now long, long ago gathered to "the years before the flood"? "Eheu! fugaces," &c. O 60 - O 56 ffor writing Richard and his Brother's Indentures pd for two Bibles for those 2 Apprentices Honour be to those who thought of Gospel as well as of Law when providing for the training up of children in the way wherein they should go! pd for 44 Kidds wch were buryed at W Roggeres lane and elsewhere in very dangerous wayes ye charge 0 3 6. Lest the non-provincial reader should be puzzled to understand what these said "kidds" were, and should fancy that the burial of them in cross-roads might possibly be a lingering trace of some unknown pagan rite practised to propitiate " Diana Trivia," be it known to him that "kidds" are much the same with faggots. ... by Order at ye Parish meeting the expences with some Ale allowed to O S o. some neighbours at a Love Spinning for Edward Bragge was What agapai were these? The Virgilian injunction touching a Love Spinning, "Veneris, dic, vincula necto," throws no light on this parochial mystery. ffor one Strick (bushel) of Mallt to make ye Workmen Small Bear on at 0 3 0. [?] The like of these notes of last century and upwards will probably never be written again. I may therefore be pardoned for trying to And now in with rescue from oblivion such "trivial fond records."* the books, and Shut, shut the "lid," good "friend;" for the clouds, like schoolboys in the middle of December, are about to break up, and I will yet try to take two or three quarter deck turns on the gravel-walk ere I return to My Own Room. * With the exception of the omission of the precise dates of some of the latter items, and the occasional substitution of initials for proper names, the above extracts are faithfully copied from the original books by the writer of this article; not to consider his paper as who, however, begs "the ingenious reader" autobiographical. TABLE TALK. BY SYLVANUS URBAN, GENTLEMAN. It needs the exertion of moral courage to write a word in defence of alcohol. I am not about to excuse intemperance, and I am ready to say Amen to the curses of teetotallers on drunkenness. But neither the cause of temperance nor any other cause is helped by fanatical exaggeration. I have read with mingled surprise and pain the letter addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury by Sir Henry Thompson-pain that an eminent surgeon should make strong statements, unsupported by any evidence. It is true, Sir Henry says, that in his own experience he has found the daily moderate use of alcoholic beverages produce some of the worst diseases the physician has to deal with; and if he had stopped there I should not have noticed his communication. But he proceeds to denounce the moderate use of alcohol as a custom that deteriorates the man both physically and mentally, and he plainly intimates that we must become a nation of teetotallers, or else the nation will be ruined. What are the known facts? The total abstainers do not enjoy a monopoly of longevity, and those who have attained to extreme old age were not teetotallers. The Empire in which we glory was won by our forefathers, who certainly were not total abstainers. Our literary luminaries and our scientific worthies were not and are not teetotallers. Mr. George Cruikshank is the most eminent living teetotaller, and his best contributions to art were executed before he abjured the use of alcohol. It is not necessary for me to contend that the moderate use of alcohol is beneficent, but it is manifest that the sweeping condemnation of Sir Henry Thompson is unwarranted, and, as a friend to the cause of temperance, I protest against an intemperate denunciation which will not influence moderate drinkers, but will induce drunkards to sneer at and deride the just condemnation of the abuse of alcohol. MR. WILLS has given to the world another original play, “Eugene Aram," remarkable, however, more for the wonderful acting of Henry Irving, and the charming scenery of Mr. Bateman's artists, than for dramatic genius. Mr. Wills's explanation that he is indebted neither to Lord Lytton nor to Tom Hood, but only to tradition, implies an affectation of wisdom and superiority on the author's part with which I should have been the last to credit him. Moreover, the result is not satisfactory from an historical point of view, and it would therefore have been best not to invite controversy on this point. The piece is well written; it is a poem, full of tenderness and power; but it is no more a drama in the highest sense than is "Charles I." To say that it is an advance on contemporary works is to say little when one looks around for comparisons; to name it with the pieces of the great masters is equally a mistake; it is simply a reading for Mr. Irving, and from that point of view it answers the purpose fully and well. Miss Isabel Bateman, too, is provided with a strong part, and she plays with a nice sympathetic grace that entitles her to critical recognition and applause; but Henry Irving has eclipsed himself in this consummation of his former readings of "Eugene Aram." He has stepped to the front, the leading actor of our time, our most consummate artist since the brilliant days of Garrick. If there was any doubt before about Mr. Irving's capacity for the great legitimate parts of the old English drama, there is doubt no longer; and I hope in due course that Mr. Bateman will give us an opportunity of seeing his great leader in a round of known characters, commencing with Hamlet, for which part he is endowed with the rarest and most special gifts. In his "Norfolk Garland," recently published, Mr. John Glyde has made a curious collection of spells, wonderful beliefs, and practices of divination, relating to courtship and marriage, which have prevailed in the county of Norfolk. The "dumb cake" is a concoction of salt, wheatmeal, and barleymeal, made and baked by a maiden in dead silence a little before midnight, in the belief that exactly at twelve o'clock her future husband will enter the house and turn the cake. It is sometimes a matter of wonder how superstitious practices survive the, necessarily, almost invariable and inevitable failure which must overtake them, but it is not difficult to imagine the preservation of some of these courtship enchantments through acts of half unconscious collusion. In the old days, when practices of this kind were common, I have no doubt that the swain would occasionally appear at twelve o'clock and turn the cake. Unassisted imagination is, however, quite powerful enough to account for the continuance of faith in the spell when it was worked in the following form. The maiden, having baked her cake, would divide it into three parts, eat the half of each, place the remaining portions under her pillow, and exactly at midnight go upstairs backwards and jump into bed in silence, expecting thereupon to see, not the future husband himself, I am glad to say, but a vision of him ; and it must be a sluggish fancy that, by the aid of a genuine confidence in the charm, cannot conjure up in the dark something which may be interpreted as the presentment of a lover. Most of the love spells contain within them some element calculated to produce their real or apparent verification. A young woman eats. an egg-shell full of salt before going to bed in the expectation that her future husband will bring her a cup of drink in the night. Wedding-cake drawn through a ring and laid under the pillow makes the love-sick maid dream of her sweetheart. The maiden who, in the process of shelling green-peas, finds a pod containing nine berries, lays it on the lintel of the kitchen door, and the first single man who enters shall be her husband. Mr. Glyde's investigations seem to indicate that in the rural districts of Norfolk the popular belief in these mystic tokens is hardly less strong than it was in the days of witchcraft and sorcery. SINCE Parliament has been asked by one or two gentlemen who are not numbered among the howling fanatics of currency, to reconsider the policy of the Bank Charter Act, I have been induced to look into a book sent to me from Manchester, on "The Bank Charter Act and the Rate of Interest," dedicated, "without permission," to Mr. Gladstone, and published by Simpkin and Marshall. As usual in these intellectual exercises on the money question, I find that while the currency reformer confines himself to criticism of the existing system he is at least worth listening to, but so soon as he begins to propound an alternative scheme he plunges himself into difficulties and his reader into scepticism. The author of this book, for example, by way of providing against the consequences of a drain of gold, proposes to the Government to issue a large amount of Three per Cent. Consols, the proceeds to be invested in good foreign funds. Is it not wonderfully simple? So soon as large draughts are made on the national reserves of gold the Government of course proceeds to sell these foreign stocks, and so supplies itself with coin to meet the exceptional drain, repurchasing foreign stock when the equilibrium is restored. The provision that the stock purchased shall be foreign is very ingenuous. The writer does not seem to remember the great sympathy which exists between British and foreign stock markets. It does not occur to him that to sell stock, foreign or otherwise, in order to meet or replace a drain on our reserves, would have the effect of increasing that drain, probably to the extent of the sale; nor does he bear in mind that a Government so dealing in stock would invariably have to sell when the stock was depreciated, and purchase when the price was high. Another of his schemes is to issue temporary bank notes of small denomination, such as forty shillings, twenty shillings, or ten shillings, when gold and silver are scarce—as if a scarcity were to be cured by withdrawing coin from circulation and substituting temporarily inconvertible paper. All these philosophers are more or less fascinated by the fallacy of inconvertible paper money: that most costly device for supplying the public with a circulating medium at the public expense. No doubt our science of currency is far from perfect, but we trust that Mr. Lowe will preserve us from any of the extremely speculative and terribly experimental changes proposed by the excited currency reformers. I AM grateful to Sir John Duke Coleridge for going down to Exeter in the very midst of a Parliamentary Session and telling the members of a literary society that the works of the poet Wordsworth are the constant companions and the solace of his intellectual life. From certain sad signs around me, I had begun to be afraid that busy men were getting every day more and more divorced from books. It has sometimes seemed to me that the study of pure literature, apart from the mere indulgence of a leisure half hour in easy literary entertainment, was becoming in the active world of London almost a thing of the past. But if the Attorney-General, in the same year in which he conducted the defendant's case in Tichborne against Lushington, and delivered the longest speech ever made by any man in any age, can in the brief holiday of the Easter week go home to his native county and discourse for an hour on Wordsworth, showing that he understands every turn of that quaintly simple and curiously philosophic mind and revealing by his enthusiasm that the labour of his days does not separate him from frequent communion with his favourite poet, there is some hope yet for poetry and for the old literary feeling of days gone by that were quieter than these. READING Some time ago an article in a popular publication, calling young ladies to account for making use of slang phrases which are compelled to do service on all sorts of occasions, whether fitting or not, I was led to watch for awhile the manner in which the ladies of our day express themselves on passing topics. The result is that I think our fair friends do not much lay themselves open to these |