From The Saturday Review. | and decorous, and would perhaps have borne THE GRAVE OF CHARLES LAMB. the thought of a neglected grave as well as IN the churchyard of Edmonton the in- any one. His life is quite as interesting as quiring traveller may, after considerable his writings are; and much of the attachment search, find the grave of Charles and Mary which he has inspired, even in those who Lamb. The churchyard is large, and has an never knew him, except in print, arises from air of neglect and desolation, and one of the the sympathy which his story excites. He most neglected parts of it is the grave of the had not much outward prosperity, nor did man whose memory gives the whole scene he live a life of much ease. Without coman interest. The grave is a little way back plaint, and without pretension, he went on from a side path, and is overgrown with net-plodding through a routine he hated— tles and long grass, while over it towers a wounded in his affections, liking humble hideous erection of the fluted order of vil-pleasures, and devoted to a small circle of lage architecture, designed to perpetuate the fame of a certain Gideon Rippon, of Eagle House. On the tombstone, between the dates recording that Charles Lamb died December 27, 1834, aged fifty-nine, and that Mary Anne Lamb died May 20, 1847, aged eighty years, are inserted twelve of the very worst verses that the ingenuity of friends could have struck out. In the beautiful and touching lines in which Wordsworth sketched the character and history of his friend, he tells us that he meant the earlier portion of the piece to be placed on Lamb's tombstone, but that other arrangements had been made. The visitor to Edmonton may see what was the effusion that was preferred to Wordsworth's. It begins by declaring that Lamb's meck and harmless mirth "no more shall gladden our domestic hearth." It goes on to assure the deceased that he is not all lost and that his writings shall "win many an English bosom pleased to see that old and happier vein revived in thee." Everything is in a sort of rude harmony-the nettles, the shrine of Gideon Rippon, and the doggrel. We go out to see the grave of one of the most charming and original English writers of the nineteenth century, and we find a bank of weeds and a supereminent mass of stone or stucco in honor of a bank clerk, and a set of verses for which the schoolboy of Lord Macaulay's Essays would have been deservedly flogged. friends and intimates. It is because he got But probably the vicar, and the churchwardens, and the other people of Edmonton would pay a little more attention and respect to his grave, if only they had the slightest notion who he was. We suspect that the At first the sight may awaken a little dis- number of Englishmen who are acquainted appointment, and even indignation. If only with his works is exceedingly small. With the vicar, or the churchwardens, or some all his great and genuine powers, he can other local dignitary would but spend a scarcely be called a popular writer. There shilling a year, the nettles, at least, might is nothing he has left behind him which be uprooted. But as we get a little accus-every one knows as every one knows Watomed to the sight, we find it fits, not in- verley, Childe Harold, or Campbell's seaaptly, into our associations with Charles pieces. A dry humor, and a subtlety of Lamb. He had no great sense of the solemn style, and a command of pure English words, and a vein of delicate exaggeration, | moulded the thoughts of succeeding genera are things which, if once seen and appreciated in a writer, are appreciated very highly, but which very few persons give themselves the trouble to appreciate. We are all very apt to overrate the influence and reputation of authors whom we ourselves admire; and this is especially the case if the writer requires, in order to be admired, not only a relish for a certain kind of intellectual effort, but also a sympathy with a certain sort of moral excellence. Charles Lamb was one of the brightest wits and one of the noblest characters of the generation that has just passed away. But his fun is rather recondite, and might easily have no charms for those whose notions of fun are of a broader kind. He was, as Wordsworth said of him, "good, if e'er a good man lived." But his goodness was not of the sort that the run of men take much heed of. The goodness of a man who has a strong sense, among many personal distresses, of the value of life, who has a horror of phraseology that he would consider unmeaning or sectarian, and whose good deeds have all been done at home, hardly answers to the popular estimate of a good man. We cannot expect all the world to care about such a character, and it is, perhaps, better that when feeling is absent its absence should be undisguised. At any rate, there is no nonsense or hypocrisy about the Edmonton authorities. They have no artificial enthusiasm for the man resting in their churchyard. They do not trouble their heads about him, and they do not pretend to. All this is, however, in a great degree, a matter of chance, and some day probably there will be a vicar, a beadle, or sexton at Edmonton who is devoted to his Essays of Elia, and will clear the nettles away. This churchyard, or indeed any churchyard-only that the Edmonton churchyard is a little more neglected than most others -may also awaken in us a few reflections as to literary influence generally. Literary workers, like all others, are gathered into the common grave, not only in the sense that they themselves perish, but that their work ceases, except in rare instances, to have any great prominence, and is lost in the general influence of the past on the present. There have been few writers, such as Luther and Bacon and Voltaire, who have really tions in a way so distinctly their own that we cannot lose the sense of their personal eminence in the contemplation of the general history of human thought. But, with most writers, this is not so. They are but part of a general movement. They carry the thinking world some little way in a particular direction, and then that which they have done becomes absorbed in the general way of thinking which is habitual to the men and the nations that come after them. The Lake Poets and their friends stood apart from the generation in which they lived. At first their writings were abused and ridiculed by the many, and admired with something of the exaggeration of contradiction by the few. Then they were for a few years supreme. A generation of young men grew up to whom Wordsworth was the source of all that was definite in poetical feeling, and to whom Coleridge opened a vision of a new Christian philosophy. They knew no wit like the wit of Charles Lamb, and honestly tried, if they failed, to find comfort in the laborious pedantry of The Doctor. Now Wordsworth is little read by the young. They prefer mourning imaginary friends in the metre of In Memoriam, or indulging in those combinations of lines of various lengths and those mysteries of phraseology which Mr. Browning has suggested as the secret of poetry. They would, indeed, think in a different way from what they do if Wordsworth and his friends had not written; but this may be said of writers that lived much longer ago. All the past affects us. As we look round the churchyard, we find the memorials of laborers in a hundred fields of labor, and in each field the laborer that is dead has done something. Even the bank clerk whose shrine overshadows the resting-place of Charles Lamb probably kept some books and accounts that, without him, might have been kept less well. The officer in an adjoining grave did something to keep up the reputation and success of the British army. The Bank of England of the present day, and the army of the present day, are the creations of numberless efforts in time past. But the officers and the clerks of other days have faded out of memory, and the living institutions they have left behind them exist without any definite traces of those who set them on foot or kept them in activity. It is the same with almost all writers. The gen- merit. Distinguished writers like this general thought which they have helped to mould or expand remains, but they and their influence are lost in it. This grave of a great writer, overgrown with nettles and unnoticed by the living, also typifies the place which literature holds in English life. There is no fictitious prominence given it. A man who can may write a book if he pleases, and the book may have a reputation for more than six months if it deserves it. But the writer is left very much to his friends. If he pleases, he may go to a few London dinner-parties, and if he likes to show himself in public places, he may have the satisfaction of being stared at as if he were a wild dog. But he receives no national honors or recognition. It is no longer the custom to bury him or to raise a memorial tablet to him in Westminster Abbey. Lord Macaulay was only buried there because he was Lord Macaulay. He is left to his family and his circle of friends, and if his circle of friends is large, and his friends are warm and sincere, that is only a blessing which he shares with men of every kind of erally, and have no wish to go out of the limits of their home. They wish to be private men, and to live and die as private men. They desire to be buried where they have lived. Wordsworth lies at Grasmere, and Southey at Crosthwaite, and Charles Lamb at Edmonton, and their graves have met with the treatment they themselves met with in their lives. Wordsworth's grave is kept with simple and affectionate reverence at Grasmere, because he was well known there, and much respected, and because the friends he has left there honor his memory. Charles Lamb's grave is neglected, because his lot in life was cast in London and its suburbs, and no one notices his neighbor much, or has any great care for literature, in a suburban town. In each case, that has happened which might have been expected, and we may perhaps lose the wonder which the sight of Charles Lamb's grave provokes, in the general satisfaction produced by the thought that this is really only a sign of the wise way in which literature is treated, and loves to be treated, in England. COATING THE HULLS OF IRON SHIPS.The fouling, by incrustation of barnacles and sea-weeds on their bottoms, is one of the evils of iron ships which requires remedy at the present time. Wooden vessels were once subject to the same annoyance, until it was found that a sheathing of copper prevented the adhesion of shell-fish and afforded a remedy. Coppersheathing cannot, however, be employed on iron ships, because, by the contact of the two metals, a galvanic action is set up which decomposes the iron with great rapidity. At present the hulls of all iron vessels are merely painted, and the common paints used for the purpose are ineffective; iron vessels have, therefore, often to be put in dock to be scraped. This frequent docking is not the only evil, for when the bottom is foul the speed of the ship is diminished, and in the tropics cases are recorded in which, after one year's running, this has been to the great extent of reducing a ship from twelve to seven knots per hour. The best experiments as yet made on the subject are those of Mr. Mallet, C.E. By him it is stated that iron in water, not exposed to air, does not corrode. Iron in contact with platina does not corrode. The rate of corrosion of average iron from natural causes is six-tenths of an inch in a century. Iron could be protected in the mass by zinc in the proportion of one hundred and twenty square feet of iron to one of zinc. Dutch metal, which is an alloy of four atoms of copper to one of zinc, is very good, for a vessel so coated is relatively as forty-nine and one-half to eighty-four. Of the effect of metallic poisons on shell-fish Mr. Mallet found that, commencing with small doses of sulphate of copper, oysters would live in a highly poisonous fluid, and on running a penknife into one thus dosed for two years, the blade came out coated with copper. The red lead generally used in England for coating the hulls of iron vessels is a very ineffective remedy, but the Americans speak highly in favor of zinc-white. Arsenic and antimony have been tried as paints, but with no sufficient results.-London Review. THE Government of Greece is making great efforts to accomplish valuable works of internal improvement. It has repaired the disasters of the recent insurrection; is constructing a port on the western coast of the Peloponnesus, the necessity of which previous administrations had limited themselves to simply admitting; and is completing the system of telegraphic communication, which will put the different parts of Greece in communication with each other, and with the rest of Europe. From The Saturday Review. It would be an interesting subject of investigation to inquire into the causes which have determined the literary rank of words. We all know that there is a republic of letters; but if there be a republic of words, too, it is a republic of a very aristocratic cast. Some words are born to honor. Poets love to use them; the orator reserves them for his choicest metaphors or most sonorous perorations; and generally their presence indicates that you are in the company of sentiments and ideas of the most exalted quality. Their dwelling-place is in grand passages, and they furnish the raw material out of which fine metaphors and sublime similes are composed. Below them comes a useful, active class of words—the bourgeoisie of the dictionary. They are employed when good hard work is to be done, and no ornament is wanted. They form the staple of blue-books, scientific or learned treatises, the speeches of people who are not orators, and the like. Perversely enough, this middle class is chiefly of Norman or Latin origin, while the grandee class of words can generally boast of a Saxon pedigree. Below them again, comes the verbal proletariat -the small change of daily life, comprising many words which never find their way into composition at all, except when the writer is homely of set purpose, or when he wishes to warn his reader that he is going to be comic. We are not about to be democratic, or to murmur at any providential distinction of ranks. We know that in America, where the verbal noblesse are forced into every sort of society, and are made to do all kinds of commonplace drudgery, the literary results are often of a character which assures us that lexicographical democracy has broken down. Still, we cannot help sometimes wondering how the division of ranks came about, and how some of the words which are universally regarded as words of quality manage to climb up into that exalted position. Why is a word not "a word for a' that ?" What is it that divides words into castes? What is it that makes some words unalterably poetical, and dooms other words to be irredeemably prosaic ? be poetical, and that the works of man's ingenuity should be prosaic. It is quite right, for instance, that a man of genius should be said to soar like an eagle, and not like a balloon. But this rule is not always equitably observed. Some of the works of nature, and some of the works of man, have a preference over others of the same class for which no good reason can be given. You may apply balm to a man's wounded feelings in the highest flights of eloquence; but if you proceeded to speak of applying ginger to his failing energies, you might possibly raise a laugh. Yet this is very hard. Ginger is a very respectable vegetable product-quite as respectable as balm, and probably even a more useful member of the Pharmacopeia. Why is balm to lift up its head as a sort of duke among words, while ginger is set down among the clowns? In the same way, it would be quite dignified to speak of a man being tried in the furnace of affliction; but if, instead of that, you spoke of his being hardened in the oven of adversity, you would only excite low and culinary ideas. You may, with great propriety, make your hero explore mines of learning; but it would be wholly indecorous to allow him to pick up nuggets of wisdom there. In respect to articles of food, the distinction between the prosaic and the poetical is flagrantly inequitable. The heroes of an epic always quaff goblets of wine. As a matter of fact they probably drank black-jacks of beer. But beer is of prose prosy, and its very contact would destroy all sentiment. The same proscription seems to be extended to brandy and water. Some very lax writers may allow their characters to drink raw brandy at the close of a very exciting scene, to nerve them for some tremendous effort; but neither gods, men, nor stalls have ever suffered a hero to drink brandy and water. Perhaps, however, it may be said that beer and brandy and water reek with the associations of the pot-house, and might be out of harmony with the sublime and beautiful. But they are not the only articles of diet that are under the ban. Why is the harmless potato, which has no special connection with the pothouse, to be forever exiled from the realms of fine writing? The bread of affliction is Some of the rules of precedence commend admitted into the most fastidious composithemselves to the mind at first sight. It is tions. Why are the potatoes of pauperism very fitting that the works of nature should to be cast out as vulgar? Yeast is another article of diet whose wrongs are too crying to be passed by. Its elder brother, leaven —though in actual life not a very refined sort of article holds an acknowledged place among the stock metaphors of the poet and the essayist. As a simile for all species of moral fermentation or infection, there is no word that has a more assured position. But what writer would venture to talk of the "working of the revolutionary yeast ?" Yet why is yeast less ideal than leaven ? It is at least as characteristic as any other part of the face; and if people die of broken hearts, which is the condition in which they are of most use to the poet, their noses become quite as emaciated as their cheeks. But there is a rooted prejudice against the nose, which nothing can overcome. No one will give it credit for a particle of sentiment. It never enters into any ideal. It has no rapturous epithets assigned to it. All the other features have their own special set of In most of these cases, as in questions of laudatory adjectives. Raven hair, rosy lips, precedence generally, it appears to be antiq- dimpled cheeks, lustrous eyes, pearly teeth uity that settles the rank. All things that but not a word for the poor nose. The were invented or discovered a sufficiently lover raving over his mistress's beauty, the long time ago are admitted to the freedom | poet working out the word-picture of his of the poetical world. All things invented hero, both pass over the nose in discreet siin more recent times are excluded. Weapons lence. Even Milton, bold though he is in of war appear to come specially under that breaking through conventional restraints, decanon. You may speak of the shafts of fate; scribes hair and cheek and eyes and brow and but it would be incorrect to speak of the bul- even wrinkles in his pictures of Satan and of lets of fate. Yet there must have been a Adam, but no word of the nose. Perhaps, time when shafts were as familiar as bullets if it were put to them, neither lover or poet are now. What did the poets of those days would wish the object of their admiration to do? Did they fall back upon slings and peb-be without a nose; but they regard it as a bles? Either they must have entertained a necessary evil—a sort of poor relation to the very different theory touching the requisites rest of the features, about whom the less that of poetry from that which prevails among is said the better. And the poets are perus, or they must have been sorely put to it fectly right. Their readers would not apprefor want of words. In respect to instruments ciate a reference to the obnoxious feature. of illumination, there is a striking gradua- If Byron's celebrated stanza had runtion of rank, exactly corresponding to the "When we two parted progress of invention. Torch is the oldest In silence and tears, and the most barbarous; and it is accordHalf broken-hearted ingly the grandest. "Handing down the torch" is one of the most respectable conventional metaphors in existence. The lamp of truth ranks very nearly as high, but it is not calculated for quite such fine writing. But when we get past these two antiquities, the poetry of artificial light evaporates. In practice, the light of torches and ancient lamps must have been very dirty, and not at all poetical. But nothing brighter is admissible into a metaphor. Candles are decidedly prosaic, and gaslight is quite intolerable. One of the most curious portions of this subject is the different rank which is assigned to different features of the face. Nothing can be more poetical than the cheek, and nothing more ridiculous than its neighbor-the nose. This absurdity of the nose is a very difficult prejudice to fathom. There is no particular ugliness inherent in the feature. To sever for years, no doubt it would have been perfectly true In dress also, the gradations of verbal rank are very strongly marked. The order |