HEIDELBERG VAT; OR, THE GREAT TUN OF HEIDELBERG.

MANY of our readers have, doubtless, made an | Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus would have excursion from the Rhine to the beautiful city of celebrated this rare worke with their learned Heidelberg-on-the-Neckar. Our object is not to stile as well as the rest, and have consecrated sing the beauties of the scene, but to introduce the memory thereof to immortality, as a very the regular sight-seer to one of the greatest curi- memorable miracle. For indeed it is a kinde of osities of the castle. But our inquisitive country- monstrous miracle, and that of the greatest sise man, Master Thomas Coryat, who visited this for a vessell that this age doth yield in any place city about two hundred and fifty years ago, is so whatsoever (as I am verily perswaded) under the eloquent in his praises of" The Great Tun," that cope of Heaven. Pardon me, I pray thee, genwe cannot do better than extract his eulogy. tle reader, if I am something tedious in discours"For it is the most remarkable and famous ing of this huge vessell; for as it was the strangthing of that kinde that I saw in my whole jour- est spectacle that I saw in my travells, so I hope ney: yea, so memorable a matter, that I thinke it will not be unpleasant unto thee, to read a full there was never the like fabrick (for that which description of all the circumstances thereof; and they showed me was nothing else than a strange for thy better satisfaction I have inserted a true kinde of fabrick) in all the world, and I doubt figure thereof in this place (though but in a small whether posterity will ever frame so monstrously forme) according to a certain patterne that I large a thing: it was nothing but a vessel full of brought with me from the city of Frankford, wine, which the gentlemen of the court showed me where I saw the first type thereof sold. Also I after they had first conveighed me in into divers have added an imaginary kinde of representation wine-cellars, where I saw a wondrous company of myselfe upon the toppe of the same, in that of extraordinary great vessels, the greatest part manner as I stood there with a cup of Rhenish whereof was replenished with Rhenish wine, the wine in my hand. The roome where it standeth totall number containing 130 particulars. But is wonderful vast (as I said before) and capacious the maine vessell above all the rest, that super- even almost as bigge as the fairest hall I have lative moles (or mass) unto which I now bend seene in England, and it containeth no other my speech, was showed me last of all, standing thing but the same vessell. It was begunne in alone by itself in a wonderfull vaste room. For the year 1589, and ended in the year 1591, one it is a stupendious masse (to give it the same Michael Werner, of the city of Laudacica, being epithetm that I have done before to the beauty the principall maker of the work." We learn of St. Mark's street, in Venice) that I am per- from the same authority, that this "wonderfull swaded it will affect the greatest and constantest moles" measures sixteen feet high (diameter), man in the world with wonder. Had this fabrick and at the belly eighteen. The proportions of been extant in those ancient times when the this curiosity of Heidelberg are small compared Colossus of Rhodes, the labyrinths of Egypt and with the monstrous vats of the London Breweries Creta, the temple of Diana at Ephesus, the of our times; it is, however, strictly speaking, hanging gardens of Semiramis, the tombe of not a vat, but a cask, or tun, and in this latter Mausoleus, and the rest of these decantated mira- capacity, we suppose, may still rank as the largest cles did flourish in their principall glory, I thinkel of its kind.-Pictorial World.

From Notes and Queries.

SIR THOMAS BROWN AND BISHOP KEN.

Having name two of Sir Thos. Browne's works he proceeds :

In the formor [Religio Medici] we find the followWHAT your correspondent J. H. MARKLAND ing lines, curious in themselves, but more so as apparently containing the general ideas of Bishop calls "A Midnight Hymn," by Sir Thomas Ken's "Evening Hymn." They are thus introBrowne, is evidently "An Evening Hymn;" and duced, in the author's quaint but impressive manthe coincidence between that and Bishop Ken's ner. Speaking of sleep, he says, "It is that death well-known bymn was pointed out by James by which we may be said to die daily; a death Montgomery of Sheffield, in his "Christian which Adam died before his mortality; a death Poets" (12mo., 1827), one of the volumes of Select Christian Authors, published by Collins of Glasgow. As your correspondent has not given the whole of Sir Thomas Browne's lines, and as those he has given are not in their own proper order, I may perhaps crave space for a complete transcript, with Montgomery's prefatory remarks. DLXIII. LIVING AGE. VOL. VII. 7

whereby we live a middle and moderating point between life and death: in fine, so like death, I adieu unto the world, and take my farewell in dare not trust it without my prayers, and a half

"A Colloquy with God.

"The night is come. Like to the day,

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