his works are "Discoveries in Optics;" "More Worlds

than One;" and " Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Sir Isaac Newton." in 1808 he became editor of the “Edinburgh Encyclopædia," and in 1819 he was one of the founders of the " Edinburgh Philosophical Journal." He was knighted in 1832, and in 1849 was chosen one of the eight foreign members of the French Institute. He died February 10, 1868.]

pothesis, which we shall afterwards have occasion to mention, that a brilliant phosphorescent light may be excited in the satellites by the action of the solar rays. Another difficulty has presented itself, though very unnecessarily, in reference to the shortness of the day in Jupiter. A day of ten hours

has been supposed insufficient to afford that period of rest which is requisite for the renewal of our physical functions when exhausted with the labours of the day. This objection, however, has no force. Five hours of rest are surely sufficient for five hours of labour; and when the inhabitants of the temperate zone of our own globe reside, as many of them have done, for years in the arctic regions, where the length of the days and nights is so unequal, they have been able to perform their usual functions as well as in their native climates. A difficulty, however, of a more serious kind is presented by the great force of gravity upon 80 gigantic a planet as Jupiter. The stems of plants, the materials of buildings, the human body itself, would, it is imagined, be crushed by their own enormous weight. This apparently formidable objection will be removed by an accurate calculation of the force of gravity upon Jupiter, or of the relative weight of bodies on its surface. The mass of Jupiter is 1230 times greater than that of the earth, so that if both planets consisted of the same kind of matter, a man weighing 150 pounds on the surface of the earth would weigh 150x1200, or 180,000 pounds, at a distance from Jupiter's centre equal to the earth's radius. But as Jupiter's radius is eleven times greater than that of the earth, the weight of bodies on his surface will be diminished in the ratio of the square of his radius-that is, in the ratio of 11x11, or 121 to 1. Consequently, if we divide 180,000 pounds by 121, we shall have 1487 pounds as the weight of a man of 150 pounds on the surface of Jupiter—that is, less than ten times his weight on the earth. But the matter of Jupiter is much lighter than the matter of our earth, in the ratio of 24 to 100, the numbers which represent the densities of the two planets, so that if we diminish 1487 pounds in the ratio of 24 to 100, or divide it by 4.17, we shall have 312 pounds as the weight of a man on Jupiter, who weighs on the earth only 150 pounds that is, only double his weight-a difference which actually exists between many individuals on our own planet. A man, therefore, constituted like ourselves, could exist without inconvenience upon Jupiter; and plants, and trees, and buildings, such as occur on our own earth, could grow and stand secure in so far as the force of gravity is concerned.

SIR DAVID BREWSTER.