to their mothers, by extension of the a case like this, but the domestic tone system of day nurseries over the whole and the social feelings of the women of city, by a large and well-organized Glasgow are in general so high and so "woman's mission," extending into every pure that I cannot but hope that even neglected corner and comfortless home these few remarks may sink like good in Glasgow, surely the happy mothers, seed into their minds, and aid in giving a and educated women generally of this definite direction to some of those Chrisgreat city might do something to dimin- tian aspirations which late events have ish infant mortality, and preserve coming tended so much to quicken. generations from destruction. It is but little, comparatively, that men can do in I am, &c., W. T. GAIRdner. THE railway now about to be constructed from Naples to the top of Mount Vesuvius, near the crater, will be 26 kilometres (circ. 16 miles) long; the localities it serves, to the foot of the volcano, comprising a population of 100,000 inhabitants, who provision the markets of Naples. From Naples to the foot of Vesuvius, a distance of 23 kilometres (about 14 miles), the ordinary rails will be used, and the system of traction by means of iron rails (drothseil) will be adopted for the remainder of the way. The second division will be classed into two sections - the one 2,100 metres long, towards Atrio di Cavallo, where will be the drawing machine and the buildings necessary for the railway; the second section, 1,100 metres, will come out a few steps from the crater. The terminus will be sunk 20 metres under the lava. In case of eruption, the current would thus be turned away from the rail, which throughout its whole course will be raised above the level of the soil. Professor Palmieri, director of the observatory at Mount Vesuvius, having observed that the lava, in every eruption, approaches nearer the buildings of the observatory, the opposite side of the mountain will be chosen for laying down the rail. About 250 metres from the projected station at Atrio di Cavallo, Mount Somma makes a spur or projection, of which they will make use to keep all the working stock in case of an eruption. The whole line will be held in communication with the observatory by means of a telegraph. The work will be begun at the last section, that is, the part which will go to the top of the crater and spare the fatigue of the ascent. It will not take more than a year to carry out. THE growth of tea and sugar in European soil are perhaps branches of culture which we can scarcely expect to be remunerative in a commercial point of view. Be this as it may, the sugar-cane is now grown and sugar manufactured to some extent in the neighbourhood of Malaga, Spain. Tea has also been introduced into the southern districts of Sicily, and though the first attempt made last year to raise the plants on a large scale was not successful, owing, it is said, to the injury caused to the plants and seeds by immersion in seawater on their transit from Japan, it is con. fidently hoped and believed by the promoters that another attempt with healthy seeds and plants will prove quite successful. Meanwhile tea is being grown at the Cinchona plantations in Jamaica, and a sample has recently been received at the Kew Museum which was grown and manufactured as above from Assam tea plants received through Kew in 1868. So far as the appearance of the sample is concerned, it is roughly manipu |lated, not being sufficiently twisted or curled, and apparently not sufficiently roasted. Never theless, its manufacture is little inferior to that of the earliest samples of Assam tea that appeared in the English market. Its quality, however, is another thing, for it produces a very watery infusion of a very herby flavour, and devoid of the aroma for which tea is noted. Care, however, in the cultivation of the plant, as well as in the selection and manipulation of the leaves, may in time produce a more marketable article. DR. PHILIPPI states in Das Ausland that the boundary treaty concluded between Chili and Bolivia describes the border-land according to the old notions of theoretical geography, which gave the Cordilleras of that region sierras, deep valleys, streams, &c., notwithstanding that he had explained its true character in his published journey through the desert of Atacoma. He found a huge plain, on which were scattered isoiated mountains, mostly extinct volcanoes, never forming chains, valleys, or passes, but huge clefts often 500 or 600 feet deep, with perpendicular walls, that appeared to have resulted from aqueous action at some former period. At present it only rains about once in from twenty to fifty years. From his description it is evident that a model of this district would look much like certain portions of the moon as seen through a good telescope. Academy. For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor when we have to pay commission for forwarding the money; nor when we club the LIVING Age with another periodical. An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & GAY. HORATIAN LYRICS ODE X. OF BOOK II. "Rectius vives, Licini, neque in altum Semper urgendo, neque dum procellas Cautus horrescis, nimium premendo Littus iniquum.' THE GOLDEN MEAN. My friend, you will do wisely not to steer When tempests rage, to hug the treacherous shore. The wise man chooses aye the golden mean; Safe from the pinching cares and withering blight Of squalid want; safe from the gorgeous sheen Of halls that bring more envy than delight. ODE XXIII. OF BOOK I. "Vitas hinnuleo me similis, Chloe." You shun me like a fawn, my dearest Milly, The loftiest pine bends first beneath the blast; heart, At new-found marvels that she dare not pass; And bounding off again with sudden start From rustling leaves or lizards in the grass. Don't be alarmed, my darling - I won't eat you I'm not a Bengal tiger nor a lion; Leave your mamma for one who'll never cheat you; You'd like a husband if you'd only try one. Blackwood's Magazine. KNAPDALE. MY LOSS. When tempests lower, be bold and firm of IN the world was one green nook I knew, mind; Full of roses, roses red and white, But, when skies smile, then reef thy belly-Reddest roses summer ever grew, ing sail Filled with the breath of a too prosperous Whitest roses ever pearled with dew; And their sweetness was beyond delight, Wheresoever in the world I went Roses were, for in my heart I took In the world a soddened plot I know, Ah, my folly! Ah, my loss, my pain! From Fraser's Magazine. FEW historical characters have had harder measure dealt out to them than Archbishop Laud. He was unpopular in his lifetime; he died on the scaffold; and he has been unpopular with posterity. He was born at Reading, on the 7th of October, in the year 1573. Whether the day was commemorated in Ritualist circles, as the birthday of one who, more veritably even than Charles I., lived the apostle and died the martyr of Anglicanism, we cannot tell; but there certainly was no such weeping or exultation in the camp of the Hebrews that the Egyptians heard it, and the busy England of to-day did not pause for an instant to recall the fact that three hundred years had elapsed since Laud was born. the night of Friday, the ninth of February, 1627. "I dreamed," says he, "that I had the scurvy; and that forthwith all my teeth became loose. There was one in especial in my lower jaw, which I could scarcely keep in with my finger till I had called for help." Here was a man to have the superintendence of the opinions of a great nation! Here indeed! the reader exclaims, echoing Macaulay's ejaculation, and pausing to wonder how such a thing could be. The wonder becomes not less, but greater, if we extend Macaulay's clause so as to include two other indubitable facts concerning Laud. Here was a man to be the most powerful subject in England for fifteen years, and the trusted friend of Strafford! Professor Masson, whose voluminous biography of Milton embraces a careful and elaborate study Lord Macaulay's estimate of Laud as a of Laud, sees that the hypothesis of imdriveller and a fool is best known, and it becility will not cover the facts. A poor is apt to be accepted with unquestioning Oxford student without friends does not confidence for two reasons: first, that rise to be what Laud became unless he is Macaulay, a kind-hearted man, was sel- something very different from an imbecile. dom bitterly contemptuous; second, that "Perhaps it is," suggests Professor Maswith manifest good faith and great liter-son, "that a nature does not always or ary adroitness he adduces in brief space necessarily rise by greatness, or intrinsic what seems conclusive evidence that superiority to the element about it, but Laud was a "superstitious driveller." may rise by peculiarity, or proper capilThe evidence consists of a series of ex- lary relation to the element about it. tracts from Laud's Diary. When Lord Macaulay speaks of Laud as intellectually an imbecile,' and calls him a ridiculous old bigot,' he seems to omit that peculiarity which gave Laud's nature, whatever its measure by a modern standard, so much force and punhave hold of the surrounding sensations gency among his contemporaries. of men even by pain and irritation is a kind of power; and Laud had that kind of power from the first." This is ingenious, but we have yet to learn that a much simpler solution cannot be given of the problem. We turn to his Diary (says Macaulay), and we are at once as cool as contempt can make us. There we learn how his picture fell down, and how fearful he was lest the fall should be an omen; how he dreamed that the Duke of Buckingham came to bed to him, that he saw Thomas Flaxney in green garments, and the Bishop of Worcester with his shoulders wrapped in linen. In the early part of 1627, the sleep of this great ornament of the Church seems to have been much disturbed. On the fifth of January he saw a merry old man with a wrinkled countenance, named Grove, lying on the ground. On the four teenth of the same memorable month he saw To Laud may claim to be judged by his waking moments, not by his dreams, and Lord Macaulay, in writing him down an imbecile, is bound to render account of several things besides the jottings in his Diary. The world of dreams may with sufficient correctness be described as a region in which the incidents and sayings of waking life are transposed, distorted, turned topsy-turvy, an made the ma- be true that no one can be a hero to his terials of an occasionally tragic but more valet. frequently comic grotesquerie. It is as But there is something more to be conif a crew of mischief-making imps, with sidered. Readers who derive their idea Queen Mab and Puck for master and of Laud's Diary solely from Lord Mamistress of the revels, got possession of caulay are likely to form an incorrect life's stage when reason, the manager, notion of the document. The quotations was asleep, and followed up the graver are not false, but, from being thrown entertainment of the day with broad together, instead of spread over a numfarce or monstrous pantomime. In a ber of pages, are apt to produce a false scientific age the antics of the dream- impression. There is no dream menimps, if the recollection of them is not tioned in the Diary till Laud is fifty years washed utterly from the mind by the dews old; he lived rather more than twenty of morning, mix with the gossip and the years longer; and we venture to say, on clatter of cups and saucers at the break-the strength of more than one careful fast table, and are then forgotten forever. examination of the piece, though without The man who in our day should put the having made any express calculation, record of his dreams upon paper except that Lord Macaulay has managed to find for purposes of amusement, or in the room in his half-page for almost all that hope of throwing light upon some curious would strike a modern reader as peculpuzzle in psychology, would most prob- iarly silly or ludicrous in the recorded ably be a fool. But in the time of Laud dreamings of Laud. The Diary is a very the ablest men, or at least a large pro- curious production. The right mood in portion of able men, attached importance which to contemplate it is, we should to dreams and omens. Clarendon de- say, pointedly not that of hard and harsh votes four pages to an account of a spec- contempt. There is in it a vein of what tre which appeared three times at the the rudely practical man would regard as dead of night, some months before the childishness, but which affects us in a assassination of Buckingham, and gave kindly way towards the old bishop. He warning of the danger to which the Duke enters memoranda of the weather, of the was exposed. And of remarkable men tides, of the time when harvest was gathof Wallenstein, of Hobbes, of Voltaire, of [ered in, which distantly remind us of Goethe, of Napoleon it will hold good White of Selborne. The comparative that we shall form an erroneous judg- absence of reference to those great afment, in whatever age they lived, if the fairs in which Laud played an important criterion we adopt of their general ability part, and which were among the most and character is some personai whimsi- momentous in modern history, is concality, or crotchet, or perversity, or ab-spicuous. Laud rarely touches on them surdity. Wallenstein was a dreamer of with a pen-stroke. May the cause not dreams, or at least a believer in dreams, have been that, in this wholly private and as well as Laud; Hobbes fiercely main- personal document, he jotted down only tained that he had squared the circle; or chiefly those "unconsidered trifles " Voltaire was vain to an extent that would which had an interest for a wifeless and have been ridiculous in an Eton school-childless old gentleman who, in more boy; Goethe filled volumes with anti-tranquil times, would have delighted to Newtonian theorizing about light; and watch the habits of robins and dorNapoleon, to put it in the words of mice, or to puzzle Mr. Lewes or ProfessMacaulay himself, was "not exempt from or Bain with questions as to the influthe influence of that most pernicious of ences which act upon the nerves, and set superstitions, a presumptuous fatalism." in motion the delicate machinery that If the follies and weaknesses of eminent hangs with painted curtains the palace men are to be made the test of their of the mind, when sensation is paralyzed strength, and to neutralize the positive by sleep? Sometimes the juxtaposition evidence of their capacity, it will indeed of incidents infinitely unimportant with |