took an orgie of gamblers for a civilized M. de Persigny was personally and and respectable form of government as pleasantly known on this side of the Chancandidly and sincerely as he mistook him- nel as an ambassador who relished English self for a grand seigneur. All men, it has life as heartily as he hated English liberbeen said, are apt to make maxims of their ties, and who had the parvenu's taste for favourite follies and precepts of their pro- the rich man's country. English society pensities. M. de Persigny had constructed is seldom reluctant to bow down before out of his moral consciousness a faith in any sort of success; and when M. de the democratic despotism of the Bona- Persigny kept open house at Albert Gate partes, as in a Second Providence upon his saloons were as fashionably filled as earth, for the salvation of revolutionary the late lamented Mr. Hudson's. There societies, and the creation of penniless was a flavour of something questionable counts and dukes out of a chaos of com- and interlope in the political antecedents munism and panic. The Gospel of St. of the enterprising diplomatist which enHelena was his religion; he was its martyr gaged the jaded sympathies of a society and confessor in evil days, and when it be- always in search of a sensation. Some came the religion of the State he believed fastidious Frenchmen who remember that in it still; indeed, we doubt not he be- their country had been represented in lieved in it to the day of his death, as other days by a Broglie, a St. Aulaire, a some gamesters believe in rouge-et-noir, Guizot, a Chateaubriand, might be excused with an ardour unquenched by disaster. for shrugging their shoulders at the enthuThe glorious device of his reigning house, siasm of Belgravia for a commis voyageur. "Sauvons la caisse," may have dignified But in the London world it was enough and consoled his latest reflections upon that his Excellency was most genial and the final failure of an experiment which hospitable, and decidedly more free and at least had filled the pockets of so many easy than his predecessors or his colgenerous enthusiasts. Whatever doubts leagues; besides being a charitable patron may have overshadowed his hours of re- of the English alliance. After the brief tirement, he cannot but have felt that he occupation of Albert Gate by that gay old had enjoyed a rare degree of felicity in be- "troupier" the Duc de Malakoff, there ing almost respected, while his compeers was quite a perfume of good company in were derided and envied. His intervals the receptions of the Duc de Persigny, of isolation during the declining years of who, if not a grand seigneur of the old his beloved régime had lent him a certain school, was very much at his ease in an air of distinction which a few speeches in aristocratic mob. M. de Persigny had the Senate against parliamentary institu- taken the measure of English policy, and tions, and his occasional letters to the Em- of English manners and morals, and while peror, urgently advising vast public loans the Embassy adopted a high tone with the for the construction of cross-roads and Foreign Office upon any question of refucanals, exalted rather than impaired. The gees or conspirators, it agreeably encourgeneral public were disposed to give him aged that enlarged and liberal freedom of credit for all the good which was left un- social intercourse which is perhaps one of done and for opposing all the evil he did the most lasting benefits we owe to the not prevent. And he made ample use of Second Empire. his opportunities of increasing this gratuitous and fanciful reputation. It is no secret that during his last visit to London he complained bitterly of the frivolous counsels which had accelerated a ruinous war. He had not foreseen the publication of those confidential papers which show that the Duc de Persigny had eagerly applauded the declaration of war. It was only a disastrous war that he disapproved.

The Duc de Persigny will probably be more regretted by a few in England than by many in France; but his biographer may plead that he bore the fate of his Sovereign and the woes of his country with a not ungraceful equanimity, and that there was even in the most doubtful passages of his life and the least imposing features of his character something that inspired an involuntary sympathy.

THE VERB "PROGRESS. The opinion is widely spread among literary men that to use the word progress as a verb is to be guilty of an Americanism. How can this opinion be maintained, seeing that progress is used as a verb by Shakespeare, Ford, and Milton ?

"Let me wipe off this honrable dew
That silently doth progress on thy cheeks."
King John, Act V. Sc. 2.

"Although the popular blast
Hath reared thy name up to bestride a cloud.
Or progress in the chariot of the sun,'
Ford.
"In supereminence of beatific vision progress-
ing the dateless and irrevoluble circle of eterni-
ty."- Milton's Reformation in England.

the glass manufactory on the island of Murano, where of late years the making of the famous Venetian glass, so prized by antiquaries, has been revived and carried to great perfection. To our English eyes this glass may appear dull, and imperfect in shape; but when we consider that all the beautiful vases, flowers, etc., we see, are made without model, simply shaped by the eye and hand of the workman, the marvel is that they are so true in form. A man will take a certain number of sticks of glass of equal length, resembling the peppermint-sticks so dear to children, and place them in a row on a sort of shovel; this he places in a furnace till the glass becomes partially fused; then he takes another round iron implement, and twists the melted glass round it, and by turning it in various ways, and frequently placing it in the furnace for a few moments, it at last assumes whatever shape you please either vase, goblet, or plate. When finished in shape, he takes a small quantity of dark red glass, passes it IN VENICE.- No one should leave Venice lightly round the edge, and thus forms the without well studying the curious mosaics in St. border. The preparation of the gold stoneMark's; that grand cathedral is at once a no- glass, and of the opal tint which is so much adble temple and an historical museum of unsur-mired, is a secret recently re-discovered, I bepassed interest. Here you may read of the re- lieve, by Salviati, to whom we are indebted also ligion, the riches, the liberality, the conquests, for the modern mosaics, which from their beauty and the progress made in the arts, by that wou- and durability will, I trust, ere long, be emderful Republic of the past. Here are treas-ployed largely in wall decorations in England. ures, war spoils, from Constantinople and from The bugle and bead works are also curious. A Greece. Over the great door stand the gilded man takes a piece of glass from the furnace, bronze horses, said to be the work of Phidias, blows down an iron rod into it; another man placed there, I conclude, to show the Venetians seizes it, and the two walk backwards from each what a horse is like, as they have no opportunity other through a long passage till the glass is of studying the living animal. These were drawn to the size of a bead or a bugle; it is then taken to Paris as trophies by the first Napoleon, cut into lengths, and the beads are filled with and restored, to the great joy of the people, af- sawdust, again fuse, and rounded by friction, ter the battle of Waterloo. It is difficult to im- being shaken together in a sack by a peculiar agine a city full of life without horses and with- motion. Churchman's Shilling Magazine. out wheels, in which you may walk certainly, but only through narrow lanes of houses, where you may touch the walls on either side with outstretched arms, where you come to bridges of steps every few yards over the numerous canals, NEW FOSSIL CONIFERS. - Mr. W. Carruthers and where the turnings are so intricate, and so has figured and described in the number of the much alike, that only by great care can you Geological Magazine for December 1871 two find your way back to your hotel; a city wholly new species of fossil coniferous fruits from the devoid of verdure, where all the vegetables and Gault beds of Folkestone. He states one species fruit consumed have to be brought in barges to be allied to the existing Wellingtonia, and daily from the mainland. In some of the court- shows that they point to the existence of a coniyards you see a few orange-trees in tubs, and ferous vegetation on the high lands of the Upper there is one square patch called a garden, con- Cretaceous period, which had a facies similar taining a few trees; but with these exceptions to that now existing on the mountains in the there is no green thing in Venice, and the near-west of North America between the thirtieth est approach to vegetation must be looked for on the Lido, that long, low, narrow tongue of land sheltering Venice from the waves of the Adriatic, which may be seen from the lagoon where all is calm, tossing and raging, as though vainly endeavouring to burst the slender barrier. One of the most interesting sights in Venice is

and fortieth parallel of latitude. No fossil re-
ferable to Sequoia (or Wellingtonia) has hith-
erto been found in strata older than the Gault,
and here, on the first appearance of the genus,
we find it associated with pines of the same
group that now flourish by its side in the New
World.

1

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From The Westminster Review.

THE FIRST EARL OF SHAFTESBURY.

hostilities;

all

binations and unreasonable violent hatreds and unaccountable reconIt is perhaps the peculiar boast of Eng- ciliations; profound suspicions and openland - and in a secondary degree the hearted credulity; the grossest corruption boast of the United States that works and the most sublime self-devotion of great research, labour, and learning have been produced in either country by men belonging to the leisured class, who wrote not for gain, but for pure love of the subjects which employed their pens. To a list which includes the distinguished names of Stanhope, Grote, Motley, and Prescott, may be now added that of Mr. W. D. Christie, who has devoted the horas subsecivas of official life and the leisure of retirement to an illustration of the lives of two Carolinian celebrities, John Dryden and Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury.

It is true enough that in any society of average Englishmen very few will be found who know much about Dryden or care anything for Shaftesbury. Yet the times in which these men flourished were amongst the most strange and stirring in the history of England; the parts played by both conspicuous and pronounced; the mark which one made on the history of his day only less than the impression which the other made on its literature, as the work of the statesman must always be less enduring than that of the poet. Both of these men have left a lasting mark on England. The one gave us the Habeas Corpus Act; the other in "Absalom and Achitophel" and the "Hind and Panther," bequeathed to English rhyme a finish, point, and terseness, at once a vigour and a smoothness, which made French models thenceforth superfluous, and inspired the future rivalry of Pope.

these jostle one another like the manycoloured images of a kaleidoscope. The contrast of the age of Charles II. with the age which preceded it, of the men of his reign with the men of the Protectorate, of his foreign policy with that of Cromwell, gives to the history of his time and his ministers the interest of an historical puzzle; and perhaps no one statesman of the period exemplifies its peculiarities more vividly than the one whom Mr. Christie has undertaken not only to justify but to praise.

Anthony Ashley Cooper was born in 1621, the nineteenth year of the reign of James I. His father was Sir John Cooper, of Rockborne, in Hampshire. His mother was the only daughter of Sir Anthony Ashley, of Wimborne St. Giles, in Dorsetshire. As he said of himself, "My parents on both sides of a noble stock, being of the first rank of gentry in those counties where they lived." Young Cooper was christened Anthony Ashley by the express desire of his maternal grandfather, who had stipulated that the lad should bear the name of Ashley along with that of his father. When he was seven years old he lost his mother. Three years after that he lost his father, who had married a second wife, Lady Morrison, daughter of Sir Baptist Hicks. Lord Campbell speaks of Anthony Ashley as being, while a boy, a baronet with 8000l. a year. He was indeed left rich; but he was rich after conAnd the age in which they both lived is siderable losses. He inherited estates amongst the most interesting and perplex- held of the Crown by tenure of knighting in the annals of our country. To one service, and therefore under the control of who looks back on it from the age of Queen the Court of Wards. His grandfather's Victoria, it seems much as the tortuous brother, Sir Francis Ashley, who, as defiles of the Alps seem in the recollec- King's Serjeant, had considerable inflution of the traveller who has effected a ence with that Court, showed himself less safe descent on the rich and sunny than kind to his young kinsman, for he obplains of Lombardy. Unreasonble com-tained a decree by means of which some

A Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury, 1621-1683. By W. D. CHRISTIE, M.A, formerly Her Majesty's Minister to the Argentine Confederation and to Brazil. 2 Vols. London and

New York: Macmillan and Co. 1871.

of the estates were sold to himself and others much below their value. Nor was this the only wrong attempted by this unjust grand-uncle. He endeavoured to bring other property of his nephew within