ocean, the shadow is invisible, the tower it- he has added much of endearing interest self disappears, nothing is seen but the light. to our knowledge of the exquisite writer Reluctantly we close the pleasant ret- whom he loves to honour. rospect of Charles Lamb and some of In listening as it were to the uttered his Companions,' to which, first invited thoughts of a spirit so gently attuned as by Serjeant Talfourd, we have been re-at- that of Elia,' so humane, yet so elevating, tracted by the kindred genius of Mr. Proc- the mindter. In his recent biography of Lamb, the Poet of Marcian Colonna' has revived the sense of our own obligations to himself 'For heavenly tunes piped through an alien flute;' (Lamb's verses to the Author of Poems published under the name of Barry Cornwall.) while in his simple and touching narrative Of controversy where no end appears,' feels that sense of repose, which, to quote the words of Elia' himself, steals over him 'whom the Sabbath bells salute, BEET SUGAR IN ILLINOIS.-A report re-teen thousand pounds of sugar (two-thirds of cently made to the directors of the Illinois Central Railroad Company by Mr. R. W. Bender, gives an interesting account of the first beet sugar manufactory in Illinois. A German company began operations. in 1866 by planting four hundred acres of land in Livingston County, mostly fresh prairie, from which they have raised a crop of more than four thousand tons of fine beets, at a cost, according to their own estimate, of less than four dollors per ton. The beets are of the "White Silesian "" and Imperial" varieties, and both have done well. At the time of harvest the roots from all parts of their farm were tested, and the juice was found to contain from nine to thirteen and one-half per cent. of sugarthe average of all the tests showing twelve per cent. The quality of the beets tested would yield seven and one-third per cent. of raw sugar, in color equal to fair refining sugar, but intrinsically much superior-or it would yield five and one-half per cent. of sugar equal in every respect to New York refined" B." The beets raised, if successfully and rapidly worked, would have produced not less than four hundred and fifty thousand pounds of refined sugar. which was equal to New York refined B), which was the product of an unknown quantity of beet roots, as I found they had not kept any record of the quantity brought from the pits to the factory. The pulp was not watered on the centrifugals, so as to save evaporation. The juice was boiled blank and placed in large tanks to crystallize. This course was mainly taken to economize the use of steam. The first product granulated in twenty-four hours, and the second in three days, so as to go in centrifugal machines. I could see nothing of the third product. I very much regret that the Messrs. Gennert could not give me an accurate account of the cost of cultivating their beets; the estimate, as I have already said, was less than four dollars per ton. It is also to be regretted that no account of the weight of beets taken to the factory was kept, although any calculation made on that basis would be unfair, considering the irregular operations at the factory, and the deterioration of the saccharine properties of the roots from long delay in working. "The result of my investigations, added to my previous knowledge of the subject, more than ever confirms my belief in the speedy and successful development of this branch of agri. cultural industry. And this feeling is already widely entertained through the West, where suitable lands and abundance of fuel can be had at low prices in the immediate vicinity of a ready market." In consequence of accidents to machinery, and other causes, the work has been delayed for several months, but it has recently been resumed with great success. Mr. Bender says: "The capacity of the manufactory is estimated to be equal to fifty tons of beets per day. This experiment is the beginning of an inDuring the few days the works have been industry which may become highly important. operation, they have turned out about eigh - New York Evening Post. T No. 1188. Fourth Series, No. 49. 9 March, 1867. 100 613 615 618 621 7. Mr. Bartlett and Mr. Friswell's Familiar Quotations The Nation, 8. A Winter among the Swallows 9. New America. By Hepworth Dixon 10. Eavesdropping at Biarritz 11. English Demoniacs 12. N. P. Willis 13. Naturalization of Foreign Birds, Spectator, Blackwood's Magazine, POETRY: The Union Realized, 578. We are happy to announce to our Subscribers that Charles M. Gay, Esq., late Secretary of Civil and Military Affairs for the State of Vermont, has joined the Living Age firm, which will henceforth be styled LITTELL & GAY. OUR MUTUAL FRIEND (with 42 illustrations), by Charles Dickens. This is the first volume of a new edition of Dickens's works, issued by T. B. Peterson and Brothers, Philadelphia. They intend to continue in the same style till the whole of the works are completed. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the Living Age will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year; nor where we have to pay a commission for forwarding the money. Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars. The Complete work Any Volume Bound, 3 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers. THE UNION REALIZED; OR, THE REGIMEN FOR IRISH EVILS. A NEW SONG. Air "When I was a-walking." TRUE | In the battle of life when fierce trials assail, ["When the inhabitants of a country like Ireland, Norway, Egypt, or Hindustan, neglect the due admixture of nitrogenous and nonnitrogenous aliments, by confining the diet too exclusively to such substances as potatoes or rice, in which the amylaceous bodies predominate, the result is seen in the excessive poverty of the masses and in the idle habits of the people. With such a diet idleness is a physical necessity, not a moral delinquency, for work of an average amount is an impossibility." 'North British Review' for December, 1866, p. 343.] BRIGHT lately prescribed for the evils of Erin; But a true Irish audience refused him a hearing: I think they were right; for they wouldn't have heard, Had they listened till doomsday, a sensible word. His plan is to sell all the Absentees' land, Which the penniless peasants shall purchase off-hand; And, of course, if they can't, why, then off they'll be sent, Or more strictly than ever distrained for the rent. For I'm sure it would bring her prodigious relief, The Potato, some think, is the root of all evil, If you'd give all her sons an ambition for Beef. But the best of God's gifts are abused by the Devil : THE mind of a child has been likened to so many dissimilar things, and subjected to such an infinite variety of treatment; it has been urged into so many royal roads to learning, and dosed with so many infallible cures,' as to leave us amazed that children are still as charming and as naughty as ever. Some famous doctors have treated it more or less as an empty cupboard, into which were to be crammed, with all possible expedition, squares and cubes of knowledge on every possible subject, until the shelves were all filled up with solid facts, and education was completed. Others have set to work on it as something inherently, radically bad and vicious; to be dosed, restrained, corrected, and perpetually guided, scolded and preached at; to have food only of few and special kinds, all specially prepared, and manipulated, 'As if they thought, like Otaheitan cooks, No food was fit to eat till they had chewed it;'* der laws and rules as immutable as those of the Medes and Persians. Both these systems, in spite of the inevitable success which crowns the labours of every quack, have miserably failed. They produced, indeed, a multitude of little, abortive, precocious beings, who aimed at being men and women before they were children; but in these, while they lacked none of the conceit and pharisaism of maturer age, the graces of childhood were utterly wanting. Freshness, vivacity, love of mischief, and curiosity, were all but blotted out; and in their place came cunning, none the less crafty because it was demure, and hypocrisy none the less mischievous because the unhappy Possessor was unaware or only half conscious of its presence. The patent. model, perfect child-if ever met with was even more intensely disagreeable than he was rare; and the more perfect the cure, the more insufferable was the patient. It is pleasant, therefore, to turn to a third process of dealing with a child's mind, though only in print, as something — not radically vicious or bad but waiting to be to drink in air, sunshine, vigour, cold, or drawn out into simple, healthy, happy life; heat, each in their degree, from all around it; to meet good and evil as things that must be met, to be natural as God meant it to be, and to be dieted on wholesome food. Now, the food of a child's mind must be fiction as well as fact. 'The mind of a child,' says a wise thinker, 'is like the acorn; its powers are folded up, they do not yet appear, but they are all there. The memory, the judgment, the invention, the feeling of right and wrong, are all in his mind, even of an infant just born. One by one they awake.' His imagination one of the earliest powers that awakens within him, even before he has passed through the mysteries of pap, and found out that being naughty differs from being good-must be fed. And fed it will be; either on the make-believe talk of his sister Mary nursing her doll, the idle stories of Betsey the Nursemaid when he is naughty about 'Bogey' and the Black man who carries off bad boys; or about the golden fairy who is to give him toffey and gingerbread-when he is good. By and by, as he grows older, his sister Mary reads to him, and at last he learns to read for himself, the charming adventures of the Fox and the Crow, 'Billy-Goat Gruff,' Sindbad the Sailor,' or 'Diamonds and Pearls;' the delicious his to be taken only in certain fixed ways, un- tory of Puss in Boots,' the tragedy of Blue Hood's Ode to Rae Wilson.' Beard,' or the heroic drama of Jack the Giant-killer.' But whichever of these, or a hundred other such delightful pages, it be, | first we have to deal with the word 'fic his faith is boundless. Happiest of mortals, tion,' on the true meaning of which the for a time at least, he can believe all he force of much that we have to say must dereads; with the one happy proviso that if it pend. On the very threshold of the inis not true, it ought to be, ay, and is, be- quiry we are met by Mr. Bounderby and cause his sister says so. While he is ab- his friends, who indignantly cry out, Why sorbed in the misfortunes of the Tin fill the poor child's head with a pack of Soldier' or the Ugly Duck,' the breakfast trashy falsehoods, instead of true facts from bell is unheard, and dinner unheeded; he history?' going clearly on the plain supposition is feasting in Dream-land, on stirabout in that fiction is all false, and history all true. the Giant's Castle, or on those famous cheese- But will either assertion stand? 'Fiction' cakes of Queen Scheherezade, whose springs from fingere,' which, in its primary vital charm was pepper. Not that he is sense, means to frame or fashion. Fiction forgetful of fact, even while in the full pur- is, literally, that which is framed. Thus, a suit of fiction. Indeed, he is always burn- certain man, a Lysippo fingi volebat,'* ing for facts. He wishes to know what wished to have his statue carved by Lysipglass is, where Robinson Crusoe was buried, pus; and so Cicero, telling of the cleverest how much gold it takes to make the inside of all craftsman, says, 'fingunt apes favos;'t of a watch, why the sun sets later in June but neither the statue nor the dainty penthan in December, what thunder is, if the tagon of wax was a fiction in the sense of end of the rainbow touches the ground, why falsehood; though fingere' has for its secfiring off a cannon once made a man deaf, ond meaning to imagine, or feign. Fiction, what sago is, and a thousand other things, as we shall see by and by, is not all which papa, not being a walking encyclo- false; but is history all true? If so, pædia, is not always ready to tell him. And whose history shall we take? That by whatever answer he can obtain he is ready Macaulay, Dr. Cumming, David Hume, or to believe implicitly, as long as he is dealt Dr. Lingard? Shall we look at matters fairly with. Yet, though St. George and through yellow, green, blue, blue and the Dragon, Ali Baba, and Robinson Cru- yellow, or plain white spectacles? Is any soe, are in one sense as true to him as the one of these all true, as prepared by History of England, there are shades and Hume for Whigs and sceptics of the last degrees of belief in his own mind both as century, or by Macaulay for ourselves; or, regards the domains of fact and fiction, turning to the exact point before us, as it is which he cannot perhaps define, and of prepared for the infant mind by Miss Corwhich he is scarcely sensible, yet on which ner, Mr. Neale, or Mr. Dickens? Are we he unconsciously acts; setting each narra- with Mr Dickens to tell children that tive or story, tale or fable, romance or Henry VIII. was a most intolerable ruffian, chronicle, in its own due place, and giving a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of to each his own royal favour and approval blood and grease upon the history of Engas good, bad, or indifferent. A child in land?'§ Or, of James I.-These disgood sound health is insatiably curious, his putes, and his hunting and drinking, and thirst for fiction of one shape or other is his lying in bed, occupied his Sowship very quenchless; and if he never asks questions, well. The rest of his time he chiefly passed and cares nothing for Jack and the Bean-in hugging and slobbering his favourites?! stalk, or The Lad who went to the North Wind,' there is a screw loose somewhere or other; he is in a morbid, unhealthy state of body or mind, probably of both; his natural growth and tastes, as a child, are becoming stunted and diseased; forced into some narrow, petty channel, where ignorance or bigotry will soon blot out the freshness, grace, and light, that are childhood's most precious possessions. Our present aim is to glance over the wide domain of Children's Books of Fiction, and endeavour, as far as our limits will allow, to show what classes and kinds are healthy, and likely to add to a child's true enjoyment and real good, and which are unhealthy, and sure to do him harm. But Is it wise or true to say-Mary's Court was a model for that of a Christian Princess, her sister Elizabeth's a perfect den of wickedness; her goodness was her own, her faults were her advisers'?'¶ Or to tell a boy that- 'In this reign Milton wrote his "Paradise Lost," a remarkable proof that it does not always please God to be * Ovid. 2' Trist.' v. 489. All true?' says C. Lamb, 'I have just been reading Burnet's Book, cram full of scandal as all true history is.' § Dickens' History of England for Children,' Dickens, p. p. 278. Dictory Pro Children, p. 171, by Rev. J. M. Neale. |