Oglou was wont each joy and care
Of Hassan's infancy to share ;

He ruled the guard when Hussein sway'd,
And now Zulema's nod obey'd.

His brand, though weak and wide its blow
Distracts the might of Hassan's foe;
For smallest grain affects the scales
Where neither balanced weight prevails.
Thus harass'd, vex'd, by foes opprest,
No chance of aid, escape, or rest,
Achib retreating gasps for breath,
Yet combats still, and parries death.
Then first, when strength and powess fail,
Revenge and baffled hate prevail;
That flash from his uplifted arm-

That pistol's flash hath spread alarm,

While rampart, grove, and tower around

Reverberate its unwelcome sound.'-pp. 63, 64.

But it seems that Ashraff was not perfectly satisfied with making a retreat; for we find, that somewhat tardily, indeed, for it is not till we come to the third canto, that he makes up his mind to take part in an action with his rival.

Tahmasp, however, ultimately triumphed, and returned to Ispahan, When he was passing through that city, he was clapsed to the bosom of an old woman, who cried out My child, my child!' She had disguised herself as a slave, when Mahmood took the capital, and performed the lowest duties in the harem, for a period of seven years. The allusion to this circumstance is not badly ex

ecuted by Mr. Cole:

There spoke a Mother's rapture; in one word
The hope of years of misery, hope deferr'd

Which maketh sick the heart. Slow down her cheek
The tear-drop roll'd; Nature, unapt to speak,

Was apt in act; she raised her head awhile,
Held him, and gazed at full: a mother's smile
Play'd round her lips, and shone beneath her tear;
Again she clasp'd him, for her soul was there.
The Shah was soften'd; weal or woe betide,
Kings are but men, and in their plume of pride
The gentler still the nobler. "Yes," he cried,

"

My Mother! oh, my Mother! this delight

"Is more than thrones and triumphs to my sight;
Kingdoms are mean before thee; for by thee

"

'I share that kingdom where man's soul is free;
"To thee I owe whate'er of good or wise
"Hath fix'd my faith, or taught my hope to rise!
"Within me thought of all thy kindness burns,
"And all my boyhood, all my youth returns :

"

Might but my love, as thine those earlier hours, "Cheer Life's declining, latest path with flowers!"

When Love had power to speak, and Joy's first glow
Was past, Kerumah told her tale of woe.
Soon as the fall of Iran's Shah was known,
When Affghan Mahmood seiz'd on Iran's throne,
Within that Haram where she wont to sway,
Disguised in haste, awhile conceal'd she lay;
For seven long years, unused contempt to brave,
Mother and Bride of Kings, she toil'd a Slave;
Saw Hussein stoop to calm a Tyrant's ire;
Heard Hussein's children and her own expire,
Without or strength to shield, or skill to save;
And still Remembrance broods upon their grave.'

The number of the minor poems is few; but in the extracts from the Renegade, we have given ample specimens of Mr. Cole's powers.

MISCELLANEOUS INTELLIGENCE.

Paving. The length of the paved streets and roads in England and Wales, is calculated at 20,000 miles; that of the roads which are not paved is about 100,000 miles. The extent of the turnpike roads, as appears by parliamentary documents, was, in 1823, 24,531 miles.

One of the Strange Tenures.-A ceremony respecting a peculiar tenure for lands, situated in the parish of Broughton, in Lincolnshire, takes place at Castor church, every Palm Sunday. A person enters the church yard with a green silk purse, containing ten shillings, and a silver penny tied at the end of a cart whip, which he smacks thrice in the porch, and continues there till the second lesson begins, when he goes into the church and smacks his whip three times over the clergyman's head. After kneeling before the desk during the reading of the lesson, he presents the minister with the purse, and then retiring to the choir, waits the remainder of the service.

Leipsic Fair.-The last number of the general catalogue printed every semestre at Leipsic contains 2,157 new books, the foregoing number has but 310 less-so that, in the course of one year, 4,004 German works have been published! a number which surpasses by far that of the yearly publications of England and France taken together.

Whale Fishery,-From the account of Davis' Straits and Greenland Whale Fishery, for 1832, it appears that eighty-one ships had been employed, of which five, viz.—the Ariel and Shannon of Hull, the Egginton of Kirkaldy, Juno aud William Young of Leith, were lost. The produce of this fishery has been 12,578 tuns, of 252 gallons each, and the quantity of whalebone was about 670 tons weight, valued at about £100,000. The The value of the oil was £250,000, The number of seamen employed was nearly 4,000.

Strange Custom.-In the islands called the Cyclades, the male inhabibitants of which are chiefly brought up to the business of sponge-diving; no young man is allowed to marry until he can descend with facility to a depth of twenty fathoms in the sea.

Tracts. From the report of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,' for the year 1832, we learn, that its income in the last year has amounted to 66,2697. 10s., and its expenditure to nearly the same sum. The number of books and tracts circulated during the year, has amounted to 1,715,323, being a considerable increase over the year preceding. In this number are included 129,756 Bibles and Testaments, and 165,818 Prayer Books and Psalters. In the year 1832 the number of its members was 460, its revenue about 6,000l., and the issue of its publications about 86,000. In the year 1832 its members were about 15,000, its revenue about 66,000l., and publications nearly a million and three quarters. The returns for the present year, from 9,300 places, containing 10,965 schools, are, that the number of children receiving instruction in those places, in connection with this Society, amounts to upwards of 740,000.

Ship-Worms.-The ingenious Abbé de la Pluche has speculated on the use of these destructive animals. They open, he says, a source of considerable riches to the inhabitants of Sweden, by employing the vigilance of the Dutch, and imposing upon them the necessity of continually tarring and repairing their dikes and Indian vessels. The Terredo, in this manner, he thinks, serves to form a union between the two commercial nations, by occasioning a perpetual demand for oak, pitch, and fir. As these apparently pernicious animals, he continues, are perpetually at work at Amsterdam, for the advantage of Stockholm and Archangel, so the labours of others in the North are equally profitable to the Hollanders, by promoting the consumption of their salt, spices, and grocery, which are annually exported in large quantities, either for the purpose of seasoning and preserving the provisions of their Northern neighbours, or to cure the fish which they use instead of bread.

Northern Expeditions.-The expeditions, which of late years have been so numerous, to the Northern Seas, for the purpose of establishing the fact of a north-west passage by sea, were suggested partly by the circumstance that a whale was once caught in the sea of Tartary with a Dutch harpoon sticking in its back. The weapon proved, on enquiry, to have been plunged into the animal in the Spitzbergen sea; so that there must have been a communication from one sea to the other, by which the whale passed.

March of Rail-roads.—A rail-road between the Weser and the Rhine is about to be commenced; it has received the sanction of the King and States of Hanover, and a company, supported by government, has been formed to carry it into effect. Several hundred shares of 500 thalers each, have been taken. The execution of this plan will be of great advantage to the trade of the North of Germany, particularly of Bremen. It is proposed to connect Lubec and Hamburgh by a rail-road and steam carriages. A steam-coach is now in construction at Copenhagen, which is to run on the new road between Kiel and Altona.

Strange Postman.-The mode in which letters are carried in various countries is a subject of great curiosity. The postman who is the medium of communication between the coasts of the Pacific Ocean and the provinces which are situated on the east of the Andes, swims for two days

down the river Chamaya, and through a part of the Amazons, carrying his bag of letters wrapped about his head, like a turban. There is scarcely an instance of the letters ever having been lost, or even wetted.

Steel Engravings.-A Mr. Percy Heath has discovered a mode of rebiting steel plates, by which he can bring up to colour those tints which are usually considered as incapable of profiting by that process. This method promises to be useful in restoring worn plates, or such as merit to be restored.

Temperature of England.-The mean temperature of London is about 2 deg. higher than that of the surrounding country; the difference exists chiefly in the night, and is greatest in winter, and least in spring. During the whole year, the mean temperature of England does not vary in different years more than four degrees and a half.

The Wonders of Art.-The skins, says Mr. Babbage, used by the goldbeaters, are produced from the offal of animals. The hoofs of horses and cattle, and other horny refuse, are employed in the production of the prussiate of potash, that beautiful yellow crystallized salt, which is exhibited in the shops of some of our chemists. The worn-out saucepans, and tinware of our kitchens, when beyond the reach of the tinker's art, are not utterly worthless. We sometimes meet carts loaded with old tin kettles, and iron coal-scuttles, traversing our streets. These have not yet completed their useful course: the least corroded parts are cut into strips, punched with small holes, and varnished with a coarse black varnish, for the use of the trunk-maker, who protects the edges and angles of his boxes with them; the remainder are conveyed to the manufacturing chemists in the outskirts of the town, who employ them, in conjunction with pyroligneous acid, in making a black dye for the use of calico-printers.

Gas.-The gas lamps of London alone consume not less than 38,000 chaldrons of coals in the year. The gas-pipes of the metropolis were in 1830 of the total length of upwards of 1,000 miles.

Curious Vegetable.-The sting of the nettle bears a very singular resemblance to the fang of the rattle-snake. The sting is a tube that has one end placed in a gland: when the leaf is touched the gland is pressed-its juice oozes through the tube, and passes into the wound which the sting

has made.

Customs Extraordinary.-Almost all countries present examples of the strange love which mankind have of doing things in a roundabout way. In England a member of parliament does not give up his seat-he only ac cepts the Chiltern Hundreds.' In the Ottoman empire, when the sultan wants to dismiss a grand vizier from his office, he sends a messenger, who enters the vizier's house, walks up to his table, and wipes the ink out of his golden pen. No more is said or done, but the vizier understands that he is forthwith dismissed.

A Queer Calculation.—Taking the number of theatres which have been built in Europe and America, and the number which have been destroyed by fire, &c. it appears that the average duration of the existence of a theatre is not more than forty years.

Business to be done in the Farm in January.-Preparing the soil, carting out materials, and laying down a good plan of operations for the year, are now the chief business. Manure produced from bone dust is increasing

in consumption; there is no doubt of its capability of rendering humid poor land quite rich in a short time. Some recent experiments made in Germany, where this sort of manure was first used, have been described to us, and if we may rely upon the results which they produced, we can fairly promise the happiest consequences from its general employment. The use of bone dust, as compared with the best stable dung, is attended with these advantages: in respect to quality seven to four; of quantity about equal; of durability of the energy of the soils three to two. In France some experiments were lately made to ascertain how far sand might be used as manure. The results are as follow: Chaptal found a proportion of forty-nine per cent. of the silicious principle in the most fertile parts of the banks of the Loire; Davy obtained sixty from the best English soils; and Glauber seventy-nine on the most productive lands near Tunis. Dutrochet, the celebrated botanist, tried a layer of silicious sand on land where nothing had grown before; he obtained crops as good as were produced by the best soil in the neighbourhood,-Moore's Almanack Impr.

Business to be done in the Garden in January.-Trench and manure ground for early planting; plant out fruit trees, gooseberries, currants, raspberries, and nuts,-cabbages to succeed the first crop which had been planted out in the autumn. Sow lettuce (coss, common cabbage, brown Dutch, and Silesia kinds); radishes (short topped and salmon); carrots; spinach (smooth, seeded, and round leaved); parsley (curled leaved); beans (Sandwich, Toker, Windsor, broad Spanish); peas (Charlton and golden hotspur) ;-(only in hotbeds, with or without frames); sow cucumbers (long prickly, long green Southgate, white prickly); melons (the Cantaleupes); small salading (cress, mustard, and radish); cauliflowers. -Ibid.-NOTE. It is our intention to continue the series of directions from this valuable almanack throughout the year.

E. M. R.

Note to Readers and Correspondents.-Owing to a great pressure of works of considerable importance, we have been compelled to postpone our usual literary notices, which will be resumed in the next number, and strictly attended to in future.