Mr. Yarrell," pikes will seize moor-hens, ducks, or indeed any animals of small size, whether alive or dead." They swim rapidly, and dart at their prey with great fierceness. The roach and dace are sometimes kept in ponds, and have a beautiful appearance in the water, but their flesh is insipid and woolly. Gudgeons, and other common small fish, are usually found in rivers; as are trout, which, however, may be kept, and will attain a large size, in ponds which have a hard rocky bottom, clear water, and a constant stream running through them.

Deerbrook. By Miss Martineau. Published by Moxon.

[THERE is talent of no ordinary kind in Deerbrook; nevertheless, whatever popularity it may enjoy, it will owe more to the just observations it contains upon the concerns of humanity, than to anything particularly attractive in the narrative or the characters. In short, it does not appear to have been the intention of the authoress to represent either striking events or characters much above common-place; she perhaps knew better where her strength lay accordingly, although the novel is not without approaches to sprightliness, the reader will seldom be better pleased than when Miss Martineau drops her story in order to make suitable reflections upon its events. Take the following extract as an instance :-]

Poverty, what it is, and what it is not. What is poverty? Not destitution, but poverty? It has many shapes, aspects almost as various as the minds and circumstances of those whom it visits. It is famine to the savage in the wilds; it is hardship to the labourer in the cottage; it is disgrace to the proud; and to the miser despair. It is a spectre which "with dread of change perplexes" him who lives at ease. Such are its aspects: but what is it? It is a deficiency of the comforts of life,-a deficiency present and to come. It involves many other things; but this is what it is. Is it then worth all the apprehension and grief it occasions? Is it an adequate cause for the gloom of the merchant, the discontent of the artisan, the foreboding sighs of the mother, the ghastly dreams which haunt the avaricious, the conscious debasement of the subservient, the humiliation of the proud? these are severe sufferings; are they authorised by the nature of poverty? Certainly not, if poverty induced no adventitious evils, involved nothing but a deficiency of the comforts of life, leaving life itself unimpaired. "The life is more than food, and the body than raiment," and the untimely extinction of the life itself would not be worth the pangs which apprehended poverty excites. But poverty involves woes which in their sum, are far greater than itself. To a multitude it is the loss of a

pursuit which they have yet to learn will be certainly supplied. For such, alleviation or compensation is in store in the rising up of new objects and the creation of fresh hopes. The impoverished merchant, who may no longer look out for his argosies, may yet be in glee when he finds it a rare dropping morning for the early colewort." To another multitude, poverty involves loss of rank, -a letting down among strangers whose manners are ungenial and their thoughts unfamiliar. For these there may be solace in retirement, or the evil may fall short of its threats. The reduced gentlewoman may live in patient solitude, or may grow into sympathy with her neighbours, by raising some of them up to herself, and by warming her heart at the great central fire of huma nity, which burns on under the crust of manners, as rough as the storms of the tropics, or as frigid as polar snows. The avaricious are out of the pale of peace already, and at all events.-Poverty is most seriously an evil to sons and daughters, who see their parents stripped of comfort at an age when comfort is almost one with life itself: and to parents who watch the narrowing of the capacities of their children by the pressure of poverty, -the impairing of their promise, the blotting out of their prospects. To such mourning children there is little comfort, but in contemplating the easier life which lies behind and (it may be hoped) the happier one which stretches before their parents on the other side the postern of life. If there is sunshine on the two grand reaches of their path, the shadow which lies in the midst is necessarily but a temporary gloom. To grieving parents it should be a consoling truth, that as the life is more that food, so is the soul more than instruction and opportunity, and such accomplishments as man can adminis ter: that as the fowls are fed and the lilies clothed by Him whose hand made the air musical with the one, and dressed the fields with the other, so is the human spirit nourished and adorned by airs from heaven which blow over the whole earth, and light from the skies, which no hand is permitted to intercept. Parents know not but that Providence may be substituting the noblest education for the misteaching of intermediate guardians. It may possibly be so; but if not, still there is appointed to every human being much training, many privileges, which capricious fortune can neither give nor take away. The father may sigh to see his boy condemned to the toil of the loom or the gossip and drudgery of the shop, when he would fain have beheld him the ornament of a univer. sity; but he knows not whether a more simple integrity, a loftier disinterestedness, may not come out of the humbler discipline than the higher privilege. The mother's eyes may swim as she hears her little daughter sing her baby! brother to sleep on the cot

tage threshold,—her eyes may swim at the thought how those wild and moving tones might have been exalted by art. Such art would have been in itself a good; but would this child then have been, as now, about her father's business, which, in ministering to one of his little ones, she is as surely as the archangel who suspends new systems of worlds in the furthest void? her occupation is now earnest and holy; and what need the true mother wish for more.

Songs and Ballads. By Samuel Lover.

(Concluded from page 236.)

[WANT of space obliged us to exclude from our former notice, the following very characteristic, highly yet playfully wrought, effusion of Irish humour. Mr. Lover may appropriate this vein as exclusively his own among living Irish ballad-writers, for Mr. Moore, who in lyrical compositions is in general unapproachable by any competitor, has been too much engaged in ministering to the drawingroom, and to sympathy with the more serious griefs of his countrymen, to have had leisure for such humble sorrows as those of the forlorn lover of Molly Carew. We add a pleasant trifle, which turns to poetical account some of those cant phrases with which from time to time our ears are dinned while passing along the streets of London.]

MOLLY CAREW.

OCH hone! and what will I do?

Sure my love is all crost

Like a bud in the frost;

And there's no use at all in my going to bed,

"There are very impudent people in Lon

head;

And 'tis all about you,

My sweet Molly Carew

And indeed 'tis a sin and a shame!

You're complater than Nature

In every feature,

The snow can't compare

With your forehead so fair,

And 1 rather would see just one bliuk of your eye

Than the prettiest star that shines out of the sky,

And by this and by that,

For the matter o' that,

You're more distant by far than that same !

Och hone! weirasthru !

I'm alone in this world without you.

Och hone! but why should I spake

Of your forehead and eyes,

When your nose it defies

Paddy Blake, the schoolmaster, to put it in rhyme, Tho' there's one BURKE, he says, that would call it

"As I walked down the Strand, a fellow stared at me and shouted, "Who are you?" Five minutes after, another passing me, cried, 'Flare up ;'-but a civil gentleman, close to his heels, kindly asked,' How is your mother.'

"Who are you?-who are you ?

Little boy that's running after

Every one up and down,

Mingling sighing with your laughter;"

"I am Cupid, lady belle,

I am Cupid and no other."

"Little boy, then prithee tell,

How is Venus? How's your Mother?
Little boy, little boy,

I desire you tell me true,

Cupid, oh you're altered so,

No wonder I cry Who are you?
Who are you?-who are you?
Little boy, where is your bow?
You had a bow my little boy-”
"So had you, ma'am,-long ago."
"Little boy where is your torch ?"
"Madame I have given it up:
Torches are no use at all

Hearts will never now flare up."
Naughty boy, naughty boy,

Such words as these I never knew:
Cupid, oh! you're altered so,

No wonder 1 say who are you?”

[No one who has a relish either for the tender or the humourous, should be without this volume. In a small compass there is something to gratify a variety of tastes.]

OWEN MACARTHY.

AMONG the many rich and pathetic narrations of Irish humour and pathos, which bespangle the pages of Mr. Carlton's Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, is one of "Tubber Derg; or, the Red Well," the principal character in which is Owen Macarthy, a loving-hearted peasant, who, in order to alleviate his distress, travels to Dublin, when after a fruitless appeal to his landlord for assistance, he returns to the abode of all he loves on this earth; and on knocking at his cottage-door, his demand for entrance is unheeded :

"Mother of glory! what's this? But wait, let me rap again. Kathleen, Kathleen! are you widin, avourneen? Owen !-Alley!arn't yees widin, childhre? Alley! sure I'm come back to yees all!"-and he rapped more loudly than before. A dark breeze swept through the bushes as he spoke, but no voice nor sound proceeded from the house; all was still as death within. "Alley!" he called once more, to his little favourite; "I'm come home wid something for you, asthore; I didn't forget you, alanna; I brought it from Dublin all the way! Alley!"-but the gloomy murmur of the blast was the only reply.

:

Perhaps the most intense of all that he knew of misery was that which he then felt but this state of suspense was soon terminated, by the appearance of a neighbour who was passing.

"Why thin, Owen, but yer welcome home agin, my poor fellow; and I'm sorry that I hav'n't betther news for you, and so are all

of us."

He whom he addressed had almost lost the power of speech.

"Frank," said he, and he wrung his hand. "What-what! was death among them? For the sake of heaven spake!"

The severe pressure which he received in return ran like a shock of paralysis to his

heart.

"Owen, you must be a man; every one pities yees; and may the Almighty pity and support yees! She is, indeed, Owen, gone; the weeny fair-haired child, your favourite Alley, is gone. Yesterday she was berrid; and dacently the nabours attiuded the place, and sent in, as far as they had it, both mate and dhrink to Kathleen and the other ones. Now, Owen, you've heard it; trust in God, an' be a man.”

A deep and convulsive throe shook him to the heart.—“ Gone!—the fair-haired one! Alley!-Alley!—the pride of both our hearts! -the sweet, the quiet, and the sorrowful child, that seldom played wid the rest, but

kept wid mys-! Oh, my darlin', my darlin-gone from my eyes for ever! God of glory! won't you support me this night of sorrow and misery!" With a sudden yet

profound sense of humility he dropped on his knees at the threshold, and, as the tears rolled down his convulsed cheeks, exclaimed, in a burst of sublime piety, not at all uncommon among our peasantry, "I thank you, O my God!I thank you, an' I put myself an' my weeny ones, my pastchee boght, into your hands.-Keep me up and support me-och, I want it! You loved the weeny one, and you took her: she was the light of my eyes, and the pulse of my broken heart; but you took her, blessed Father of heaven; an' we can't be angry wid you for so doin'? Still, if you had spared her-if-if-oh, blessed Father! My heart was in the very one you took! But I thank you, O God! May she rest in peace, now and for ever! Amin!"

Necessity obliging Owen and his wife to leave their abode, they gain a precarious living by begging; at length, fortune smiles on him, and he returns to the resting-place of his "fair-haired one," and thus apostrophises over her grave:

"Alley!" he exclaimed, in Irish, "Alley, nhien machree! your father, that loved you more than he loved any other human crathur brings a message to you from the mother of your heart, avourneen!

She bid me call to see the spot where you're lyin', my buried flower, and to tell you that we're not now, thanks be to God, as we wor whin you lived wid us. We are well to do now, acushla ogn machree, an' not in hunger, an' sickness, an' misery, as we wor whin you suffered them all. You will love to hear this, pulse of our hearts, an' to know that, through all we suf fered-an' bitterly did we suffer since you departed-we never let you out of our memory, No, asthore villish, we thought of you, and cried afther our poor dead flower many and many's the time. An' she bid me tell your darlin' of my heart, that we feel nothin' now so much as that you are not wid us to share our comfort an' our happiness. Oh, what wouldn't the mother give to have you back wid her: but it can't be. An' what wouldn't I give to have you before my eyes agin in health an' life? But it can't be. The lovin' mother sent this message to you, Alley. Take it from her. She bid me tell you that we are well an' happy; our name is pure, and, like yourself, widout spot or stain, Won't you pray for us before God, an' get Him an' his blessed Mother to look on us wid favour an' compassion! Farewell, Alley, asthore! May you sleep in peace, an' rest on the breast of your great Father in heaven, until we all meet in happiness together. It's your father that's spaking to you, our lost flower; an' the hand that often smoothed your goolden head is now upon your grave.

The Gatherer.

Another Brute Tamer is about visiting England to illuminate and amuse the noveltyseeking public. We learn by a Marseilles paper, Le Semaphore, of the arrival there from Columbia of the American vessel, Bustard, bringing Senor Martin Oataya, his son, and a racer of a new description, which bids fair to be a formidable rival to our aeronauts ; It consists of a Condar of the Cordilleras of enormous size, the two extremities of his extended wings is thirty-two feet, who has been rendered so gentle and tractable, that Martin Oataya's son uses him like a horse, gets upon his back, and to the astonishment of all, flies with him to an immense height, managing him by means of a little stick with a steel point. The boy and bird reached Florence in twelve minutes, and returned in the evening.

Nature is an Eolian harp, a musical instru ment; whose tones again are keys to higher strings in us.

1

Every beloved object is the centre of a paradise.

Surmise is the gossamer that malice blows on fair reputations; the corroding dew that destroys the choice blossom. Surmise is the squint of suspicion, and suspicion is esta blished before it is confirmed.

The public garden at Gibraltar.-The alameda, or public walk, one of the lungs of Gibraltar, is ornamented with statues and geranium trees, which, indeed, they are. General Elliott is surrounded with more bombs than he was during the siege, while Nelson forms his companion, emerging, like Jonah, from two huge jaw-bones of a whale. At one end is a shadowy, silent spot, where the bones are laid of those who die in this

distant land. This alameda was kept up by a small tax laid on the tickets of the Spanish lottery, which were sold in the garrison.

し

Louisa, the last surviving daughter of the great Linnæus, died at Upsal, March 21, 1839, aged 90.

To the Editor of Mirror.-A few days ago, I copied the following little bit from a bench in Kensington Gardens. It was write ten with a black-lead pencil. G. W. N.* "Drowned in the Serpentine, 20th October, 1837.- Measure 100 yards from the Bridge to the left, and about 20 yards in the river-there you will find the deceased; a gold watch in his waistcoat pocket, and a Black silk purse with two forged 100 pound "Yours, "The deceased. No more!"

notes."

Will our respected Correspondent inform us where we can communicate with him? Or will he take the trouble to send to our office for a small parcel ?

Mr. Stewart's Cabinet of Pictures were sold by Messrs. Christie and Manson, on Sa turday the 20th inst. The Visit, by Netscher, and esteemed one of his finest productions, brought 190 guineas: a finished sketch by Fraser, of Rembrandt in his studio. 21 guineas: the Drummer, by the same artist, 19 guineas: an Interior, ditto, 20 guineas: Repose, by A. Van de Velde, 1-663, one of his most delightful and perfect works, 155 guineas: J. Steen's Bed-chamber, by himself, 95 guineas; and his Convivial Party, 80 guineas: A Mid-day Calm, by W. Van de Velde, 71 guineas: Cuyp's Boy holding the Bridles of three Horses, 96 guineas: A Lawyer in his Cabinet, by A. Östade, förmerly, we think, in Mr. Ludgate's collection, 105 guineas: A Landscape and Figures, said by Rembrandt, but more brobably by Verboom, 69 guineas: Jan Steen's Blowing Hot and Cold, 71 guineas; very cheap. brought £17. 58. Cleopatra, 114 guineas; There were several by Etty; his Monk,

.

Head of a Philosopher, 17 guineas—the Toilette, a companion picture, 16 guineas— A Bacchante and a Girl, 22 guineas and his Cupid entreating Venus, 55 guineas; John Burnet's Salmon Weir, 30 guineas. Our confined limits prevent enumerating the whole of the collection; all the pictures brought very fair prices.

We understand Mrs. Rothschild has purchased Wilkie's picture of the "Pinch of Snuff," for 800 guineas: and that the same artist's "Village Card-players," for which the late Duke of Gloucester paid £50. has been disposed of to G. Bredel, Esq. for 500 guineas.

The Sebastiani del Piombo, was sold at Foster's rooms in Oxford-street, on Friday, the 20th, for 550 guineas.

Millhouse, the poet, died on the 13th inst. We learn by the Nottingham Review, that We shall give a memoir of this gifted but

unfortunate man in a future number.

.

THE career of this extraordinary chieftain developes the character of a man, born to change, or materially influence, the destinies of a vast portion of mankind. Proud, restless, ungovernable, impatient of restraint, he rules with despotism over twenty millions of people; and from a licentious love of power, and unbounded ambition, aided by the fertile powers of his mighty genius, has risen from a common thief to be a conqueror of princes! Possessed of a considerable and well-disciplined army, numerous foundries and arsenals, a regular government, and a wealthy exchequer, he has become the friend and ally of the British government in India! Runjeet Singh is represented as having no

VOL. XXXIII.

Ꭲ .

education in any branch of learning or science. He cannot read or write in any language; he does not value knowledge for its own sake, but he has the sense and discretion to appre ciate and apply for his own advantage, that of others; yet he is in the habit of hearing papers read in Persian, Punjabee and Hindoo. He is the chief administrator of justice in his kingdom; but each village has a judge, who decides minor offences. The king is easily accessible, and any one of his subjects can plead his own cause before him. A child without a home, or a man without bread, can prefer his request to the Rajah, and never fail of his application, if he should appear a worthy object of his bounty. He