As for the rings, so far from appearing to be contrived especially for the advantage of Saturnian beings, these rings, if Saturn were inhabited, would be the most mischievous and inconvenient appendages possible. They would give light during the summer nights, indeed, when light was little wanted, though even this service would be counteracted by the circumstance that at midnight the enormous shadow of the planet would hide the greater part of the rings. But it is in winter that the rings would act most inconveniently; for then, just at the season when the Saturnians would most require an additional supply of light and heat, the rings would cut off for extensive regions on Saturn the whole of the solar light and heat which would otherwise be received. Dr. Lardner was quite mistaken in supposing (after a cursory examination of the mathematical relations involved) that the eclipses so produced would be but partial. His object was excellent, since he sought to show that "the infinite skill of the Great Architect of the universe has not permitted that the stupendous annular appendage, the uses of which still remain undiscovered, should be the cause of such darkness and desolation to the inhabitants of the planet, and such aggravation of the rigors of their fifteen years' winter," as would result from eclipses lasting many months or even years in succession. But we must not endeavor to strengthen faith in the wisdom of the Almighty by means of false mathematics. So soon as the subject is rigorously treated, we find that Sir John Herschel was quite right in his original statements on this subect. The present writer published in 1865, a tabular statement of the length of time during which (according to rigid mathematical calculations) the eclipses produced by the rings last in different Saturnian latitudes. The following quotation from the work in which this table appeared will serve to show that the partial daily eclipses conceived by Lardner are very far from the truth, or rather are only a part, and a very small part, of the truth:- "In latitude 40 degrees (north or south), the eclipses begin when nearly three years have elapsed from the time of the autumnal equinox. The morning and evening eclipses continue for more than a year, gradually extending until the sun is eclipsed during the whole day. These total eclipses continue to the winter solstice, and for a correspond

ing period after the winter solstice; in all, for 6 years, 236 days, or 5,543 Saturnian days. This period is followed by more than a year of morning and evening eclipses. The total period during which eclipses of one kind or another take place is no less than 8 years, 293 days. If we remember that latitude 40 degrees on Saturn corresponds with the latitude of Madrid of our earth, it will be seen how largely the rings must influence the conditions of habitability of Saturn's globe, considered with reference to the wants of beings constituted like the inhabitants of our earth."* In the presence of such facts as these, we may follow Sir John Herschel in saying, that "we should do wrong to judge of the fitness or unfitness of the arrangements described, from what we see around us, when perhaps the very combinations which convey to our minds only images of horror may be in reality theatres of the most striking and glorious displays of beneficent contrivance." But we do well to exercise our minds in inquiring how this may be; and, as it appears to us, the views which have been advocated in this essay at once afford an answer to this inquiry. We are taught to see in the Saturnian satellites a family of worlds dependent on him, in the same way that the members of the solar family are dependent on the sun. We see that though the satellites can supply Saturn with very little light, he can supply them, whether by reflection or by inherent luminosity, with much. And lastly, we see that the ring system (which has been shown to consist of a multitude of small bodies, each travelling in its own course), while causing no inconvenience by eclipsing parts of Saturn, may not improbably serve highly important purposes by maintaining an incessant downfall of meteoric matter upon his surface, and thus sustaining the Saturnian heat, in a manner not unlike that in which it is now generally believed that a portion at least of the sun's heat-supply is maintained by the fall of interplanetary meteors. In fine, we see in Saturn and his system a miniature, and a singularly truthful miniature, of the solar system. In one system,

*As this passage has been quoted nearly verbatim, and without any sort of acknowledgment, in a compilation on Elementary Astronomy recenty published, the present writer, that he may not be suspected of plagiarism, ventures to point out that it is not he who is the borrower.

as in the other, there is a central orb, far surpassing all the members of the system in bulk and mass; in each system there are eight orbs circling around the central body; and lastly, each system exhibits, close by the central orb, a multitude of

discrete bodies-the zodiacal light in the solar system, and the scheme of rings in the Saturnian system-doubtless subserving important though as yet unexplained purposes in the economy of the systems to which they belong.-Cornhill Magazine.

'SUPPOSING you were in an invested town, threatened with starvation, how would you supply yourself with provisions?' asked the examiners at Brienne of a young student. From the enemy,' was the prompt reply. The embryo Emperor was thought to have said a good thing; but the happy hit might have been due to ready recollection rather than ready wit, for it is upon record that one of Suvorof's sergeants was promoted by giving exactly the same answer to the same question propounded by his rough chief. Paul I. of Russia no doubt believed he was acting very originally when, disgusted with the bad riding of an officer at a review, he commanded the maladroit man to resign his commission and retire to his estate; and being told he had no estate to retire to, replied: 'Give him one, then!' The eccentric Czar would have been surprised to learn that his novel mode of enforcing sentence had been anticipated by a player. Yet so it was. The hero of the Dunciad, intrusted with the delivery of a stage-message, acquitted himself so awkwardly that he marred one of Betterton's best scenes. As soon as he passed the wings, the irate actor ordered the prompter to 'forfeit' Master Colley. It can't be done,' said that useful official; 'he has no salary.' 'No salary!' echoed Betterton: 'put him down for ten shillings a week, and forfeit him five.'

Mrs. Salusbury, the mother of Johnson's lovely, lively Hetty Thrale, was fond of relating an episode in Lord Harry Pawlett's courtship of a lady friend of hers. The lady in question was seized with a desire to possess a couple of monkeys of a particular species. Anxious to gratify her whim, Lord Harry-a bad scribe, with loose notions of spelling-wrote off to a friend in the East Indies, entreating him to procure the pair of monkeys, and send them home immediately. Unfortunately, he chose to spell two, t-o-o, and to write it

in characters all of one height. The receiver of the order read it 100, and, to Lord Harry's dismay, notified the shipment of fifty monkeys of the required description, to be followed by the other half-hundred as speedily as possible. The obliging lover may have victimised himself in this way; Mrs. Salusbury vouched for the fact, and we have no right to set her down as a tarradiddler; but it is odd that a good century before, Sir Edward Verney should write to his son: To requite your news of your fish, I will tell as good a tale from hence, and as true. A merchant of London, that writ to a factor of his beyond sea, desired him, by the next ship, to send him 2 or 3 apes. He forgot the r, and then it was 20 3 apes. The factor sent him fourscore, and says he shall have the rest by the next ship; conceiving the merchant had sent for two hundred and three apes. If yourself or friends will buy any to breed on, you could never have such a chance as now!'

Sir William Drummond, finding himself outside a tavern where the sons of song were wont to meet, to enjoy the feast of reason and the flow of sack, peeped through the window, to see if any roysterers were taking their pleasure. Caught in the act by them, he was willy-nilly dragged into the house to make merry with Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, Sir Robert Kerr, and Sir William Alexander. When the hour of reckoning came, they fell to rhyming over it, and Drummond's lines were unanimously voted the best; a decision saying little for the impromptu skill of the rest of the jovial party, since it would not seem to have required much genius to equal such a verse as:

The anecdote would not be worth telling, if it were not for the fact that Allan Cunningham tells a story of Robert Burns bearing a wonderful likeness to it. Strolling, one fair-day, about the streets of a Cumberland town, Burns got separated from his friends. Thinking to find them in a certain tavern, he bent his steps thither, and not doubting his lost cronies were somewhere about, popped his head into room after room; as he was closing the door of the last, one of its three occupants shouted: 'Come in, Johnny Peep!' The sociable bard, thus challenged, accepted the invitation, sat himself down, and was soon on the best of terms with his new acquaintances. After enjoying themselves for some hours, somebody proposed that a verse should be written by each, and put, with half-a-crown, under the candlestick-the best poet to take back his money, and leave his unsuccessful competitors to pay the score between them. Burns won, with:

Here am I, Johnny Peep;
I saw three sheep,
And these three sheep saw me.
Half-a-crown apiece

Will pay for their fleece, And so Johnny Peep goes free. An effusion pleasing the fancy of the Cumberland boys so mightily, that they insisted. upon knowing their guest's name; and when they did know it, would not allow him to part company till the small-hours brought daylight with them. We can readily credit such a thing happening to Burns; but if he knew nothing of the Drummond story, his improvising a verse so suspiciously like an adaptation of Drummond's impromptu, was, as an old story has it, a coincidence queer.'

Hogarth tried often, and tried hard, but all in vain, to persuade Fielding to sit for his portrait. It might be supposed the great artist would not have found it too difficult a task to limn his friend's face from memory; but, for once, the painter's skill failed him, he could not reproduce the familiar features. Lamenting his nonsuccess to Garrick, the mobile-faced actor suddenly asked: 'Is that like ?' and the astonished Hogarth saw the novelist before him, and seizing his pencil, drew Fielding's portrait for posterity. What Hogarth and Garrick did between them for Fielding, Coulon and Gros accomplished for a French minister. Coulon, doctor and

jester to Louis XVIII., was famous for his powers of mimicry, and one day, when Gros complained there was not a portrait that did justice to Villèle, answered: 'No; none show the profound nobility of his character, and his evanescent expression ;' and while he spoke, the words seemed to come from Villèle himself. Gros then and there sketched Coulon's transformed face, and from it produced the best portrait known of the lost statesman.

Art has its parallel stories of a more tragic nature. In the

Chapel proud

Where Roslin's chiefs uncoffined lie, Each baron, for a sable shroud,

Sheathed in his iron panoply,

How it

stands an exquisite example of Gothic tracery-work, known as the Apprentice's Pillar, neighbored by corbels carved with grim, grotesque human faces. came by its name may best be told as the old dame who acted as cicerone at the beginning of the present century used to tell it. There ye see it, gentlemen, with the lace-bands winding sae beautifully roond aboot it. The maister had gane awa to Rome to get a plan for it, and while he was awa, his 'prentice made a plan himsel, and finished it. And when the maister cam back and fand the pillar finished, he was sae enraged that he took a hammer and killed the 'prentice. There you see the 'prentice's face-up there in ae corner wi' a red gash in the brow, and his mother greetin' for him in the corner opposite. And there, in another corner, is the maister, as he lookit just before he was hanged; it's him wi' a kind o' ruff roond his face.' In the same century that the Prince of Orkney founded the chapel at Roslin, the good people of Stendal employed an architect of repute to build them one new gate, and intrusted the erection of a second to his principal pupil. In this case, too, the aspiring youth proved the better craftsman, and paid the same penalty; the spot whereon he fell beneath his master's hammer being marked to this day by a stone commemorating the event; and the story goes that yet, upon moonlight nights, the ghost of the murdered youth may be seen contemplating the work that brought him to an untimely end, while a weird skeleton beats with a hammer at the stone he wrought into beauty. Another stone, at Grossmöringen, close by Stendal, tells

where an assistant bell-caster was stabbed by his master because he succeeded in casting a bell, after the latter had failed in the attempt. It is a tradition of Rouen that the two rose-windows of its cathedral were the work of the master architect and his pupil, who strove which of the two should produce the finer window. Again the man beat the master, and again the master murdered the man in revenge for his triumph. The transept window of Lincoln Cathedral was the product of a similar contest, but in this instance the defeated artist killed himself instead of his successful rival.

Scott's ballad of Wild Darrell was founded upon a story, first told by Aubrey, but for which the poet was indebted to Lord Webb Seymour. An old mid-wife sitting over her fire one dark November night was roused by a loud knocking at the door. Upon opening it, she saw a horseman, who told her, her services were required by a lady of rank, and would be paid for handsomely; but as there were family reasons why the affair should be kept secret, she must submit to be conducted to her patient blindfolded. She agreed, allowed her eyes to be bandaged, and took her place on the pillion. After a journey of many miles, her conductor stopped, led her into a house, and removed the bandage. The mid-wife found herself in a handsome bedchamber, and in presence of a lady and a ferocious-looking man. A boy was born. Snatching it from the woman's arms, the man threw the babe on the blazing fire; it rolled upon the hearth. Spite of the entreaties of the horrified midwife, and the piteous prayers of the poor mother, the ruffian thrust the child under the grate, and raked the hot coals over it. The innocent accomplice was then ordered to return whence she came, as she came; the man who had brought her seeing her home again, and paying her for her pains. The woman lost no time in letting a magistrate know what she had seen that November night. She had been sharp enough to cut a piece out of the bedcurtain, and sew it in again, and to count the steps of the long staircase she had ascended and descended. By these means the scene of the infanticide was identified, and the murderer Darrell, Lord of Littlecote House, Berkshire, was tried at Salisbury. He escaped the gallows by bribing the judge, only to break

his neck in the hunting-field a few months after ards, at a place still known as Darrell's Stile. Aubrey places Littlecote in Wiltshire, makes the unhappy mother the waiting-maid of Darrell's wife, and concludes his narration thus: This horrid action did much run in her (the midwife's) mind, and she had a desire to discover it, but knew not where 'twas. She considered with herself the time that she was riding, and how many miles she might have ridden at that rate in that time, and that it must be some great person's house, for the room was twelve feet high. She went to a justice of the peace, and search was made the very chamber found. The knight was brought to his trial; and, to be short, this judge had this noble house, park and manor and (I think) more, for a bribe to save his life. Sir John Popham gave sentence according to law, but being a great person and a favorite, he procured a nolle prosequi.'

In Sir Walter's ballad the midwife becomes a friar of orders gray, compelled to shrive as a dying woman

A lady as a lily bright,

With an infant on her arm;

and when

The shrift is done, the friar is gone,
Blindfolded as he came-

Next morning, all in Littlecote Hall
Were weeping for their dame.

It was hardly fair to make Darrell worse than he was, by laying a second murder at his door, merely to give a local habitation and a name to a Scotch tale of murder that might have been an adaptation of the Berkshire tragedy. Somewhere about the beginning of the last century, an Edinburgh clergyman was called out of his bed at midnight on the pretext that he was wanted to pray with a person at the point of death. The good man obeyed the summons without hesitation, but wished he had not done so, when upon his sedanchair reaching an out-of-the-way part of the city, its bearers insisted upon his being blindfolded, and cut his protestations short by threatening to blow out his brains, if he refused to do their bidding. Like the sensible man he was, he submitted without further parley, and the sedan moved on again. By-and-by, he felt he was being carried up stairs; the chair stopped, the clergyman was handed out, his eyes uncovered, and his attention directed to