ingenious invention promises a further development of aerial lines. The steel rope is charged with an electric current, and the cars themselves carry a motor which "picks up" its power as it travels along the wire.

summit. These nine lines carry on an | carried by the force of gravity, is to average twenty-three hundred tons of revolve the endless cord by a drum ore a day, none of which touches the worked by steam. But a recent and level of the ground till it has travelled some five miles through space. The appearance of these multiplex lines of wire, stretching from tower to tower of light trellised iron, and hung at intervals with hundreds of ore-carriages in constant motion, is one of the strangest The limits of usefulness of the aerial spectacles in modern mining enterprise. railway have not yet been reached. The double line of iron scaffolds, where Probably great weights will never be it leaves the terminus in the valley, carried on the lines in single cars. But looks like the support for some enor- the transport of smaller quantities on mous viaduct, festooned with wires the endless ropes can be multiplied slung with rows of pendent buckets. almost without limit by increasing the Higher up the mountain, where deep number of parallel lines. It is not only ravines cut the face of the hill, the the cheapest, but often the only postrestles tower to such a height, that the sible form of transport in places inactravelling loads of ore look like little cessible to ordinary railways; and the black balls against the sky. When the absence of danger from collision more different levels of the mine are reached, than compensates for the first trial to the lines of the wire way diverge, and the nerves made in the aerial transit. are carried to nine separate points in For ordinary ferry-work across rivers, the workings. Yet the traffic is con- the system is probably too like a maketrolled with little difficulty, and there shift to satisfy the English mind. But is no risk of any serious stoppage by it is as an auxiliary transport, cheap accident, as in the case of a breakdown and convenient, that it deserves a place on the trunk lines of a great railway. among the every-day expedients of At the worst, one or two lines only modern life. In commercial cities it would be blocked, leaving the others would supply a means of parcel-transfree for use. It is calculated that one port by the shortest route, from point hundred thousand tons of ore can be to point, above the houses, with little carried on each of these cables before greater disturbance than that caused it becomes unfit for service. In cross- by erecting telephone wires; and in ing wild ravines or rivers, where one its simplest form it would be a useful bank is lower than another, the aerial auxiliary on every large farm in which line is used exactly as the old-fashioned manure and food has to be transported funicular railway works, the descend-up-hill, sand or seaweed carried up ing load being used to haul up the ascending car. In the Alps, the Pyrenees, and in the bridging of deep riverbeds, this is the simplest and cheapest form of transport known. In the Italian Alps, a span of fifteen hundred yards is crossed without a support, and this "gossamer" transport is soon to be applied to distances of two thousand yards. The usual means of drawing the load on level lines where it is not embankments.

from the shore, or water drawn and taken to a distance. These are some of the obvious uses for the aerial railway in this country. In the colonies and abroad, it will take a vastly more important place; and the little Brighton line will have served its purpose if it reminds Englishmen from time to time that there is yet another form of transport than that by sea and on railway

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You leaned your flower-soft face toward "Sometimes I dream of early youth
my face,
(For past days never come again);

I waited, heart-sick, for the crowning Some follies few and light, in truth,
hour;

You looked and longed and loved-not me, fair flower

You loved the mirror of your own great grace.

You leaned down with the lily that you

wore

Had I but leaped to meet your kiss divine,

You and your flower of love had now been mine,

Drowned in my love-to waken never

more.

But as it is - ah ! love, you know the rest! Robbed of your image, how the pool seemed base!

You will find many a mirror for your face,

I had; we are like other men. Our hearts are open as the skies, They love to change their garrison." "True, true!" the faithful gensdarme sighs,

"Brigadier, vous avez raison !”

Then on they ride in silent thought,
The horses plod their weary way,
They make their rounds, by duty taught,
And peaceful is the sergeant's sway.

But no more flowers will lean across my But when Aurora trims the skies

breast!

From The Edinburgh Review.

ENGLISH TOWNS IN THE FIFTEENTH

CENTURY.1

Green has chosen to write the history It may perhaps be asked why Mrs. of English towns in the fifteenth century. We may give her answer in her own words :

There is no better starting point for the study of town life in England than the fifteenth century itself, when, with ages of restless growth lying behind them, and with their societies as yet untouched by

the influences of the Renascence or the Reformation or the new commercial system, the boroughs had reached their pros

It would be vain to

which the towns hold in the early political and social history of our country. Mrs. Green, while wisely refrainTHE good that a man does lives after ing from large generalizations, has him is a saying of the truth of which sometimes allowed her interest in her this book is an instance. For though subject to bias her judgment; but she it is the work of Mrs. Green, it owes has, on the other hand, illuminated her its being to the example and the bid-collection of materials with pertinent ding of her husband. "When Mr. and well-timed remarks, which put the Green's work was over he asked of me reader in the way to form his own cona promise that I would try to study clusions, and to draw his own pictures some of those problems in medieval from the facts which are collected in history where there seemed to him so these pages. much that still needed to be done, and so much to be yet discovered. In this book I have made my first beginning toward the fulfilment of that promise." It is a tribute to the memory, and a continuation of the method, of an historian whose life was too short, but who has done very much to vivify English history, and who viewed facts and events in their true proportions. To him is due, wrote the late Mr. Freeman in the introduction to his " English Towns and Districts," "the happy phrase the making of England,' to describe the process in which many of the towns and districts here spoken of played no small part." It is a phrase which causes us to regard historical facts from quite a different point of view from that which was at one Lime common. Great events and constitutional conflicts, the policies and the deeds of statesmen and of kings, have now found their proper place in the making of England side by side with the apparently insignificant movements of trade and commerce, with the gradual growth of borough and port, and with the broadening of freedom from precedent to precedent among burghers and townsmen. To this appreciation of some of the less striking, but not less important, elements in the making of England these volumes are an important contribution, since they place before us the materials which enable us to realize both the growth and the character of town life in the fifteenth century, and, to understand, looking before and after, the place Town Life in the Fifteenth Century. By Mrs. the arbiters of English politics." This

J. R. Green. In two vols. London: 1894.

attempt any reconstruction of their earlier
perous maturity.
history without having first stood, as it
were, in the very midst of that turbulent
society, and by watching the infinite variety
of constitutional development learned to
search out and estimate the manifold forces
which had been at work to bring about so
complex a result; and no study of their
standing of the prodigious vitality of the
later history is possible without an under-
mediæval municipalities. (Vol. i., p. 9.)

It is the age at which the English
boroughs had reached a period of
prosperity, after which their history is
more interwoven with the general
history of the nation. Thenceforth,
also, new forces were to affect the
towns individually, so as, in some
instances, to produce a still larger
growth; in others, to hasten their de-
cay. Up to this time "the burghers.
went on filling their purses, on the one
hand, and drawing up constitutions for
their towns on the other, till, in the
fifteenth century, they were, in fact,
the guardians of English wealth and

is too broad a statement, though it is a

striking way of emphasizing the fact the royal demesne than by those on that the English towns, by their cor- land of which a noble or an ecclesiasporate growth, and by the comfort and tical dignitary was the lord. As bethe wealth of their inhabitants, had tween towns on the two latter kind attained a place which caused them of estates, commercial prosperity was henceforth to be important factors in greatest on Church estates, but municithe politics of the age and vital elements pal freedom was as difficult of attainin the social system of the country. ment there as under a feudal noble ; At the same time, it is necessary to the latter was jealous of civic freedom, guard against the idea that there was a and he was so straitened for money uniformity in the growth of the English that he was always squeezing the last towns, or that there was, in their ma- farthing from towns on his estates. turity, a complete similarity either in Noblemen of the fifteenth had often as their constitutions or their customs. little spare money as many of the arisIt is, in fact, the marked difference tocracy of the nineteenth century; between them which renders necessary they were hard pressed to find the a careful study of each borough, if we means of maintaining their position would understand correctly the making and of supplying fighting men for their of England. In some respects the king: title of this book must put the student on his guard. He will be inclined to expect a single view of the English towns at a particular period; he will hope to catch them, if we may so say, for the moment stationary. In this he will be disappointed, for he will have to watch their growth, and their changes during the whole of the fifteenth century, and he will have to do more he will have, in some instances, to go back to yet earlier years, in which the cardinal events in the mediæval history of some of the Euglish towns are to be found; and he will be fortunate if, while endeavoring to draw some general conclusion, he does not find that each fresh town that he brings within his review alters the generalizations which he is formulat

ing.

The want of similarity in growth, to which we just now alluded, is well exemplified in those pages in which Mrs. Green treats of towns on three differént kinds of estates-namely, those on the royal demesne, those on feudal, and those on Church estates. It is dangerous to generalize on the subject, and Mrs. Green has in this part of her work perhaps endeavored to make these divisions too marked; but, no doubt, some difference is evident in a more rapid growth and a quicker attainment both of municipal freedom and commercial prosperity by the towns on

The conditions under which the great landowners were living at this time were indeed singularly unfavorable. With the new trade they had comparatively little to do, and the noble, with his throng of dependents and his show of state, was really living from hand to mouth on the harvests from his fields and the plunder he got in war. After the fashion of the time the treasure of the family was hoarded up in his great oak chests; splendid robes, cloth of gold, figured satins, Eastern damasks and Sicilian silks, velvets and Flemish cloths, tapestries and fine linen, were heaped together with rich furs of marten and beaver.

Golden chains and collars of "the old fashion" and "the new," rings and brooches adorned with precious stones, girdles of gold or silver gilt by famous foreign makers, were stored away in his strong boxes, or in the safe rooms of monasteries, along with ewers and goblets and basins of gold and silver, pounced and embossed with great large enamels" or covered with silver of "Paris touch." But the owner of all this unproductive treasure scarcely knew where to turn for a little ready money. The produce of the estate sufficed for the needs of the household, and if the lord was called away on the king's service, or had to attend Parliament, a supply of oats was carried for the horses "to save the expense of his purse ;" and an wards continually to fetch provisions from army of servants rode backwards and forfields and ponds and salting tubs at home, so that he should never be driven to buy for money from the baker or at the market. The crowd of dependents who swelled his