it was pleasanter still when the forms of my two cousins were by my side.

Gertrude and Emmeline were the only children of my aunt. They were both beautiful to me. Gertrude was one year older than Emmeline. There was a great difference between the two girls,-one was a timid, fearful thing, fond of reading quaint old story-books, and of listening to ancient legends of the mythical beings of old. This was my cousin Gertrude; she had a light graceful step, and walked along the grass like the fairies and elfmaids, about whom she so often would talk. Her heart was ever filled with the tenderer emotions of woman. Every word was spoken softly and kindly, as though she were fearful lest she might in the slightest way wound the sensitiveness of any with whom she was associated. There was an intensity of feeling in every glance of her dark warm eyes, not passionate, but soft, loving, trustful. I never heard a harsh word fall from her lips, nor saw her do anything unkind. Hours upon hours we used to pass together in the cooling shade of the summer arbour, sometimes turning over the leaves of an old story-book, and sometimes talking of the strange things we had read.

My other cousin, Emmeline, was little like her sister in such things, but there was a charm and fascination about her that few who saw her could resist. To Gertrude she was all in the world, and more than all. She had dark and very beautiful eyes, full of fervour and expression; sometimes they would flash like bright summer stars, and often would rush into their depths a flood of passionate light, that lingered for a few moments, and then died away into a calm, carnest, intense gaze. Her features were Grecian, and very beautiful, and her voice clear and soft, so that the car that heard it almost hungered to drink again of its music. Emmeline was not so calm and quiet as her sister,-there was more of passion and fire in her nature, more of restlessness and vivacity.

My aunt was like a mother to me, so that I scarcely could have loved a mother more; but I had never known what it was to look up into a mother's face, and clasp her hand in mine, and bury my head in her bosom.

I had lived there many years, and my cousins were growing up from girlhood to womanhood. Gertrude was nineteen and Emmeline eighteen years old. It was in the summer time when there came to live in our city a widow lady of the name of Raymore, with her two daughters and her son. We observed the strangers at the cathedral many Sundays before we became acquainted with them, and how it happened the acquaintance took place at all I know not, but in the course of a few months they became not unfrequent visitors at our house.

Arthur, the only son of the family, had pale and very thoughtful features, and masses of dark curling hair that clustered around his brows. He had particularly taken my attention whenever I had seen him in the cathedral.

From the time the intimacy sprang up between Mrs. Raymore and her family and ourselves, I perceived a change in both Gertrude and Emmeline, and then began to rise within my heart strange emotions, for which I could not account, even after the lapse of many years. I had observed for many months that Arthur Raymore frequently looked to that part of the cathedral in which we nsually sat, but I was too young or too thoughtless to understand why. The truth, however, broke in upon me afterwards to my sorrow, for I had loved my cousin Emmeline with all my childish heart; but I knew then too well that, although she had passed hours with me (and to me none were happier), and had loved me as though I were her brother, yet the warmer love for which my heart sometimes longed would never be mine.

And so the days passed along for many months, and the visits of Arthur and his sisters to our house were continued with little intermission, until Arthur and became as good friends as we were likely to be, and

when at home I could easily perceivé (for I could not at times refrain from watching him) that his eyes followed her wherever she moved, and though it was not often I saw them together-and it was seldom that Arthur spoke long to her yet by the earnestness of his voice, and the expression of his features, I knew he loved her.

There was one night when this truth appeared more distinctly to me. In was in the early summer time, when the roses and many other flowers were abundant and beautiful. He and his sisters had been at our house the whole of the afternoon. When tea was over, we sat some time looking over books of engravings and portfolios, belonging to my cousins. Arthur and Emmeline sat side by side, and I, by the side of Gertrude, opposite to them. Arthur's sister Ellen was playing some air on the piano, but Emmeline and he still turned over the leaves of a portfolio, and the few words he spoke to her were inaudible to any one else, though I saw, by Emmeline's drooping head and crimson cheeks, that he was saying something to her unusual for him.

The evening was wearing away, and the rest of the girls were busily engaged, each at her own work, but the conversation had suddenly hushed, and there was no sound in the room but the occasional rustling of the leaves of the portfolio as they were turned over by Arthur's hand, and from the parlour walls many pictures were looking silently down on that silent company.

At length Gertrude looked up from her work, and asked her sister to play a piece of music, of which they were very fond.

When Emmeline had ceased playing, she quietly left her seat, and went from the room unobserved by me, and soon afterwards Arthur too left us. A deep feeling of sadness came over me when alone with Arthur's sisters, and a dread of some impending sorrow, and I too rose and went to my room.

It was a small chamber, and the window looked on to the grass-plot and garden at the back of the house. I stood for some minutes in the dark room, and the tears came into my eyes, for I felt very lonely and sad. I drew near to the window, and looked out into the garden.

The

sky was very bright and beautiful. Many stars were looking down from the clear blue arch of heaven; there was no rustling of the leaves in the wind, there was no sound above or below, but a deep solemn quiet rested over and upon all.

There were two figures standing together in the garden against the arbour, and one of them was Emmeline. Without her bonnet, for the night was warm and clear, she was standing with her head drooping downwards, and before her was Arthur. I could hear no words spoken, but I could tell that he was speaking to her-to her whom I loved above all others then, beneath the stars, so near and yet so far from me, a vision too true and too sad.

I went no more downstairs that night; there was darkness in my room, and darkness in my heart; the bell of the old cathedral told of the flight of the hours, and still I lay sleepless and sorrowful. It was the first dark night that had ever fallen upon me. I could not help the tears that flowed freely; I could not help the restless unsatisfied achings of my heart, and it was long past midnight before sleep came to my heavy eyes. first waking thoughts were of the past night; they clung to me and made me sorrowful, in spite of the natural lightness of my heart.

My

The months passed on. Arthur and his sisters were still visitors at our house, and we had the same evenings over and over again, but I could see no change in either Arthur or Emmeline towards each other, and the kindness of my aunt and cousins to me had nearly worn away the sad impression of that bitter night.

go

When the autumn came, it was my custom after tea to into the secluded harbour, and sit there in its shade

with a book on my knee till the stars sprang silently into the sky. One fair evening I had been sitting there as usual, and while I was so employed, Arthur and his sisters had called at the house, but I did not go in, and after reading for some time, I fell asleep. The wind was sighing sorrowfully through the leaves, covering the lattice-work of the arbour.

Towards the hour of twilight I was awakened with the sound of voices near me in a low conversation. I knew them too well, but I was fearful of moving away, lest I should be seen, for Emmeline and Arthur were standing close by the doorway, but not within it. There was a deep earnestness of tone in Arthur's voice that I had never heard before, and a wild fervour of expression, as though he were speaking the last words his lips would ever utter. Now he was talking quickly, and then his voice fell into a low, carnest whisper, with a passion almost fearful to hear.

You know I have loved you, Emmeline," he cried, fiercely; "loved you long-loved you like my life, like my soul; that my heart wishes to know that you will give me all I desire-all for which I long and now you tell me that it cannot be. O, Emmeline, Emmeline," he whispered, "do you know that if you will not love me, my whole heart will sink and fail and die? that with the loss of you I lose all things else; and will you now slay my heart with this unkindness ?"

And after a little silence, Emmeline replied, in a low, sorrowful voice, "You must not think that I am heartless. If you will have a sister's love from me, it is yours, but more I cannot give; do not ask me for more." There was another silence, which was at length broken by Arthur, who cried, hastily and bitterly

Why do you ask my heart to be satisfied with a drop, when it thirsts for an ocean. O pity me, and—and love me."

"I sympathise with you, if you will not refuse my sympathy; but if you will not accept a sister's love, I can offer you no more;" but there was, I thought, a something more than sympathy in her low, sweet voice, but Arthur seemed not to know it: he did not speak, but stood motionless at a little distance from her, and Emmeline went on.

"You do not know your own heart, Arthur; there are worthier objects of its love than I. You turn away; I know you are proud; I know your heart is noble, let it follow a nobler end than to love me. You can acccomplish deeds that yet you think very little of. Go out into the world of men- -be true to your own heart-have a high purpose, ceaselessly pursue it, and remember me not but in your prayers, for I am very weak and very sinful. You have honoured me, and indeed my heart feels far more than my lips can tell. When you have risen in the world, when you have achieved a great work, and earned a name, or perhaps before, you will thank me for causing you this night's sorrow. Bury the past; go on to meet the future. My prayers will be for your happiness. Do not tell me more. Farewell; we are still friends." And Emmeline walked with a quick step to the house, leaving him standing there silent and motionless. And the glory of the stars was naught to him, and he heard not the whisperings of the peaceful wind, nor felt its coolness on his bare, aching brow, and his heart throbbed under the burden of a great love.

He stood long in the same position, and I dared not to move, for I knew he had a grief that alien lips, instead of relieving, would double. Then I saw him as he took a step forwards, and with his head bare and his hands clasped, his soul broke forth in a wild passionate utter

ance.

Arthur stood there no longer, but strode hurriedly away into the darknesss. I saw him no more in our house after that night; nor did Emmeline. But I often

had a feeling of pain that she should have so lightly cast away a heart that was devoted to her as Arthur's was.

Soon after this he left the city, and I knew little of him for many years. The summer came again upon the earth; the birds sang in the garden as of old; and the jasmine twined round and over the arbour, luxuriant as ever; the same stars came tremblingly forth in the calm blue sky, and my two cousins still lived with my aunt in the old house. I had gone away into the world, and left the quiet house and the cool arbour for the busy town and the noise of trade, but the recollection of those early and happy days was to me like letters from friends to those long exiled in foreign lands. Gertrude and Emmeline had grown up into full and perfect womanhood.

It was with strange feelings that I visited the city again, and walked in the old familiar places, and took my old pathway to the cathedral, with my cousins on either side me.

The evening after I arrived, I half-unconsciously stole away into the quiet graveyard, and my heart's thoughts flew backwards, and dwelt for long in the ark of the past. It was growing dusk; but when leisurely returning, I was startled at the sight of a light figure bending over a low tombstone, and until the moon rose in the sky, that form still bent over it; and still I stood, shielded from observation by the dark shade of the old yew-tree that had cast its mournful shadow over the graves at its feet for many years. I knew the figure was Emmeline, as she rose and turned away: her head was drooping in her bosom, and sorrow deep and strong was in her step. When her form had receded, I passed over to the grave, and on the tombstone I read, in worn letters, the name of Arthur Raymore.

This was many years since. Gertrude and Emmeline have now both found a resting-place side by side in the same cemetery in which Arthur lies. They had been throughout their lives the ministering spirits of the city wherein they dwelt, visiting the abodes of want and of sorrow, and relieving the poor and the oppressed, and to this day they are known, and their memories are blessed, as the two angels of the city.

SWEEPINGS OF POETRY.*

ARE these "poems" translations, or are they the spontaneous combustion of some phosphoric temperament, made more phosphoric by "too much youth and reading?" We shrewdly suspect that many of them are original; but whether translations or originals, we are of opinion that they might have been uninterpreted or unwritten, and literature none the worse off.

Let us properly "begin with the beginning," and see what the author of Morbida says in his preface:-" The second, third, fourth, and fifth poems were written in about a dozen nights; and some of the others, at considerable length, at a single sitting each. Several are unfinished, almost all unpolished, and some much mutilated also. I am conscious that I ought to endeavour to amend much of what I now commit to the press, and not to 'shoot' these clearings of my desk there; but I do not think it worth while to expend any pains upon such materials. I fear it would be in vain to try to make these compositions worth much: the foundations are too sandy.' I may have no further opportunity of essaying any literary work."

We presume that any reasonable reader would not expect much after this declaration; but is it not an insult to the public and an unwarrantable presumption in the writer to issue "the clearings of his desk,"-translations

* Morbida, or Passion Past, and other Poems; from the Cymric and other Sources. London: Saunders and Otley. 1854.

offered his paw and fortune, and for whom he would fight and bite to the last extremity; for whose sake, too, if this nut-brown maid' rejects his homage, he will leave, perhaps, his native shores for ever, and take a passage in the hold of the first ship that starts, with despair gnawing at his heart, and he gnawing at the tough rough faces of the sleeping tars." Do rats gnaw sailors' faces ? And is this meant for truth?" A lionne made her appearance on deck to-day twenty-five times in twentyfive different toilets; the energy displayed in the cause of fashion was edifying; we heard her observe how difficult was the task, for she had to hunt a lace cap and blue silk bonnet, that destiny and the lurching of the ship kept removing from her grasp, up and down her cabin for two hours, and chase a flying muff that sped away into the large saloon. It was truly the pursuit of dress under difficulties."

We dismiss our visitor, doing her the justice to extract a bad page, said to be "my maid's" account of the cabin. If the maid does, or did, talk in this fashion, she ought to be dismissed too,-"Oh, laws! indeed, this is nothing to what there is in the other cabin," she exclaimed, proceeding pretty literally in this strain, "nothing! you've got to scramble through the stewardess, that's tumbled right out of her berth, without waking, and so used to it, poor thing! She sleeps like a top and a dead body anywhere, and a heap of sick Irish children with their poor mother going to take them to their father, she can't pronounce the name where, and don't know, I think,-in curl-papers, and not a 'versel comb to the back hair, or stays, or hooks and eyes, or anything,-just like chaos, without a nightcap, in dishabille, and a ragged pinafore about the shoulders, and a pap-boat, and a squalling baby that belongs to her or somebody else, I believe, dreadfully tumbled and turned upside down (and, poor little wretch! inside out, too, probably), all jumbling and tossing in this jolting ship, running about without shoes and stockings, and broken bottles on the floor, and nasty rusty crooked nails out of some old trunks of hers, and splinters from a smashed box, and cold bunches of hard keys, and steel forks, and carving-knives, and skewers,--no one knows how they got there, and fishbones from supper, and old toothpicks, and the boy's horrid slippy marbles, cannons, and cannon balls,-that's the peas, to keep him quiet,—all on the roll, and everything planted about everywhere, and Spanish liquorice, and lucifermatches, and iron hooks from somewhere, and rough bits of walnut-shells, and a razor or two she's taking to her husband, dreadful sharp, and cracked chaney, and corkscrews, and nutcrackers, and our bonnets all out of any shape amongst them, full of sticky figs and raisins as they can be (one would think dried figs grew at sea, as somebody seemed to fancy roasted apples did in England, and were the only fruit that ripened there, too). Oh, dear! only to think! and tooth-brushes, and mattresses, and bolsters, and goloshes, and umbrellas, and our little bandbox, all littering about and spoiling, I'm sure-such a desert! Our best bonnets look like old butter-boats (and the sea's in the cabin, too, that knocked me down quite, for nothing can stand agen salt water; blue ribbon, partickler, hasn't a chance against the rude ocean, nor any other dye, as to that, I do believe the sea would wash the colour out of a born Greenlander!--or out of the whole Board of Green Cloth, whatever that is, if you come to that), and the shapes, our new shapes, they are ruined in that cabin,-the trimmings in tatters, the crowns squeezed, the bows spoilt, the wires bent, the edges torn, and the linings ripped,-that cabin's a museum for wild Ingians and cannibals,-it's a perfect picture of a plantation,-it really is a desert, a waste without a tree-a howling wilderness, with not a single human bonnet to go decent on shore with!"

There are many readable things in Lady Wortley's

visit; the above is readable, and thousands will read this book as they read others. But who admires such literature? Ah! that is a secret.

THE UNIVERSITY BREAKFAST.

My college career was ushered in by suppers delayed till the morning, and breakfasts till noon. Such breakfasts, too! Being used to a mug of tea, and a round of dear, simple bread-and-butter, conceive my consternation when a heterogeneous mass was driven into my luckless interior, including every known condiment, and every unknown compound under the sun. Devilled kidneys and moselle; cocoa and euroçoa; coffee and cognae; anchovy paste and pigeon-pie; mushrooms, marmalade, and potted char; laver, caviar, patés de foies gras; dried fish, Catalonian hams, and Archangel deer-tongues; all these, with many other minor delicacies too numerous to mention, very often constituted my first meal; and out of this mélange I was expected to select the good from the bad, without grumbling at the additional labour. My friend and relative, Mr. Head, too, had his tasks to perform ; and never did two cab-horses on a (people's) holiday work harder than we did; but at length, just as he passed his "little go," I broke completely down, and from sheer inIn capacity was not to be removed by whip or spur. vain they tried all sorts of drams and stimulants; I had become so used to them, their effects had ceased. In vain little round pellets of mercury were sent to try their effect. The god himself might have shaken his caducens in my face with no result. In fact, I could not, would not, stir, and it was only after a long course of almost starvation that I consented to resume my duties, and then only by slow degrees.-Memoirs of a Stomach.

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS.

Musical instruments are to music what tools are to a handicraft employment. They are invented and perfected according to the development of music; but as the tools influence the handicraft, so musical instruments in their turn react on the character of music, and impart to it a distinctive character, leading even to considerable modifications in its general features, and thus form an important agency in the whole development of the art. We have only to remind our readers of the connection between the grand Erard pianos of seven octaves and the new pianoforte schools. We need scarcely ask, could the one exist without the other? We can thus trace the action of musical instruments in the national music of all countries, and in most instances we can discern in the character of the music, the nature of the instrument which serves to express it. In every Spanish air we hear the sighing of the mandolin, or the clinking of the castanet; in the Venetian we have the dreamy sound of the guitar; in the Swiss the echo of the bugle; and who could mistake in Scotch music the drone of that old worthy, the bagpipe? It seems growling at the follies of the small reeds, while it accompanies their mad leaps with its uniform and benignant hum, and largely contributes to the humorous effect by the contrast it presents to the quick high notes of Scotch tunes. To the bagpipe we must attribute, in a great measure, the predominancy in the Scotch music of fifths and thirds, besides the emphatic sixth major.North British Review.

Printed by Cox (Brothers) & WYMAN, 74-75, Great Queen Street, London; and published by CHARLES Cook, at the Office of the Journal, 3, Raquet Court, Fleet Street.

MODERN ARCADIA.

THE Arcadia of the agricultural districts is now unhappily to be found only in the pastorals of our poets. The modern Strephon and Phyllis prove to be a very humble pair, living in a clay-floored cottage, and ineffectually endeavouring to maintain a family of five children on eight shillings a week. And so far from Strephon spending his time in sitting by a purling stream playing 'roundelays" upon a pipe, poor fellow! he can scarcely afford to smoke one, his hours of labour are so long, and his wages are so small. As for Daphnis, he is a lont, and can neither read nor write; nor is his Chloe any better. Both of them have a strong idea that they may end their days in a workhouse-not together, but on the separate system.

66

Before the age of railroads and sanitary reformers, the pastoral life of the Arcadians was a beautiful myth. What a pity it was so false. The Blue Book men have exploded it for ever. The Arcadians have not decent houses, only miserable huts to live in. They have no provision for cleanliness or decency. Two rooms for sleeping and living in are all that the largest family can boast of. In Bedfordshire, the sanitary reporters tell us that the day-room, in addition to the family, contains the cooking utensils, the washing apparatus, agricultural implements, and dirty clothes; the windows are broken, and stuffed full of rags. In the sleeping apartment, the parents and their children, boys and girls, are indiscriminately mixed, and frequently a lodger sleeps in the same and only room, which has generally no window,-the openings in the half-thatched roof admitting light, and exposing the family to every vicissitude of the weather; and the liability of the children so situated to contagious maladies, frequently plunges the family into the greatest misery. The husband, having no comfort at home, seeks it in the beershop. The children grow up without decency or self-restraint. The boys enter upon situations in rags, without a particle of instruction: the girls-alas! their fate is worst of all. We need not pursue the description. But the reader will see at a glance that Arcadia, if it ever existed in England, is clean gone; and in its place we have poverty, destitution, suffering, and "Swing."

Our towns are not yet what they ought to be; not sufficiently pure, wholesome, and well regulated. But the rural labourers regard even the misery of towns as

[PRICE 1 d.

preferable to the worse misery of the rural districts; and year by year they crowd into the seats of manufacturing industry in search of homes and employment. This speaks volumes as to the actual state of our "boasted peasantry, their country's pride." It is not often that village affairs are made the subject of discussion in newspapers, for the power of the press does not yet reach remote country places. But we do hear occasionally of gentlemen pulling down and razing whole villages, in order to prevent them "becoming nests of beggars' brats ;" and one gentleman, a Mr. Hodges, M.P. did not hesitate to proclaim before a Parliamentary Committee, that he "had pulled down between twenty-six and thirty cottages, which, had they been left standing, would have been inhabited by young married couples." What becomes of the dispossessed? They crowd together into the cottages which are left standing, if their owners will allow it; or they crowd into the workhouses: or, more generally, they crowd into the towns, where there is at least some hope of employment for themselves and their children. The owners of land would do well to bethink them of the lamentable condition England would now have been in, but for the immense fields of employment opened up for these dispossessed labourers in the manufacturing towns of this country.

The clergy of Hereford but the other day painted for us a lamentable picture of the mental state of the Arcadians in that county. One reverend prebendary declared that the farmers, the head Strephons, would see nothing ridiculous in the announcement that the market was soon to be overwhelmed with vast crops from the great Sahara or the summit of Chimborazo! They are for the most part in a state of "blessed ignorance" as to whether these places are in England, France, or "Tamboff." And as for the labouring Arcadians of the same county, they are still in much the same mental state in which their forefathers were in the time of the Druids. They still work by spells, observe lucky days, cure fits with a chain woven with hairs from a jackass's back, preserve sick pigs with holy water, avert the "evil eye" and drive away the foul fiend with crossed sticks over the house-doors and horse-shoes over the stable-doors!

It is provoking to contrast the state of these modern Hereford ruralists with that of the Arcadians of Old England as described by the poets. Here, for instance, is Phineas Fletcher's description of " The Shepherd's Home:"

Thrice, oh, thrice happie shepherd's life and state
When courts are happinesse, unhappie pawns!
His cottage low, and safely humble gate,
Shuts out proud Fortune, with her scorns and fawns:
No feared treason breaks his quiet sleep:
Singing all day, his flocks he learns to keep;
Himself as innocent as are his simple sheep.

His certain life, that never can deceive him,
Is full of thousand sweets and rich content:
The smooth-leaved beeches in the field receive him
With coolest shades, till noontide's rage is spent :
His life is neither tost in boist'rous seas
Of troublous world, nor lost in slothful ease;
Pleased and full blest he lives, when he his God can please.

His bed of wool yields safe and quiet sleeps,

While by his side his faithful spouse hath place:

His little sonne into his bosome creeps,

The lively picture of his father's face:

Never his humble house or state torment him: Lesse he could like, if lesse his God had sent him! And when he dies, green turfs, with grassy tomb, content him.

Where, oh where, has this gentle shepherd gone? Have spinning-jennies swallowed him up quick? Alas! as was observed of Mrs. Harris, "there's no sich a person." Did he ever exist? We have a strong suspicion that he never did, save in the imaginations of poets. "The happy, humble swain," and "the gentle shepherd' of the old poets, were only of a piece with their

Golden sands and christall brooks
With silken lines and silver hookes ;

And contemporaneous only with the times when

Rivers ranne

With streames of milk, and hunney dropt from trees.

Sydney Smith has said, with more truth than elegance, that in the infancy of all nations, even the most civilized, men lived the life of pigs; and if sanitary reporters had existed in past times as they do now, we should doubtless have received a very different account of the actual existence and domestic accommodation of the old English swains and "shepherds," from that above given by Phineas Fletcher. Even the mechanics of this day are more comfortably lodged than the great landed gentry of the Saxon and Norman periods; and if the truth could be got at, it would be found that, bad as is the state of our agricultural labourers now, the condition of their forefathers, the serfs of England, was at least no better. But this may, we think, be safely averred, that that class has made less progress, and obtained fewer of the advantages of civilization than any other in England that can be named. As their religion has as yet made but little progress beyond the time when Thor and Odin were worshipped in this island, so their domestic accommodation is little better than what it was in the days of their Pagan Saxon ancestors.

Turn to the Arcadians of Scotland, and you find matters in no better a state. Not long since, a public meeting of titled and reverend gentlemen was held in the Modern Athens, for the purpose of improving the dwellings and the domestic condition of the agricultural labourers-the hinds and shepherds of Scotland. The Duke of Buccleugh, who is the largest landed proprietor in Scotland, occupied the chair, and he introduced the business of the meeting by describing the actual domestic state of the Scotch labouring classes. We ourselves know that his description was not overcoloured. The writer of this article has spent many a winter's night in the cottages of the Scotch agricultural poor, watching by the bedsides of the sick, and can therefore speak, from considerable personal experience, as to their miserably unwholesome and comfortless state. The ordinary hut or cot of the Scotch hind consists of one apartment, lighted by one small window. The floor is laid with lime, but oftener with clay full of hollows. The principal furniture is the two box-beds, into which the family are cooped

at night-all in the one apartment. These box-beds form one side of the home, the doorway being usually situated behind them. The cottages are as comfortless as can be imagined. The doors fit badly, the chimneys are wide, and the wind swoops through them. The least possible money is spent upon their repairs, and many of them seem falling to pieces. The Duke of Buccleugh, at the Edinburgh meeting, stated that he had examined a great many of these cottages on his own estate, and he mentioned one case in which he discovered it was impossible to patch the building up. "When the box-bed was taken out,-an article of furniture of which some people were very fond,-down came the roof of the place, as the framework of the bed had been its support.” Here is a picture of his own Arcadia, drawn by a duke!

Why do not the Scotch landlords build better cottages for the labourers on their estates, in place of making eloquent speeches at public meetings? This seems to be the practical course, and if adopted, were worth bushels of eloquence. But the duke explains, that the practice in Scotland is, to let the cottages with the farm, and the tenant keeps them in repair, of course, at the least possible outlay, until the end of the lease. But this is no sufficient reason for the landlords neglecting to build and maintain proper dwellings for the labourers. It is notorious that as leases run out, they are accustomed to relet their farms often without the slightest improvement in the dwellings of the poor-though their dwellings are often of mud, clay, and thatch-far worse than the places where the farmer's pigs are styed or his horses are stabled. It is amazing how the Scottish peasantry should have been enabled to preserve their virtuous and religious character under such wretched physical conditions. That they have done so is greatly to their honour: perhaps the culture given to them in their parish schools has helped them in no small degree. But they still want better homes, with greater comfort;--for heretofore, modern “progress” can scarcely be said to have reached them.

The Arcadians of Ireland are in a still worse plight. Indeed, we do not think the poets have ever ventured to lay the scene of Arcadia in that country. Without exception, the dwellings of the Irish poor are the worst in the whole world. The wigwams of the red Indians are superior to them, and Hottentot kraals are palaces compared with Irish hovels. In no period in Ireland's past history could the dwellings of the Irish poor ever have been worse than they are now, in the middle of this highly enlightened and civilized nineteenth century. A recent visitor to Connemara gives the following account of the peasant dwellings there. "The cabins," he says, "freely admit the rain through the roof; they are without windows, and frequently without doors. Naked urchins and filthy-looking women forcibly reminding the traveller of Indian squaws, emerge from the cloud of smoke which fills the wretched dwellings, and stare wildly at the traveller. The lithe and athletic mountaineers of Connemara are nowhere to be seen. The race is extinct. Stunted, sickly-looking, dwarfish specimens of humanity, are all that remain of that hardy, vigorous population which, a few short years since, abounded in Connemara. working classes are nowhere to be found in the west of Ireland. They have proceeded to England, Scotland, and America, or rotted away in the cells of the workhouse." What an Irish dwelling was many hundreds of years—it may be a thousand years ago-was shown at the recent Dublin Exhibition, the most interesting portion of which, perhaps, was the collection of Irish antiquities.

The

This ancient relic was discovered in a bog in the county of Donegal a few years since, by some peasants who were searching in Drumkelin bog for bog-timber. They were probing the soil with long iron rods, and while thus engaged, discovered the buried dwelling, about sixteen feet below the surface of the bog. Most probably the mossy