ber or very weak soap and water may be borne in mind. Thus, comparing it with used. silver, the bulk of a given weight of aluminThe process of soldering aluminium also ium is nearly four times that of the same is worthy of note. The solder used is com- weight of silver, so that if one ounce of silposed of zinc, copper, and aluminium, and ver were required for an article, four similar the pieces of the article intended to be joined articles could be made of one ounce of alumust be "tinned," as in ordinary soldering minium. Its lightness is, as we have before with tin, with the aluminium-solder itself. observed, one of its principal qualities, the The pieces are then exposed to a gas blow-specific gravity of platinum is 21.5, of gold pipe or other flame; but in order to unite 19-5, tin, 7.3, while that of aluminium is only the solderings, small tools of the metal it-2.6. The lightness which it communicates self must be used. Tools of copper or brass, to the bronze, whose durability, hardness, such as are employed in soldering gold and and immense strength nearly equal that of silver, are not permissible, as they would the best steel, renders probable its future form colored alloys; moreover, no flux extensive use in the construction of buildwhatever can be used, as all the known sub-ings, the manufacture of ordnance, and other stances employed for that purpose attack the objects where strength and lightness are remetal, and prevent the adhesion of the pieces. quired to be combined. The use of the little tools of aluminium is an art which the workman must acquire by practice, as at the moment of fusion the solderings must have friction applied, the melting taking place suddenly and completely. In comparing the price by weight of this with other metals, its greater bulk must be Having witnessed how admirably the French have applied this metal to ornamental and fanciful objects, it will be a matter of future interest to watch the development of its applications, as a British manufacture, to more solid and practical objects. From The Examiner. Verses and Translations. By C. S. C. Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, and Co. London: Bell and Daldy. WE looked into these pages expecting what is usually found in the books of verse that are being daily printed, glanced over, and put aside. But we were surprised by the little book into laughter, and charmed by its whimsical grace or grotesque suggestion now and then running into lines hardly surpassed in their way since the days of Thomas Hood. For C. S. C. has the mind of a young poet underlying his burlesque. In one poem, indeed, this triumphs over his sense of the ludicrous; the medley of parody and burlesque entitled Dover to Munich passing by smooth gradation into an earnest, honest close among the dreams of the art capital :— "Pallas there, and Jove, and Juno, 'Take' once more their walks abroad,' Under Titian's fiery woodlands And the saffron skies of Claude : "There the Amazons of Rubens Hang the cattle's graceful shapes, Laugh amid the Seville grapes; "And all purest, loveliest fancies That in poet's souls may dwell Kneels the Magdalene in prayer; On the calm face of her Child : "And that mighty Judgment-vision Tells how man essayed to climb Up the ladder of the ages, Past the frontier walls of Time; "Heard the trumpet-echoes rolling Through the phantom-peopled sky, "Marked the shower of sunlight breaking Through the crimson panes o'erhead, And on pictured wall and window Read the histories of the dead: "Till the kneelers round us, rising, Crossed their foreheads and were gone; And o'er aisle and arch and cornice, Layer on Layer, the night came on." Except in admirably felt translation of fragments from the English poets into Latin, or from Latin and Greek poets into English verse, that is the only direct glimpse we have here of the serious side of C. S. C. His Latin verses have sometimes a true melody of their own when they are serious, but even in Latin C. S. C. is apt at burlesque; witness his Carmen Sæculare, MDCCCLIII with the mock gravity of its Latin notes by a commentator, and its whimsical touches of parody. Here are-for we must quote a bit of the Latin-some heroics upon the undergraduates' winter enjoyment of tobacco-with an indication of the proc tors: "At juvenis (sed eruda viro viridisque juventus) Quærit bacciferas, tunica pendente,* tabernas : Pervigil ecce Baco furva depromit ab arca Splendidius quiddam solito, plenu mque sapo rem Laudat, et antiqua jurat de stirpe Jamaica. Te vero, cui forte dedit maturior ætas Odit enim dulces succos anus, odit odorem; The English rhymes are quite as amusing. Now it is the mock sentimental lover who writes lines suggested by the fourteenth of February, showing to some damsel how "Ere the morn the east has crimsoned, When the stars are twinkling there, *tunicâ pendente: h. e. "suspensâ e brachio." Quod procuratoribus illis valde, ut ferunt, displicebat. Dicunt vero morem a barbaris tractum, urbem Bosporiam in fl. Iside habitantibus. Bacciferas tabernas: id. q. nostri vocant "tobaccoshops." t'herba-avená. Duo quasi genera artis poeta videtur distinguere. "Weed," 'pipe," recte Scaliger. (As they did in Watts' hymns, and Fern and flower with silvery dew- Is to wake, and think of you." -and so forth. Now it is this solemn close to an Ode "on a Distant Prospect" of making a Fortune : "Araminto, sweetest, fairest ! Solace once of every ill! Mivins in remembrance still! Yet from that retentive mind, "When in accents low, yet thrilling, I did all my love declare; Mentioned that I'd not a shillingHinted that we need not care: And complacently you listened To my somewhat long address(Listening, at the same time, isn't Quite the same as saying, Yes.) "Once, a happy child, I carolled O'er green lawns the whole day through, Not unpleasingly apparelled In a tightish suit of blue: What a change has now passed o'er me! Goodness gracious patience me! "And I'll prowl, a moodier Lara, Through the world, as prowls the bat, Cypress wreath around my hat: I'll send up to every paper, 'Died, T. Mivins; of disgust.'" Or we have a dirge on the end of Christmas when the schoolboy must bethink himself of school, in that chill season when "White is the wold, and ghostly The dank and leafless trees, Pronounced like B's and D's." There is more promise than performance in the little book, yet with all the defects of burlesque that we found in another clever jeu d'esprit, Horace at Athens, by a Cambridge man, there is almost an equally happy knack at parody and more than an equal betrayal of the educated taste and real poetic feeling which underlie that genuine outbreak of the gay spirit of youth whence the two books derive their main charm. It is Christmas time, when frolic is in season, we make room, therefore, for another of the strains of C. S. C.; and admit an English as well as a Latin recognition of the treasures of the Cambridge Bacon :-— ODE TO TOBACCO. "Thou who, when fears attack, "I have a liking old "How they who use fusees Go mad, and beat their wives; "Confound such knavish tricks! Yet know I five or six Smokers who freely mix Still with their neighbors; Jones (who, I'm glad to say, Asked leave of Mrs. J.)Daily absorbs a clay After his labors: "Cats may have had their goose Here's to thee, Bacon!" Two such clever and merry budgets of verse as Horace at Athens and these Verses and Translations by C. S. C., Cambridge may be proud of. The Arundines Cami here maintain their old credit for sportive song, while with its dark tide of controversial theology the sister university sees Isis rolling heavily. From The New Monthly Magazine were whole and clean, and he spoke English very well, but I don't think he is English." "Oh," observed her mother, "he is some begging adventurer who has found out our name from a commissario. Rome is full of such people. You should not have spoken to him in a public place, my dear. What did you say to him, Ellen ? "O mamma, I said nothing to him," replied Ellen, "except that I could not speak to him there-that if he wanted anything he must apply to you at our lodgings-and we walked on as quickly as possible." Then followed some "promiscuous THE Monte Pincio is the Kensington Gardens of Rome; thither the English girl can resort for air, exercise, even admiration, with a security from insult, which, if we are rightly informed, no Roman lady could reckon on in the same circumstances. It seems to be an understood thing that English ladies carry with them into these distant lands the free habits of their free country, and that the continentals have learned to understand the fact that young Englishwomen do walk abroad for their own healthful en-versation upon the importunity and devices joyment, without having in view either an of Roman beggars, the numbers who "get assignation or an intrigue; hence it is that their wealth" by begging in Rome, and the two young English ladies, or more,-I would air with which the true Roman beggar takes not advise one to make the experiment,- your donation, as if he were conferring an may take their afternoon walk in this public honor by accepting it; all which we, in our promenade, protected by what a poet of our blind Protestant bigotry, charged as a direct own calls the "wild sweetbriery fence" of and necessary result of the Romish tenets their national habits of purity and independ- and principles as to the meritoriousness of almsgiving. And so the matter ended. ence. My niece, Ellen was a very pretty con The young people of this generation being and attractive girl, natural and unaffected, of more indolent habits than we of the past, not courting admiration in any unfeminine I was at the breakfast-table next morning manner, though I should vaunt her for more before any of our young folks had made than feminine if I said she disliked it. She their appearance, when my sister, Ellen's walked the Pincian a good deal while at mamma, greeted me with a mixture of fun Rome, and during her stay more than one and vexation in her countenance, the latter Roman lady, meeting her on public occa- feeling evidently preponderating, and fast sions, addressed her, as having noticed her chasing the former away. She held an open on the "Collis Hortulorum," and asked, paper in her hand, and "Here's a nice afwith civilities, the pleasure of her acquaint- fair!" she said. ance. Whether any of the Roman gentlemen desired the same pleasure we did not remain long enough to know, and I will do Ellen the justice to say, I do not believe she greatly cared to know. She walked the Pincian with her cousins for her own pleasure and health-sake, to meet her English acquaintance, and, as I am quite sure, with no object beyond. "A very strange thing happened to-day," said Ellen at dinner, after one of these promenades. "A man came up to me with a profusion of bows, and said, in very good English, 'Miss, may I speak with you?' He knew my name quite well." 66 "What is the matter ?" I asked. "A pretty thing that a lady can't walk out without being tormented by such fellows! And now, I suppose, she must stay within doors while we are in Rome, and lose her health for want of exercise." "But you have not yet told me what's the matter." "A proposal for Ellen.” 66 'Upon my word," I answered, "if you are to lock a pretty girl like Ellen up because somebody admires her, her case will be a hard one, and our English liberty to do as we like on the Continent, sadly abridged. A proposal, as I take it, is rather a compli Very strange," I said. "What kind of ment than otherwise." looking person was he?" "I can't well describe him," replied Ellen. "He did not look like a beggar, and yet he certainly was not a gentleman. His clothes "A proposal!" she said, vexation now thoroughly dominant in her face, as she flung the paper in her hand across the table. proposal, indeed! Why, it is from that im "A sighs," pudent fellow who spoke to her on the Pin- Make sadness laugh, and laughter end in cian yesterday, and whom she took for a beggar!" It would not be in humanity to have resisted a hearty laugh as I took the love-letter, and remembered, in poor Ellen's description of the person who had addressed her, her evident unconsciousness of the conquest she had made. I checked my merriment, however, when I saw the tears filling her mother's eyes, as she said, "It may be very funny to you, but it is no laughing matter to us though; I dare say we shall be the laughing-stock of Rome, if we are to be subject to this persecution." commend me to the mercurial, melancholy, half-educated, three-parts crazed, and wholly enamored Irishman! Roderick O'Kane, as I now recollect, was the name subscribed to this surprising loveletter of Ellen's adorer; of the address under written I am certain, for I registered it well in my memory, for purposes of use, "Via Frattino, numero-, piano sexto;" of the paper-a leaf abstracted from some old folio; of the seal-coarse wax, made fast by an impressive thumb; of the style-vapid and vulgar, with words interspersed, glowing far-fetched and tri-syllabled, some of which, as the writer's inimitable countryman, Sir Lucius O'Trigger, has said, "might sue out their Habeas Corpus in any court in Christendom; " of these I will not speak more precisely. The reader must imagine for himself the worst style of the Irish hedgeschoolmaster inflated by the enthusiasm of a poor love-struck Cymon, and make up the production for himself. One sentence, however, "miching malicho," as Hamlet has it, I must give in its entirety. After declaring how often his heart "had laid itself down dead at her feet"-a purely Irish figure of speech—“ as she walked the Pincian; " after confessing how long he had "hovered round her, as a guardian angel round a sylph!" he proceeded thus I hastened to assure her, that though it was impossible to withstand the absurdity of the whole affair, she might rely on my taking measures to put an end to the annoyance as soon as I understood what it really meant; and I then proceeded to read the love-letter with all due sense of the seriousness of the matter to the mother's feelings; I would not have smiled again for worlds. Love-letters are of many kinds, and of various degrees of heroism, fervency, bad grammar, and bad spelling. "The Polite Letter-writer" has many exemplars for the use of admirers at a loss, of which, in their sedate admiration, measured raptures, and well-pointed periods, if a "lover at a loss" should ever avail himself, any girl of the slightest observation and taste, in short, any girl not ready at the "wind of the word" "You must ask mamma," would immediately pronounce her verdict," This man is not in earnest; his sufferings are-a humbug his love—a sham!" Again, we sometimes see letters produced in English "breach of promise" cases, the bare reading of which before a laughing public, must I rather disliked this "do or die " part of -be the verdict what it may-reckon as the business; not that I had the slightest equivalent to one hundred pounds damages fear of any bloody termination to such an for each epistle, when the enamored defend- avowal, for I believe it is a universally acant "longs to clasp his hangel in his harms," knowledged truth that a man or woman bent and "vows that but to 'ear her hangelic on dying never announces it beforehand, but voice is his 'ighest idear of Paradise." I did much fear some annoying or ridiculous When continentals commit their raptures exhibition on the part of a moon-struck, and devotions to some charmante Englishche love-smitten swain, who could be so far gone meese to paper, they generally soar pretty in absurdity as not to perceive the nonsense high for tropes and figures, but for the of the part he was enacting in thus making "sublime of the ridiculous," for the all-un-violent love to a young lady to whom he utterable absurdity of diction and sentiment, could not be said to have ever addressed which can two sentences in his life, and I felt quite as to say, : "My heart tells me, angelic one, that they are going to tear you from me; the time is come when I must speak, or be dumb-foundered forever. 'Now's the day, and now's the hour,' as the patriot poet says, when I must do or die." |