THE LAST JUDGMENT: A POEM. In Twelve Books. supply the balance of £98,000 the directors were London: Longman & Co.

that the voyage to the African coast occupied six | formed on the chart, a glance at which enables the days, and that an eclipse, which was manifestly mariner to ascertain that, on an average of years, at total, occurred on the second day." The conclusion certain periods, the wind blows in one arc for a certain to which he has been conducted by his researches period. The chart being covered with such stars, it is, that Professor Hansen's solar and lunar tables is only necessary to find out the point where the very well represent the phenomena of the three proper wind is to be met with to enable a master to eclipses of Agathocles, B.C. August 14, 309; make an almost certain passage at any season. In Larissa, B.C. May 19,556; and Thales, B.C. May 28, the case of a vessel doubling the Cape of Good Hope, 584-as far as the historical account of those eclipses the chart at once, according to the season, shows the can be interpreted. very line in which the fair wind may be expected; so that if there be two vessels, the one furnished with a chart, and the other depending on the chance of a wind, it will occur that, while the one is becalmed, or baffled by a head-wind, the other, by keeping a little more north or south, as instructed by the wind-chart, may not require to alter a sail for days at a time.

THE PAVEMENT OF LONDON.-The pavement of Loudon is one of the greatest marvels of our time. It covers nearly 3000 acres, two thirds whereof consists of what may be called mosaic work, done in plain style, and the other third of smooth flagging. Such a series of works far transcends in quantity, as it excels in quality, the Appain way, which was the wonder of ancient Rome, and which would cut but a poor figure as contrasted with one of our commonest streets. The ancient consular way was but fifteen feet wide in the main, and was filled in with blocks of all shapes and sizes joined together, and planed only on the surface-the length of its devious course, from south to north of Italy, was under 300 miles. The paved streets of London number over 5000, and exceed 2000 miles in length!--Building News.

FIRE-PROOF DRESSES.-Within a very short time two young ladies have been burnt to death, owing to their light muslin dresses catching fire from a lucifer-match-one in London, the other at Colchester. It ought to be generally known that ladies' light dresses may be made fire-proof at a mere nominal cost, by steeping them, or the linen or cotton used in making them, in a diluted solution of chloride of zinc. We have seen the very finest cambric so prepared held in the flame of a candle and charred to dust without the least flame; and we have been informed, since Clara Webster, a dancer, was burnt to death from her clothes catching fire on the stage, the muslin dresses of all the dancers at the best theaters are made fire-proof. Our manufacturers should take the hint.-Medical Times.

WIND CHARTS.-It is recommended to all shipowners the purchase of the charts lately prepared by Government, showing the prevailing winds of the great oceans. A short time only is necessary to to make any intelligent shipmaster familiar with the mode of applying the information they contain, which may be the means of shortening very much the duration of extended voyages, such as to India, Australia, etc. The principle adopted is very simple, though much trouble and a careful examination of ships' logs was necessary before the results could be arrived at. Our readers will better understand these charts by a short explanation being given. Suppose a point taken on the Atlantic Ocean, the next process is, by means of all the records to be met with, to ascertain the direction of the wind at this point during the year; this being ascertained, a line is drawn which not only shows the direction, but the duration and the months in which it prevails. Other winds are taken in like manner, until a star is

PORTRAITS AND PAINTINGS.--The collection of portraits of Mary Queen of Scots, exhibited at the rooms of the Archæological Society in Suffolk-street, will set at rest the controversy, if not as to her virtue, at any rate to her beauty.It is stated that Mr. Gerome's wonderful picture of the "Duel after the Ball" has been purchased by the Empress Eugenie for 15,000 francs.

The annual exhibition of paintings, etc., at Paris is now open. The total number of works of art exhibited is 3464, of which 2715 are paintings.

LORD JEFFREY ALMOST NONPLUSSED.-A good anecdote is told of Lord Jeffrey: It happened, one autumn, that, after the rising of the Court of Session, Jeffrey came to spend the long vacation in the parish of L

Soon after his arrival, the minister intimat

ed from his pulpit that upon a certain day he would "hold a diet of catechizing" in the district which included the district of the eminent judge. True to his time, he appeared at Lord Jeffrey's house, and requested that the establishment might be collected. This was readily done. But what was Lord Jeffrey's consternation, when the entire household being as sembled, the minister said, in a solemn tone, "My lord, I always begin my examination with the head of the family. Will you tell me, then-What is effectual calling?" After a pause, during which the servants looked on in horror at the thought that a judge should not know his catechism, Jeffrey recovered his speech, and answered the question in terms which completely dumbfounded the minister: "Why, Mr. Smith, a man may be said to discharge the duties of his calling effectually, when he performs them with ability and success."

WATER-LENSES.-In Paris, two ingenious Frenchmen have made a successful attempt to improve water-lenses. They have overcome the difficulties which have hitherto caused failure, and produce lenses, as we are told, which "have the purity and perfection, nearly, without the cost of lenses of solid glass." This success is likely to prove beneficial in more ways than one; for a water-lens properly illuminated will send its light to a distance of ten or twelve miles-the very thing, as it would seem, for railway signals, and for ships navigating the Channel.

upon her works. Every writer of fiction should, we think, be judged with reference to the events of his life, and the scenes and characters by which he has been surrounded; let us try the author of "Jane Eyre" by the same tests, and we shall have no difficulty in prouncing both a just and a gentle judgment.

A LIFE of the authoress of "Jane Eyre," | mind, became, of necessity, impressed by a writer who holds so high a place among our novelists as Mrs. Gaskell, can not but command attention, even had the details of that life been scanty and common-place. Charlotte Bronté, however, experienced no common trials, nor was she surrounded by common-place circumstances, during her short, sad journey through life; and thus the story of this remarkable woman, told with such deep and simple pathos by her gifted and affectionate biographer, becomes as interesting as the tale of a second Jane Eyre. Fortunately, too, Mrs. Gaskell, in addition to the interesting character of her materials, has had access to a mass of correspondence, and this gives to the memoir almost the charm of an autobiography, for in the half-unconscious revelations of the letters written to her old and cherished friends, we may trace the formation of her peculiar intellectual character, and the origin and growth of many a feeling and opinion, which, strongly impressed on her own

The Life of Charlotte Bronté. Author of "Jane Eyre," "Shirley," "Villette," etc. By E. C. GASKELL. Two Vols. Smith, Elder & Co.

VOL. LXII.-NO. II.

Charlotte Bronté was the daughter of a clergyman, Irish by birth, and thoroughly Irish in his impulsive waywardness, and of a mother, a gentle west-country woman, refined, well educated-as education was some fifty years ago-and a conscientious Methodist. At the time of his marriage, Mr. Bronté resided in Yorkshire, holding, at the period of Charlotte's birth, the incumbency of Thornton, from whence he removed to that of Haworth, when "the seven heavily-laden carts, early in the year 1820, lumbering slowly up the long stone street, bearing the new parson's household goods," to that long, low, dull, gray parsonage, with its desolate background of bleak moorland, told the gazing parishioners that Mr. Bronté, with his delicate and already sickly wife, and their five little children, had come to take up

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their life-long abode there, and, alas! to find their graves among them. At this time, Charlotte was scarcely four years old, with two elder sisters, and a younger brother and sister, and to these another sister was soon after added.

to enjoy the benefit of a "little wholesome neglect." The Rev. Mr. Bronté, although Tory to the backbone-one of that furious, but almost extinct kind, common enough when "George the Third was King"-had most incongruously taken up his notions of infantile education from those awful republicans, Rousseau and Thomas Day; so the children of a delicate mother, quiet and spiritless, and "so different to any other children," were to be placed under a Sandford and Merton discipline, and "potatoes for dinner" were substituted for that full and nourishing diet which their consumptive tendencies imperatively demanded. Would that Mr. Bronté had theorized on a less important subject than the physical education of young children! Would that he had experimented on cabbages and potatoes, rather than on the delicate human plant!

Unhappily, a similar wrong-headedness presided over their mental training. No children's books seem ever to have been sought for these little ones. We readily acknowledge the slight respect we have for formal" children's books ;" and for those children who evince superior abilities, we would in great measure reject them; but the merry nursery rhymes, the pleasant story that holds the little child spell-bound at the nurse's knee, are surely better child's food than the newspaper; yet the wayward father who, acting on Rousseau's principles, would taboo Cinderella, and Bluebeard, and place even

The account of these poor little ones, as given by the woman who watched the death-bed of the gentle mother, is really painful. "They were such still, noiseless, good little creatures, you would not have known there was a child in the house;" and yet there were six, and the eldest only seven years old. Six children in a house, and no laugh and shout of merry childhood! It is true, the shadow of death then brooded over the chamber where the poor mother lay thinking of far-off Cornwall, and longing, perhaps, for a sight of its grand sea-coast, instead of those barren, uncongenial moors on which alone her eye rested. But after she had been laid in her grave, still the motherless little ones pursued their lone walks-not along fields bright with buttercups and daisies and blossoming hedge-rows, but out upon the wild dull moors, too stern for beauty, yet not stern enough for sublimity; those trackless wastes yielding but scantily even that precious heritage of childhood, wild flowers. But dull, daily walks might have mattered little, had there been sunlight and gladness at home; and the imagination might even have taken wider sweep, stimulated by the monotony around. But a happy home was what the little Brontés were sop's fables in the Index Expurgatorius, never to know. The gentle mother was allowed his little daughter Maria, then dead, and in their case it was emphatically seven years old, the privilege of "a newsan irreparable loss, for the father, with paper in the children's study," and when "his strong passionate Irish nature," that she came out, "she could tell one every "worked off its volcanic wrath by firing thing, debates in Parliament, and I don't pistols out of the back-door in rapid suc- know what all," as the admiring old nurse cession," or by sawing down the backs of declared. Alas! for the poor children, chairs, or making an auto de fé of the starved in body and starved in mind! parlor hearth-rug, obviously stood far Looking back upon our bright and joyous more in need of a wholesome discipline for childhood, we feel intense pity for any himself, than the poor little creatures little one to whom the wide realm of who stood shrinking before him; and fairy-land is an unknown region, and behappy had it been for them, had he, im- fore whose eyes all the gorgeous wonders mersed in party and local politics, just of the Arabian Nights have never passed handed them over to some decent old along. Dull, indeed, must those silent woman, who would have carefully super- walks on the moors, hand in hand, have intended their physical well-being, and been to little children fed upon the husks for abstract propositions and political of speeches in Parliament, and editors' dogmas, fed their young minds with the tirades against Catholic emancipation, and wild and the wonderful, although in the whose objects of hero-worship were but homely guise of old-world stories. But the men of the present day. The father, these unhappy little ones were not even | however, although we think he could not

but have observed the gloom which this matter-of-fact teaching, this utter contempt of the wild and the beautiful, cast over their minds in after life, expresses himself, even now, as fully satisfied with his system; and to prove how well it answered, tells us how that, when the eldest was about ten, and the youngest four, he determined to question them, and "in order to make them speak with less timidity"-wherefore should the little child feel "timidity" in the presence of its father?"happening to have a mask in the house, I told them all to stand and speak boldly from under its cover."

"I began with the youngest, (Anne, afterwards Acton Bell,) and asked her what she most wanted; she answered: 'Age and experience.' I asked the next, (Emily, afterwards Ellis Bell,) what I had best do with her brother Branwell, who was sometimes a naughty boy; she answered: 'Reason with him, and when he won't listen to reason, whip him.' I asked Branwell what was the best way of knowing the difference between the intellects of men and women; he answered: 'By considering the difference between them as to their bodies.' I then asked Charlotte, what was the best book in the world; she answered: 'The Bible.' And what was the next best; she answered: 'The book of Nature.' I then asked the next what

was the best education for a woman; she answered: That which would make her rule her house well.' Lastly, I asked the eldest, what was the best mode of spending time; she answered: By laying it out in preparation for a happy eternity.""

lished works, we think it must have been sadly inadequate, if not positively wrong. We do not find them learning any little hymns, nor ever referring to those portions of Scripture History, which dwell upon the mind of every little child. There is scarcely an allusion to the Gospels in any of Charlotte's writings, and yet the parables, and the teachings of Him who bade little children come unto Him, were especially suited to those desolate, motherless little ones, who had need to look up from their strange, wayward, earthly father, to a tender Father in heaven. But a religious gloom seems to have rested upon all the sisters; and Charlotte in some of her letters, when rising into womanhood, paints with a lurid eloquence which in its strength and its weakness, reminds us of Cowper-her fears that she is a castaway.

For more than a twelvemonth after the poor mother's death, the children continued with no companionship but the two servants, and then their mother's sister, an elderly, stiff, well-meaning, but formal woman, came to take charge of the household. Soon after, we, however, find Mr. Bronté proceeding with his two eldest girls to the school at Cowan's Bridgethat institution destined to enduring illfame as Lowood School—and hither, in the autumn of the same year, 1824, he also brought Charlotte and her next sister Emily, a poor little child under five years old!

Little did Carus Wilson, little did the gentle lady superintendent, or the more ungentle teachers, dream when they first saw the little old-fashioned, plain-featured girl of eight years old glancing timidly round with her strange, troubled eyes, that a child-yes, that mere child-was amang them taking notes," and stealthily but sternly marking every character and every incident, "destined to be reproduced in fiery words a quarter of a century afterwards."

We agree with Mrs. Gaskell, as to the strangeness and quaintness of this proceeding, especially as to the mask, but its "simplicity," we can not acknowledge. Nor can we find any proofs of the "rising talent," which the father discovers in answers which were evidently mere echoes" of" the fragments of clerical conversation which they overheard in the parlor." "The best book in the world." What a question for a little girl of seven to answer!-indeed, excepting little Emily's answer, what were they all but mere common-place apophthegms, each fit to be written with the most carefully selected pen in most unexceptionable round-hand, in the copy-book which was to be handed round to admiring friends during the Christmas holidays? Of the religious teachings afforded to these poor children, Mr. Bronté tells us nothing, but from Charlotte's letters, as well as from her pub

Much has been said respecting this. school at Cowan's Bridge since these volumes have been before the world-much we think that is unfair. Mrs. Gaskell gives us its general rules and its dietary, and neither are exceptionable: she also remarks, from personal observation, that the situation seemed to be well chosen. Now that the cook was careless and dirty, and that sanitary regulations were not sufficiently attended to-though in what