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ANCIENT MIRRORS.

This is evidently an error of the English translators, who being accustomed to use the words mirror and looking-glass to express the same thing, did not consider that it was impossible for Moses, or any other man, to make a brass washingbasin out of looking-glasses: it seems strange that the mistake did not strike them; and stranger still, that it should yet remain uncorrected in our Bibles. The mirrors of the ancients

Perchance that very hand, now pinioned flat,
Has hob-a-nob d with Pharoah, glass to glass;

Or dropped a halfpenny in Homer's hat;

Or doff'd thine own, to let queen Dido pass ;

Or held, by Solomon's own invitation,
A torch at the great temple's dedication.

I need not ask thee if that hand, when armed,
Has any Roman soldier mauled and knuckled;
For thou wast dead and buried, and embalmed,
Ere Romulus and Remus had been suckled ;-
Antiquity appears to have begun

Long after thy primeval race was run!

Thou couldst develope, if that withered tongue
Could tell us what those sightless orbs have seen,
How the world looked when it was fresh and young,
And the great Deluge still had left it green;
Or was it then so old that history's pages
Contained no record of its earlier ages?-

ANCIENT MIRRORS.

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were made of plates of some polished metal: silver was preferred for the purpose; but when they were so large as to reflect the whole figure, they were formed of thin plates of some inferior metal, silvered over. A white metal, composed by mixing copper and tin, was also used for the purpose; and as such mirrors soon became dim, it was customary to keep a sponge and some pounded pumicestone beside them, in

Still silent! uncommunicative elf!

Art sworn to secresy? Then keep thy vows;
But prithee tell us something of thyself,

Reveal the secrets of thy prison-house;

Since in the world of spirits thou hast slumbered,

What hast thou seen?

What strange adventures numbered?

Since first thy form was in this box extended,

We above ground have seen some strange mutations;

The Roman Empire has begun and ended;

New worlds have risen, we have lost old nations,

And countless kings have into dust been humbled,
While not a fragment of thy flesh has crumbled.

Didst thou not hear the pother o'er thy head,

When the great Persian conqueror, Cambyses,
Marched armies o'er thy tomb, with thundering tread;

O'erthrew Osiris, Orus, Apis, Isis,

And shook the Pyramids with fear and wonder,

When the gigantic Memnon fell asunder?

20

USE OF GLASS BY THE ROMANS.

order to renew the polish when needful. The mirrors of the Hebrew women seem to have been made of brass, by the use to which Moses applied them.

We have no account of glass being made among the Romans till the reign of Tiberius, who was emperor at the time our Saviour was on earth; i. e. about eighteen hundred years since. At that time glass was not generally

If the tomb's secrets must not be confessed,
The nature of thy private life unfold;

A heart has throbbed within that leathern breast,
And tears adown those dusty cheeks have rolled.
Have children climbed those knees and kissed that face
What was thy name and station, age and race?

Statue of flesh !-Immortal of the dead!
Imperishable type of evanescence!

Posthumous man! who quitt'st thy narrow bed,
And standest undecayed within our presence!
Thou wilt hear nothing till the judgment morning,
When the great trump shall thrill thee with its warning.

Why should this worthless tegument endure,

If its undying guest be lost for ever?
O! let us keep the soul embalmed, and pure
In living virtue! that when both must sever,
Altho' corruption must our frame consume,
The immortal spirit in the skies may bloom.

H. SMITH.

VENETIAN MERCHANTS.

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known or used by the Romans: they preferred drinking out of gold or silver vessels, and had no glass windows till the reign of Nero.*

After the destruction of the Roman empire, which included under its dominion all the ancient nations I have mentioned as inhabiting the shores of the Mediterranean, another nation of merchants rose to wealth and power, by the commerce they established on that sea, which was still the bond of union between the most civilized countries. You have heard, perhaps,

"From dirt and sea-weed how proud Venice rose;"

and no doubt you have seen the representations of its splendid churches and palaces, in some of the annuals. It was the wealth acquired by commerce that enabled the Venetians gradually to convert a cluster of small islands, once inhabited only by a few poor fishermen, into a magnificent city. The Phoenicians, as I said before, were the merchants of ancient times: the citizens of Venice were the merchants of that period called the middle ages, from occupying the space

*Ency. Brit.

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THE MIDDLE AGES.

between ancient and modern history. You all know who are the merchants of modern times; what nation it is whose commerce is more extensive than that of any other people, and who have raised another cluster of islands to an extraordinary degree of wealth and power, by means of the trade they carry on with the whole of the civilized world.

The middle ages are sometimes called the dark ages, because the ancient learning was then so much forgotten or neglected, that the greater part of Europe relapsed into an almost barbarous state, and was lost in the darkness of ignorance: but even then, the desire of obtaining wealth operated as an excitement to ingenuity, and some arts were practised with success. The Venetians, for instance, resembled the ancient merchants, not only in the spirit of commercial enterprise, but in paying great attention to the manufacture of glass.

In the thirteenth century, when Henry the Third and Edward the First reigned in England, the Venetians excelled all the other people of