We need not ask you, reader, if these be truths. In saying that we are fast going to the grave, that we are fading like the leaf, we need only utter the solemn exclamation, and then point you to those thousand emblems which so eloquently maintain it. They appeal to you more powerfully than words. They clothe the truths in visible forms, then spread them out before you, and by the fitness of the illustration, call upon you to be admonished. And will you scorn or forget the message? Can you look upon nature in her dying hours, and not realise that a similar change must pass over you? When there is death everywhere, can you be unmindful of the perishing material with which your earthly house is constructed ? Can you see a leaf fall to the ground, without thinking that you must lie beneath the clods of the valley? No, you cannot be unmindful of these solemn realities, these lessons which nature is now reading you. But do you act as though you believed them? As you look upon the change that is being wrought around you, and feel that you must change in like manner, do you remember that you have souls that can never die, which experience no decay, but will live for ever in joy or in agony ? Are you fitting this spark of immortality for the bliss of Paradise or for the torments of an eternal fire ? This is the all-important question, and should absorb every other idea, until your safety be provided for. Your probation-day is fast departing. You know not how soon it will end, for, like the leaf, you fade without warning. If you wait for the transition moment, you are lost for ever. There is no knowledge, nor device in the cold grave to which we haste. But you are familiar with all this; and yet perhaps you procrastinate. Like many a deluded wretch, now beyond that 'bourne from which no traveller returns,' you defer the most important business that can be done in this life. You place upon this fearful uncertainty the rich inheritance above, which is priceless and unfading. You may yet win it, but how small the chance, if you continue to defer! And what are its advantages? If you gain a sure title, when you fade here, you will go where there is no change, no death; not even an emblem of dying, but one long, eternal summer. You will wear an immortal form and be surrounded with kindred immortalities. You will meet the long lost and loved ones, and sit down with them to the great marriage supper of the Lamb. This is a fading world. Brightest hopes fade, beauty fades;-everything about us is fading. Even the earth will pass away. But there will be a new heaven and a new earth that cannot perish. Oh, who does not desire a place there, when he shall have passed from the dead and the dying here? Who would not have a glorious body, and go where there is but glory-nothing but harmony, love, and perfect fruition? But, reader, remember that life is the only time given to secure so priceless an inheritance. And life, you know, hangs upon a brittle thread -it may be severed at any moment. Be wise, then, and ere the unseen hand of death is laid upon you, and you fade as a leaf, secure your soul that cannot fade. PRAYER. Is thine neart by the world, or its sorrows, oppress'd, The bosom wherein all thine own had confided, REV. G. HUGHES. COTTON. BEFORE the invention of the spinning-jenny in 1787, scarcely four millions of pounds weight of cotton were imported into Britain annually; now the annual import of the same material will exceed four millions of hundred-weights. Used as a universal article of raiment from pole to pole, by the savage and by the sage, it has become one of the most extensive articles of trade, and one of the most abundant products of human labour. No one can tell when or by whom the cotton wool was first applied to the purposes for which it is now in such general use; but no one can contemplate its applicability to the wants of humanity, without being impressed with a sentiment of veneration towards Him who has planted on the earth for man all that is necessary to supply his exigencies and add to his comforts. The earth is full of the greatness and goodness of God, and he who has most knowledge of those things, of which the earth is continent, will be most impressed with this sublime truth. Even for the simplest form of beauty with which man has invested the things which he has formed by his art, he is indebted to some suggestive form in nature. The rarest vases, and the most splendid ornaments in architecture, are mere copies of some tiny thing, which, touched by the plastic hand of God, spontaneously assumes a form of exquisite beauty. Our finest cups and urns are but modifications of flower-cups. The capitals of the Ionic and Corinthian columns are but rescripts of maiden's tresses and clustering plants. Not only for the materials, then, but for the form of all these beautiful things, which in our human vanity we prize as our handiwork, are we indebted to Him who has fed us, and led us thus far through this weary pilgrimage, The material of clothing is of two kinds, animal and vegetable; first, the skins of animals and their coverings, as wool, fur, and hair, and the inner bark and fibres of plants. These may be termed the more apparent parts, for clothing pur poses, of plants and animals, and are generally used by people who have not far advanced in a knowledge of manufactures. The savage throws the skin of a wild beast over his shoulders, and wraps a piece of plaited grass, or inner-bark cloth, round his loins, and he is content; but civilisation, ever restless, ever looking for some new object of use or luxury, discovers a far more splendid and becoming raiment in the cocoon of a worm, and in the seedpod of a little shrub. The cotton plant is of a great variety of species; indeed, the more that botanists search and analyse, the more of varieties do they discover. Some kinds of cotton are infinitely more valuable than others, both on account of its productive power and quality; the Gossypium herbaceum, or common herbaceous cotton plant, is that, however, which is most commonly cultivated. This species of cotton is of two sorts, being annual and perennial. The annual is that generally sown in the United States, and in Malta and Persia, to which last country it is indigenous. It is sown just in the manner of corn-springs to a height from eighteen to twenty inches-bears a large yellow flower, with a purple centre, which is succeeded by a large pod or seed-cup, about the size of a walnut, which, when ripe, bursts and exposes the beautiful white downy substance called cotton-wool. The cotton is cut down, and yields one or two crops in the season, according to the temperature of the climate in which it is cultivated. Another species of the herbaceous cotton attains to four and six feet high, being a very beautiful shrub; but the Gossypium arboreum, or cotton-tree, rises sometimes to the height of twenty feet, and grows wild on the banks of the Nile, in India, and Arabia. Another species of cotton has been styled by Linnæus, Gossypium religiosum, but for what reason it has obtained this singular appellation cannot be said. It is cultivated in the Mauritius, and is of two sorts, one bearing a very white cotton, the other a yellowish brown. It is from the Gossypium religiosum that nankeen cloth is made, and it is supposed to be indigenous to China. The annual herbaceous plant yields, however, by far the finest quality and most abundant crops of cotton; yet so various are the plants, in the particular attributes of procreance and quality, that one can scarcely be reckoned an exact specimen of the other. Various writers have estimated the yield to be from one hundred and fifty to two hundred and seventy pounds of picked or cleaned cotton per acre. The cotton is both a hardy and vigorous plant, and is grown upon almost any kind of soil with very little trouble, although it requires a constant and wearisome attention and labour when ripened. The cotton-tree requires a mean temperature of about 68 deg. Fahrenheit to produce wool; but the shrub sort will reach maturity in a climate of between 60 and 64 deg. The cotton-plant is propagated by seed, and is generally fit for being gathered in seven or eight months after it has been sown. The planter has no difficulty, however, in knowing when to commence his harvest, as the capsule, or seed-pod, bursts and indicates maturity. When the harvest approaches, the cotton assumes a most beautiful and pleasing appearance, the white globes contrasting finely with the dark green leaves of the plant. In the east the whole of the pod is pulled by the pickers and dressed; but the general practice is to separate the wool and seed from the husk. The first mode is adopted for expedition, but it has a deleterious effect upon the quality of the cotton, the husks mingling with the wool, and refusing to be separated from it without great difficulty and patient labour. The gathering of the cotton takes place during the night, and in the morning before sunrise, lest its colour should be injured by the rays of the sun; and no one who has not seen can estimate the wearisome, fagging, fainting labour, which the poor negro slave endures in the production of this plant. During the cotton harvest, for several weeks together, the poor sun-burned negroes have scarcely four hours sleep in the twenty-four. Their fingers are worn to the flesh, their bodies become thin and emaciated, and sometimes they will ply their task during their short fitful feverish slumbers, being denied other rest altogether. Many die under the tyranny and toil which, at this season especially, are most heartlessly exercised towards, and exacted from, the darkskinned Americans, by their cruel white countrymen. The separation of the cotton from the husks was a most tedious, painful process, when done by the hand; but the invention of a cleaning machine, called a gin, has superseded the manual process. By the hand process one person could scarcely clean a pound in the day. A complex gin or mill, attended by two or three persons can, more effectually than the hand, clean as much as eight or nine hundred pounds per day. The more simple machine, how ever, which consists of two or three fluted rollers, and is set in motion by the foot, after the manner of a turninglathe, can, by the labour of one person, clean about seventy pounds per day. It is the power of the cleaning machine, which can only be purchased by a capitalist, and the inbuman usurpation of dominion over his fellow-men, that enables the slave cotton-planter to compete with and exclude from the cotton market the free cotton-growing farmers of Western America. After the cotton has been husked, it is whisked upon a wheel, through a strong current of air, and effectually cleansed from any little particle left by the gin. As it is blown out of this machine, it is gathered up and carried to the packers, who force it into bags by means of screws; and in these bales, of about three hundred-weight each, it is exported to the manufacturers. When placed on ship-board, these bales are pressed down into a far more compact and solid form. Great Britain and the state of Massachusetts are the greatest cotton manufacturing countries in the world. Of course Massachusetts cannot actually compare with Great Britain in this capacity; but, proportionably, the Old Bay state exhibits a vast amount of capital invested in this branch of trade. In Lowell, Massachusetts, so celebrated for the high moral and intellectual character of its factory girls, there are nearly twenty thousand factory operatives employed; and manufactories are rapidly increasing in Ohio, and several others of the States. Of late years attention has been drawn to the fatal influence which the continuance of the cotton trade with America has upon the life and liberty of the slaves; and philanthropists have been directing their eyes towards the East Indies, as a more honourable market for the British cotton trader than that Georgia, where men are robbed of their dearest birthrights, in order to aggrandise a few planters, who esteem their luxuries as of more account than humanity. A more practicable plan is that of preferring to purchase from the free farmer of America his free-grown cotton, and to refuse to purchase that which is slave-grown. This latter plan has already been in part acted upon, and many free-grown articles are already made and sold in this country. It would be well for the friends of the slave to encourage this revolution in the cotton trade. SNOW IN THE ARCTIC REGIONS. IN lat. 78 deg. 30 min. my attention was attracted towards a shower of frozen particles which fell down like snow, during this season of inclemency, but which was not the snow I had been used to see. Its general appearance was a fall of scales, or thin circular pellicles of ice: but, upon minute investigation, they were found to be erystalline feathers, of symmetrical beauty, connected together by their bases, so as to form a common centre, from which the vanes or shafts projected like rays, or, to use a plainer simile, like the spokes of a wheel from the box of the axletree. From the primary rays, secondary ones branched out and met each other, composing a network of small crystals, and, though the integral particles of every separate piece of snow were little elongated drops of congealed water, each having a small end inserted into the globule beneath it, and affording its own head for the reception of the taper point of that succeeding, the various arrangements of these strings of iey beads produced an infinitude of delicate forms, the contemplation of which was highly interesting. The most plentiful figure was that of a flat star, of six principal rays, with many minor lines connect- ing them together, and the disposal of these ramifications served to diversify this simple form in many delightful ways; but there were other more intricate and more beautiful arrangements of the elementary crystal, which fixed the eye in admiration upon their fairy fabrics. Elegant masses, brilliant stars, rosettes, feuillettes, and globes of complex filigree, presented themselves in every variety, but the extreme chasteness of combination in which these little automaton diamonds had disposed themselves is beyond description. Large quantities of snow, both of the common flaky and crystalline kind, fell during the night. Not only was the ship's deck, and all upon it, white with a fleecy covering, but the masts, tops, yards, shrouds, stays, and every rope and portion of the rigging on which a particle of snow could lodge, was veiled in a feathery tunic. But the fore pari of the vessel presented a beautiful and enchanting sight: the waves, which dashed against the bows, and the spray, which flew over the forecastle even to the foretop, when she dipped her head beneath the surge, became encrusted on every spot it touched. The whole front of the hull and upper works was encased in a splendid sheet of ice; whit from the bowsprit and sprit-sailyard, huge stalactites and massy pendants hung down, like the tusks of elephants, Minor icicles, and spokes of ivory whiteness, were ranged on every line and pole, giving them the appearance of long jaw-bones armed with unnumbered teeth; and scarcely was the material of the ship discernible at any point be fore the mast. It might have been imagined, upon seeing this part only of our ship, that she had been immersed in a petrifying lake, whose waters had congealed around her or that she had been dipped in a vast cauldron of melted glass, which had clung to her, and grown solid as she was withdrawn. It was delightful to sit in one of the quarterboats, and see our vessel glide through the deep blue oceau, like a bark of crystal sailing along the sky.—Tales of a Voyager. GERMAN ATHEISM AND FRENCH SOCIALISM. WHEN We look at the world through the telescopic agency of the newspaper press, it appears to be nothing more than a vast theatre of visible and active forces. We see men moving about in their different spheres, and pursuing their various objects; we behold them in masses tracing particular courses, and rushing against each other like antagonistic powers; we see kings betraying peoples and peoples dethroning kings; we hear of shouts and screams, and the booming of guns; the visible is held up to our senses in all the graphic palpability of fact. Barricades, streetfights, ejaculations, imperial flights, the movements of Magyars and Croatians, demands of workmen, negations of councils, and all the feverish manifestations of the social patient, together with the terrible eruptions that take place in the human family, are exposed by the artists of daily history, but they seldom show us the thoughts, the ideas, or speculations, which are proposed by the penseurs who set these visible forces on their tracks. The journals have to do with events more than with the philosophy of these events. Their sphere is more historical than critical; in their nature they are more synthetical than analytical; and if we wish to become acquainted with what is termed the philosophical spirit of the times, it is not to the jour-gest to our French penseurs the capacities of present sonals but to the works of the modern speculatists themselves that we must go. The age in which we live is motive with wonderful political phenomena. Europe at the present time is a phantasmagoria, whose regalities are shifting, and passing away, and going out, and whose millions are animated with thoughts and impulses as diverse, strange, and startling as the transient phantasms that flit across the disc of a magic lantern's lens. Undoubtedly the revolutions that are now taking place have been the result of a grand law which is superior to humanity or any human idea, and that is the law of motion. So general an uprising and modification of political systems was not the mere surging of an angry human sea, but the nervous action of human intelligence and human dissatisfaction. Europe had outgrown despotism and feudalism, and she knew it. She arose, looked at the systems which she believed to have enthralled her, overthrew them, and then found herself not at rest but rolling in an ocean of vague and distracting troubles, while the wild ejaculations of idealists rung incessantly in her distracted ears. Upon one grand idea, the idea of change, continental Europe was almost unanimous, and it was consummated; but under this general coincidence of thought there existed multifarious and conflicting speculations, the vehement, virulent, and murderous proposition of which still distracts society, and stimulates the burning fever of fierce political animosity. The battle which was waged between peoples and their legitimate governments has now shifted its ground, and rages between schools of political and social philosophy. It is towards the particular schools indicated by the heading of this article, that we mean to direct the attention of our readers, in order that they may form some idea of the syllogisms propounded by the leaders of the sects comprehended under the general denominations above. Socialism, per se, or a system of co-operative economy, is not necessarily connected with peculiarity of abstract speculative belief; and, very unfortunately for the modern atheists, who propose it as a new system of human association, the only successful examples of it are exhibited by communities who profess Christianity. Complete co-operation has only been successful amongst the Shakers and Rappites, and other professing Christian societies in America. European socialism in all its phases, and in all its modifications, has only existed in the brains of its proposers, in their books or in their diagrams. American cooperation, even when based upon but a weak conception and acceptance of the glorious dogmas of Christianity, has been abundantly fruitful of peace and the grosser requisites of life. French socialism, animated with the spirit of German atheism, has usurped the national tribune, and has shed blood like water in the proposition of its ideas. It is The socialism which agitates France at the present day finds definite expression in the works of MM. Charles Grün and P. J. Proudhon-the former, a German propagandist of the Young Hegelien school of atheistical sophists; the latter, the leader of the social regenerationists. The former proposes in his work on Le Mouvement Social en France et en Belgique,' published in 1845, what, by this school, is termed the spiritualism of the new world. The latter in his 'Systeme des Contradictions Economiques ou Philosophie de la Misere,' in 1846, supplies the materialism of the system, and thus it is complete. German atheism is the metaphysical power which is to dethrone all the old ethical and religious traditions; and French socialism is the system of physics which is to reclaim the physical world from individual usurpation. Conjointly they are to constitute the new 'all in all,' which shall destroy all contradictions, disparities, and miseries, and restore man to his supreme sovereignty of happiness and glory, There is nothing invidious in our association of French socialism with German atheism. Ours is not the vulgar cry of infidelity which is too often raised against propositions baptised in the spirit of Christianity. The two have wed in noonday before the world as the spiritual and material bases of the future, and have boldly declared the inanity of all other systems of belief and hope. They cry aloud that man must be regenerated, and that it is only from the fecundity of his own ideas and through his own independent powers that he can be so. All the systems of ethics based upon the idea of an abstract deity have failed of their purpose to restore man to the great good, and, consequently, this system of atheism and socialism has become a human necessity. These are startling propositions, but they are candid ones. The human senses perceive them, and the human sentiments rise up intuitively to reject them, as the daring impositions of human pride and the blasphemies of extravagant egotism; but they declare themselves to be what we have styled them, conjunct atheism and socialism,' and as such men must view them or they will not recognise the systems now proposed by the French and German economists. France, the combined communistic and atheistic ideas are spreading. It is to St Simon that M. Grün attributes the rise of the various schools of socialism that have sprung up in France during the last ten years. He was the true prophet of the future, in whose writings and words are discoverable the apostolic fire. S: Simonism is not of itself the true system of society, but its germ. It was a proposition of practical Christianity, and of course was absurd in the eyes of M Gün. St Simonism,' says M. Grün, is like a box of seeds whose contents have been scattered one knows not where: but each grain has found its proper soil, and they have sprung from the teeming earth one after the other. First appeared the democratic form of socialism, then sensua! socialism, then communism, and at last the utopis of Proudhon himself.' The mission of St Simon, according t this Young Hegelien, was to lay down his box of seed, and then to look passively at his hands. It was this peculiarity which rendered his ideas and the issue of his system s moving and so ridiculous-their vitality and humanity, and the weakness and dependence of the disciples wh adopted them. 'St Simonism,' says M. Grün, in conclusi n. buffooneries. The author left the world before he hai played his part; the manager died during the representa tion; then the actors, throwing aside the costumes whi they had adopted, resumed their city habits, and repaired each one to his own house.' Apparent St Simonism be came defunct with its master; but the members of the disruption retained the germs of independent ideas, sai the last ten years have been fruitful in the development of modifications of these ideas. Socialism as a vulgar system of materialism is of old date. Some of its disciples trace its decadence from the days of Plato and Pythagoras to its revival in the mysticisms of the middle ages. From the mystics of the middle ages it descended to Thomas Munzer, from Thomas Munzer to the Anabaptists, and from the Anabaptists to the penseurs de la Montagne, as Louis Blanc calls the speculatists. Several of the schools of socialism owe their origin directly, however, to the close of the eighteenth century, when the convulsions of 1789, which were the precursors of the present ones, took place, and when ideas of which those of M. Grün and M. Proudhon are modifications were enun-is une piece de theatre, full of feeling and contradictory ciated. M. Proudhon himself discusses what he terms the socialism of Plato and Pythagoras, the mysticism of the anabaptists, of Thomas Munzer, and M. Cabet, like an independent chief of sect and doctor, and criticises them with scrupulous fidelity and impartial justice; he is independent of their ideas, because he has ideas of his own; and his being the only true principles of social economy, are of course carefully dissociated from the imperfect speculations of his precursors. M. Grun accepts M. Proudhon's social economics, because, he says, they comprise the only system compatible with the Young Hegelien philosophy, which philosophy is the thoughts of Hegel tortured and disfigured by the turbulent German doctors, who have at last finished by the absolute denial of all divinity, and the proclamation of a religion of which every man is to himself the god. M. Charles Grün is a missionary of this Young Hegelien philosophy, and he comes from Germany fired with the vain conceits of this religion of humanism, in order to teach it to the Belgian and French systemists. He visits the chiefs of the schools in these two countries, describes their persons, records their conversation, and criticises their ideas with a graphic freedom and pungency of wit which impress us with feelings of respect for his talents, and of profound pity for his abominable mental vagaries. Some of his portraits are bold and lively, and must be interesting as revelations of a class of men who, full of the presumption of a blinded and insolent humanity, would emulate Satan in seeking to dethrone the Almighty. Of one of these persons in Belgium, M. Jacob Kats, his description is peculiarly amusing. This Fleming is the veritable apostle of popular socialism; he practises what he preaches and teaches from morning to night. During that, the course of a day, he assumes various positions and guises: in the morning he is a schoolmaster, in the afternoon he is a socialist lecturer, and at night he is a comedian. Comedy and lecture are equally acceptable to M. Kats; he is always the same, unable to remain idle, and, according to his historian, presents a touching spectacle of incessant activity and indefatigable charity. M. Grün's is rather an amusing picture of this agitator, who is at once a natural and impassioned orator, director of a theatre, author, actor, manager, chief of the orchestra, prompter, and candle snuffer. In Belgium, M. Grün met the old Buonarotti, one of the companions of Babeuf and the historian of his conspiracy, and, according to the German critic, the history of the conspiracy of Babeuf by the old demagogue of 1793 has exercised for the last ten years a powerful influence upon the mind of France. It is through this work, it seems, that the extreme parties, disgusted with mere reform politics, have had their anti-social prejudices dispelled, and have adopted the propositions of communism. The old demagogue of 1, 93, as Buonarotti is termed by M. St Rene Taillandier, has not only influenced the French but the Flemish mind; and in the Low Countries, as in The present ideas are denied to be emissions of modified St Simonism by some critics, and are declared to be the inevitable results of the philosophical progress of the French Revolution-the triumph of the ideas of Voltaire over those of Rousseau. The defeat of the ideas of Roa seau was inevitable,' said Pierre Leroux, because Robe pierre, the scholar of Rousseau, so admirable on account! his moral purity and his belief in a Supreme Being, sought to impose his belief on others by means of the guillotine. M. Grün, on the other hand, declares that Robespierre fell, not because he forced his belief on others, but simply be cause he occupied himself with religion! Voltaire and Rousseau, according to the Young Hegelian, formed t antithesis, of which he has discovered the synthesis; that is to say, he has discovered them to be two minor terms apparently opposite, but which unite in a superior term which he has found out. If Robespierre,' he says, 'had cepted the moral strength of Rousseau's doctrines and Voltaire's anti-religious sentiments, he would have been the initiator of the new moral and social world.' Th task, he affirms, was not possible, however, for the epoc of the ninth thermidor. It was reserved for the eighteent century to discover, in Camille Desmoulins, the coincidence of Roussean and Voltairean ideas; and it was reserved to our times to endorse the new world, of which these com bined ideas are the initiative. From the attrition and inpulsion of ideas, and from the collateral pressure of misery, has at last emerged, according to M. Grün, the preschi formidable organisation of thought, which is characterist as German Atheism, and that determined idea of social neorganisation denominated French Communism. The word is full of suffering; no man can deny this. Humanity is divided into isolated orders, which have too long kept aloof from one another. The voice of our blessed Lord and Master has been crying aloud to us, Love one another; and still we have neglected our brother, until the enemy has taken him captive, and has led him, like a blind Samson, against the pillars of the temple, till he has ever sought to overthrow the eternal throne. What says this German atheist? And his is not a solitary voice; it is the voice of what is termed the Young Hegelien school. Hear his terrible blasphemies: God is not; that which hamanity has so long adored is himself: it is the unity of his grandest thoughts and purest sentiments to which he bas attributed a distinct existence, and which he has named God. God is nothing more than our own image reproduced in a wondrous mirage. It is the most sublime reflection, the most magnificent shadow of human kind. It is time that humanity, like Narcissus, who admired himself in the fountain, should at last forsake this barren contemplation of an abstract divinity, and should know himself-should become conscious of his own divinity.' The discovery of this syllogism belongs to M. Fuerbach; and a number of Young Hegelien doctors have received with transport the proposition; from which has sprung that religion of humanism of which M. Grün is the apostle to the French socialists. It is upon the miseries of society that these men have sought to build their mental vagaries. It is hungry, houseless humanity whom they have sought to inoculate and indoctrinate with the virus of atheism. Man suffers, and he refuses to be satisfied with dogmas. Christendom has devoted herself almost wholly to credital discussions, and has too much forgotten the practical application of the charities of our religion to those not within its visible pale; and the consequence has been this marriage of debasing atheism with ostensible philanthropy, and their acceptance by multitudes. There must be an awakening of the Church, for the enemy is upon her. Germany and France are marshalling their hosts, and are grasping the weapons of war, with which to make a final attack upon the imperishable bulwarks of our faith. St Simonism, the benevolent dream of one confessedly full of the charities of Christianity; Fourierism, the mathematical era of material humanity; and the other isms of the modern schools, were lessons in the mysterious ordination of God to teach us to be up and doing. History can tell how these warnings have operated upon the Church. Here and there we have heard the ery of alarm from the lips of the Lord's saints, and the startled Church has listened; but as the sounds have died away, she has relapsed into satisfaction, while this host of feverish speculatists were enunciating their philosophisms and preying upon the sympathies of the miserable. The further consideration of the subject will form material for another paper. HOW DO THEY LIVE? PEOPLE Come into this world chiefly to live, and almost all the fight and bother that people have in it is how to live. When people don't know how to live, of course they die, and then they leave this world and all its cares. One would suppose that it was not very difficult to live down here, there are so many ways of living, and man needs so little here below, as the philosopher Goldsmith says; nevertheless, there is something very wrong about the economy of life; for one of the loudest thunder-toned cries in our days is live and let live.' There is one class of people who are said to live upon their means these, of course, are mean livers; and as mean folks are always cunning and secretive, it is a question for the Royal Academy of Sciences to decide upon the properties of this substance called means. Your people who live upon their means have genteel houses, and semiantique genteel raiment; they are generally thin ethereal-looking single ladies, with shoulder-of-mutton sleeves in their gowns, large bonnets, pinched faces, scraggy servant maids, cats like Cape of Good Hope sheep, and chains upon their doors. Nobody ever gets into the inside of their houses save their friends, and then there is neither wine nor biscuit discussed, but social economy and the enormities of servants. Your people who live upon their means, are the sisters or daughters of army or navy officers, who eke out their pensions like heroines, while these same pensions are squeezed from the nation's means. There is a sort of bold burly people, who are said to live upon their money; and it is certain that if they do not masticate and swallow the coins, they take their puff from them right away. The man who lives upon his money, generally does so in every respect; if he wishes worship and adulation, he rattles the guineas in his waistcoat pocket, plays with the seals at his fob, and expects the world's homage, and gets it. He laughs at genius, and talent, and philanthropy, and all that sort of thing; and only respects aristocracy and kings, because of their diadems and stars. His geography extends to the mines of Potosi and Golcondah; and he recollects of Ophir better than any other place in ancient geography. He not only lives upon his money, but he rides upon it; it is his life and hobby, and if he were denuded thereof he would be poor indeed. There are some folks who are said to live upon their talents, and this, indeed, is a very equivocal way of living. If we were to be told that Milton and Shakspeare lived upon their talents, we might say that Bamfield Moore Carew and our modern thimbleriggers do the same. is a most expansive and motley stage of life, for it embraces the histrionic stage, and the stage where Jack Ketch illustrates his strangulating talents. It comprehends the lord-chancellor, and the light-fingered gentry, whose talents generally bring them into the dock before a very talented gentleman, whose talents have brought him to the bench. This Perhaps the most healthy and athletic-looking portion of our living community are those persons who live upon the soil. Liebig and Johnston have demonstrated that rich soils are continent of gluten, and farina, and the other ingredients of muscularity; and soil being rather a plentiful thing out of town, lies fair for the mastication of those who can digest it. The barons of old were the most voracious devourers of the soil that we have any record of. They swallowed 'hides' of low land, and mountain tarns, and commons, and morasses and their descendants continue to chew the cud upon them yet; they live upon the soil, and when they die, the soil lives upon them, and 'round and round, and about and about,' the cycle goes, like a Kentucky hunter who is whipping a panther. There are a class of people walking above ground, like thin ghosts and disembodied creatures, although they have limbs and tongues, and all their features, who do not altogether live. We state this upon authority, and, lest we should be called upon to produce our authority,' as we have often been by ignorant opponents, we refer to the file of the Times,' or the balaam-box in any newspaper office. 'Where do you live now, Betsy ?' said a lady to her ci-devant maid of all work, whom she met in Cheapside. I do not live now, ma'am,' said Betsy; 'I'm married.' Perhaps the Poor-Law Guardians, or the Scotch Parochial Board, could tell how Betsy got along. This question is a most familiar one to everybody, and must suggest an infinitude of modes of living, of which even we are incognisant; we will let our readers into a secret, however, of which they are probably not aware, and that is how people lived sixty years ago upon their wits and with economy. We must confess that the following curious illustrations of life were unknown to us, until our antiquarian friend, Jedediah Grose, pulled them quietly from his escrutoire and laid them down before us. The first beats Mick Cavanagh, the Irishman, who lived upon nothing,' said we, in raptures; and the second crows down the Minories and Judee all to nothing.' 'He was a curiosity,' said Mr Grose, smiling quietly. 'Who was ?' said we, looking up from the manuscript, 'He was,' said Jedediah, reading as follows:-Mr Osbaldeston was an attorney's clerk, and, spite of the popular prejudices against his profession, said to be an honest man. This you will allow to be a curiosity, but that is not all. This honest limb of the law is married, and has, at least, half-a-dozen children, all whom, with as many couple of hounds, and a brace of hunters, he maintains out of, how much do you think? Guess a little, I pray you. Why then, to support himself, a wife, six children, twelve dogs, and two horses, he has not a penny more than sixty pounds per annum! And, if possible to increase the miracle, he did this in London for many years, paying every body their own, and keeping a tight coat for Sundays and holidays. But I will try to explain this seeming paradox. Atter the expiration of the time which Mr Osbaldeston owed his master, he acted as an accountant for the butchers in Claremarket, who paid him |