ever been, and will probably continue to be, I will hardly require to be told, there existed attendant on having outstripped contemporary in full force a great many egregiously foolish opinion. There was hardly a question on acts of Parliament, called diversely acts against which Dean Tucker was not distinctly in ad- Forestalling, Regrating, Badgering, and Envance of his time. Though a strenuous de- grossing, but all passed with the same silly fender of religion against the infidel attacks purpose of putting senseless restraints on which were then so common, he was not less trade, by preventing the merchant or speculathe eager advocate of universal toleration. tor from purchasing corn or other provisions, He wrote against drunkenness, against sports in market or on their way to market, and involving cruelty to the brute creation, and selling them again in the same place, or against war. Nothing was too grand, nothing within four miles of it. The professed object too mean, if it affected a single human was to prevent any unfair enhancement of interest, for the wise word he had to utter. the prices of provisions; the almost invariable His great argument for trade against territory, result was to empty the markets of provisions in which he warned the sovereigns of Europe altogether; and never were the magistrates, that the proper cultivation of the land of their in their fulness of ignorance, so bent on own countries inappreciably exceeded in im- putting in force the law against Forestalling, portance any amount of acquisition of waste as at those times of pinch and pressure when land in other countries, was followed by his nothing but that very law obstructed relief. "earnest and affectionate address to the A crisis of this kind occurred, and happened common people of England on their barbarous to be sorely felt in Bristol, where a scarcity of custom of cock-throwing on Shrove Tuesday.' corn was threatened; whereupon straightway He was the first to defend the naturalization assembled the sapient justices to give imof foreigners, to point out the necessity of a mediate effect to the legislation described, and union with Ireland, to denounce the impolicy were surprised to see Doctor Tucker assume of the existing restraints against interchanges for the first time his privilege of magistrate, with that country, to resist the taxation and take his seat on the bench beside them. which then fell so heavily on the industrious" "Why, gentlemen," said the dean, "what are and the poor, to oppose every kind of monopoly you going to do? How can you expect to whether of corporations or trading companies, have any corn at all, if you mean to punish to declare the navigation laws a clog upon the only persons perhaps that will bring you commerce, to propose a plan for getting rid any?" This home-thrust had its effect; and, of slavery, to call for the opening of canals, says a contemporary account of the incident, to point out what advantages would result "the markets were immediately supplied with from the establishment of a warehousing corn." For the dean's great principle, pursystem, to urge the necessity of improvement sues the same authority (a writer in a magain the high roads, to cry out against that zine of the time) about trade and commerce is, East India Company in which we only now begin to detect an injustice too monstrous for continuance or sufficiently ripe for redress, to insist on the wisdom of permitting the free exportation and importation of grain, and to advocate perseveringly in its largest sense free trade among all the nations of the earth. "Ah!" exclaimed Doctor Johnson one day at Thrale's; "another pamphlet by Tucker. The dean always tells me something which I did not know before." Yet it was but a short time after, that the dean was burnt in effigy in his native town of Bristol, because something in one of his pamphlets (it was an argument for the naturalization of the Jew) had given high offence on 'Change, where less tolerance for originality prevailed than in the large heart of Samuel Johnson. Nevertheless Doctor Tucker lived to see his townsmen make something better than a Guy of him, though of themselves perhaps something worse; for he lived to see a shouting mob unyoke the horses from his carriage, against his remonstrance, yoke themselves instead, and draw him into Bristol in triumph. It was a wonderful change, and brought about in a curious way. In those days, the reader "that they will ever find their level; that what commodities are wanted, and can be paid for, will always be had; that a nation will always go to the best and cheapest market for what they have occasion for; and that neither political friendship nor enmity have anything to do with these matters, but that they are regulated by utility and convenience." A very simple and sufficient creed, which it took nearly a hundred years more to make manifest to English statesmen. Happily the dean had not to wait so long before his view of the American quarrel received its ample justification. He did not live, indeed, to see that country enlarged and raised by Independence from thirteen colonies to thirty-one, and from three millions to thirtyfive millions of population; but his life was spared till sixteen years after the treaty of Paris; and when, on the Duke of Portland's installation at Oxford in the summer of 1793, the Dean of Gloucester, then between eighty and ninety years of age, entered the theatre with his brother doctors, the whole assemblage welcomed with acclamation, on each of the three days of the ceremony, the venerable man whose advice, if timely taken, would have saved the useless bloodshed of more than a hundred thousand of the Saxon race, and an addition to the English debt of more than eighty millions sterling. And as Mr. Curwen himself was still living at the time, in his native town of Salem, we may perhaps presume that even he had grown to be much more tolerant of Dean Tucker and his opinions, as a citizen of the American Republic, than when he first heard them in Bristol as a loyalist exile and refugee. From the Spectator. THE NEW ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA.* THE test of more than eighty years, the exhaustion of five-and-thirty thousand copies in seven impressions, and the demand for an eighth edition, speak more for this national publication than any criticism can do. To deserve success may be meritorious; but it is more satisfactory to be successful. Desert in a pursuit argues good intentions; success in the same pursuit, a just perception of the object in view, and the means of attaining it. The proprietors, in their prospectus to this new edition, point with justifiable pride to the eminent names that have been connected with the Encyclopædia Britannica; but a band of great writers does not suffice to attain success where great writing is not the first object. Names nearly if not quite as eminent may be found connected with different encyclopædias -as Coleridge, Arnold, and others, in the Metropolitana; but, however celebrated that work may be, its sale was not equal to its fame. The primary object of an encyclopædia is reference. We recur to it for information, not instruction. The man who wishes to study a science or master a subject may find better teachers for his particular purpose, perhaps must take a wider range than any digest of this kind can offer him. Great names are as a feather in the cap, and if the papers are of a merit proportioned to the writer's fame, they are good as an attraction; but the permanent support is from humbler labors. That encyclopædia will be the most enduring which gives the most of what we want when we look for it, and in the way we want it. When we take down a volume of an encyclopædia, we require an answer to a question, or the resolution of a doubt. All beyond this is a gain, but of the nature of a garnish, which will not of itself maintain the work. To do this effectually, a well-digested plan is the first necessity, and of course competent *The Encyclopædia Britannica, or Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature. Eighth Edition, greatly improved. Edited by Thomas Stewart Traill, M. D., F.R.S.E., Professor of Medical Jurisprudence in the University of Edinburgh. Pulished by Adam and Charles Black. aid. Of equal importance is a perception of the public requirement, so as to give it as much as it wants, and not much more than it wants; since it is not the business of an encyclopædia to form the public taste or discover novelties, but to digest existing knowledge. That this has been done by the Encyclopædia Britannica in a literary sense, is proved by its long success. Some facts in connexion with its form of publication will show the attention paid to the quantum suff. It was first published in three volumes, 4to, 1771; next in ten volumes, in 1778; in eighteen volumes, in 1797; to which was added the Supplement, in two volumes, by Bishop Gleig, in 1801; this was followed by an edition in twenty volumes, in 1810, and other two editions during the succeeding ten years; to which was added the celebrated Supplement in six volumes, 4to, edited by Professor Napier, commenced in 1815 and finished in 1824. The Seventh Edition, which was completed in 1842, embodied whatever remained valuable in the previous editions and in the Supplements. The eighth edition opens with the celebrated Dissertation of Dugald Stewart on the Progress of Metaphysical and Ethical Philosophy, to be followed by Mackintosh upon the same subject, with a new preface by Whewell. To these will succeed the Dissertations on Mathematical and Physical Science by Playfair and Leslie; while Forbes will continue Physics to the present time, and the Archbishop of Dublin, in a new dissertation, will handle the most popular subject of the whole, "the Rise, Progress, and Corruptions of Christianity.' All capital things, if not perfectly encyclopædic, except Stewart's article, which fulfilled in some degree the purpose of a preface. That these, however, are merely tit-bits thrown in, and that the general excellence and utility of the work will not be sacrificed to the "starring" system, may be inferred from this passage of the prospectus : vision and extensive correction. Articles renThe Eighth Edition will undergo careful redered imperfect by the lapse of time will be submitted for improvement to writers intimately conversant with the respective subjects, whilst other articles will be superseded by entirely new contributions, and subjects not formerly embraced in its pages will be added. Gregory Shortcommons, M. A. A clever enough poetical jeu d'esprit, and not at all bitter or exaggerated, considering that the satire is a succession of versified advertisements for curates though some images are rather of things understood than avowed. There is not much of art or strength in the affair. - Spectator. From Household Words. CHLOROFORM. THE recent occurrence of a case of sudden death after the administration of Chloroform in a London hospital reminds us that we are now fairly entitled by the lapse of time to pass a very distinct judgment on the value of this drug as an anesthetic agent. The case to which we have just referred was the first fatal issue within the practice of the Hospital in which it occurred, although Chloroform had been administered in the establishment to sixteen hundred patients. furnished during the last five years from private and hospital experience. A few figures, however, will suffice. The deaths after great amputations of the ordinary kind (not painless), calculated for the half-century, were found in the tables collected by Mr. Phillips, relating to hospital and private praetice, to be thirty-five per cent. In Dr. Simpson's estimate, calculated from hospitals alone, they were twenty-nine per cent. The per centage, computed from all cases in which an anaesthetic agent had been used, was found to be reduced to twenty-three. After amputations of the thigh the deaths used to be in Paris, according to Malgaigne, sixty-nine in a hundred; in the Edinburgh Infirmary, according to Peacock, forty-nine per cent.; in all practice, according to the general tables of Phillips, forty-four in a hundred; at Glasgow, according to Laurie, thirty-six; in all English and Scottish hospitals, according to Simpson, thirty-eight, while, by the use of painless operations, the per centage of mortality has been reduced to twenty-five. Under an indiscriminate use of ether, several deaths followed: not many months had elapsed before there were nine cases on record of death from the effects of ether, so applied by the surgeon, without reckoning two or three accidents. A reaction began to set in; some gave up the use of the new agent; others attempted to discover the substances that should be as efficient and less dangerous. Many substances were found to be more or less available (all containing carbon), but A few deaths directly occasioned by the use none were capable of superseding ether until of Chloroform or ether are, therefore, no, Dr. Simpson of Edinburgh, in November, more to be adduced as arguments against the 1847, published the merits of Chloroform to employment of those agents, than a few—or the profession. Experiments had been made a great many- deaths by railway, are argnwith that substance by M. Flourens, the ments for the complete abolition of the railFrench physiologist, upon animals, in the way system. Chloroform and railways are preceding March; but Professor Simpson both blessings to humanity; but it is requistands alone as the establisher of Chloroform site that they should both be managed carein the position which it now holds in the med- fully. It is a fact very much to the credit of ical profession. Its use spread rapidly; no the medical profession that instances of accidoubt the more rapidly, because Dr. Simpson dent by Chloroform are so much rarer than taught that it should be applied upon a hand-railway accidents. kerchief without the use of any apparatus, When we before discussed this subject, we and his invention was, therefore, spared the mentioned those cases in which especially heavy clog which had been attached to the Chloroform or ether should not be employed; use of ether by the instrument-makers. Ether but, we repeat as it is a kind of information as little required machinery of brass and which it is advantageous for the Chloroformglass as Chloroform; but people fancied that inhaling public to bear well in mind — that it did. Chloroform was, therefore, at once the use of such agents is rarely safe in the highly recommended by the ease with which case of persons suffering under disease of the having an intermittent pulse; or when they brain or spinal marrow; of the heart or lungs, are in a weak and pallid bodily condition. Experience also shows that fatal results have often followed the administration of Chloroform to persons who had exhibited a decisive and unaccountable dread of it. This is a curious fact which we may account for as we please, either by some theory of instinct, or by some superstition of the fore-cast shadow of approaching fate. it was to be administered. The death of Hannah Greener at Newcastle, who had been in great fear of Chloroform, and died in two minutes after its use, first impressed people with the idea that even Chloroform was not to be respired without great precaution. Accidents were however few, and instances of striking benefit almost innumerable: the use of Chloroform spread therefore over Europe, and in the five and a half years that have elapsed since its introduction, the whole number of cases in which it has produced death does not amount to more than fifty, while the number of cases in which life has been saved, by sparing to the system of a sick person the shock often attendant upon a painful operation, are to be numbered certainly by thousands. This we are now able to prove by tables The Star in the Desert. By the Author of "A Trap to Catch a Sunbeam," &c. The restoration of a wife banished by her husband on account of his pride of birth, and the conversion of the husband himself from infidelity, are the subjects of this little tale. It is wellmanaged and prettily told. — Spectator. From Household Words. GABRIEL'S MARRIAGE. CHAPTER THE FIRST. ONE night, during the period of the first French Revolution, the family of François Sarzeau, a fisherman of Brittany, were all waking and watching at an unusually late hour in their cottage on the peninsula of Quberon. François had gone out in his boat that evening, as usual, to fish. Shortly after his departure, the wind had risen, the clouds had gathered; and the storm, which had been threatening at intervals throughout the whole day, burst forth furiously about nine o'clock. It was now eleven; and the raging of the wind over the barren, heathy peninsula still seemed to increase with each fresh blast that tore its way out upon the open sea; the crashing of the waves on the beach was awful to hear; the dreary blackness of the sky terrible to behold. The longer they listened to the storm, the oftener they looked out at it, the fainter grew the hopes which the fisherman's family still strove to cherish for the safety of François Sarzeau and of his younger son who had gone with him in the boat. There was something impressive in the simplicity of the scene that was now passing within the cottage. On one side of the great rugged black fire-place crouched two little girls; the younger half asleep, with her head in her sister's lap. These were the daughters of the fisherman; and opposite to them sat their eldest brother, Gabriel. His right arm had been badly wounded in a recent encounter at the national game of the Soule, a sport resembling our English football; but played on both sides in such savage earnest by the people of Brittany as to end always in bloodshed, often in mutilation, sometimes even in loss of life. On the same bench with Gabriel sat his betrothed wife- a girl of eighteen clothed in the plain, almost monastic black and white costume of her native district. She was the daughter of a small farmer living at some little distance from the coast. Between the groups formed on either side of the fireplace, the vacant space was occupied by the foot of a truckle bed. In this bed lay a very old man, the father of François Sarzeau. His haggard face was covered with deep wrinkles; his long white hair flowed over the coarse lump of sacking which served him for a pillow, and his light gray eyes wandered incessantly, with a strange expression of terror and suspicion, from person to person, and from object to object, in all parts of the room. Every time when the wind and sea whistled and roared at their loudest, he muttered to himself and tossed his hands fretfully on his wretched coverlid. On these occasions, his eyes always fixed themselves intently on a little delf image of the Virgin placed in a niche over the fire-place. Whenever they saw him look in this direction Gabriel and the young girl shuddered and crossed themselves; and even the child who still kept awake imitated their example. There was one bond of feeling at least between the old man and his grandchildren, which connected his age and their youth unnaturally and closely together. This feeling was reverence for the superstitions which had been handed down to them by their ancestors from centuries and centuries back, as far even as the age of the Druids. The spirit-warnings of disaster and death, which the old man heard in the wailing of the wind, in the crashing of the waves, in the dreary, monotonous rattling of the casement, the young man and his affianced wife and the little child who cowered by the fire-side, heard too. All differences in sex, in temperament, in years, Superstition was strong enough to strike down to its own dread level, in the fisherman's cottage, on that stormy night. Besides the benches by the fire-side and the bed, the only piece of furniture in the room was a coarse wooden table, with a loaf of black bread, a knife, and a pitcher of cider placed on it. Old nets, coils of rope, tattered sails, hung about the walls and over the wooden partition which separated the room into two compartments. Wisps of straw and ears of barley drooped down through the rotten rafters and gaping boards that made the floor of the granary above. These different objects and the persons in the cottage, who composed the only surviving members of the fisherman's family, were strangely and wildly lit up by the blaze of the fire and by the still brighter glare of a resin torch stuck into a block of wood in the chimney corner. The red and yellow light played full on the weird face of the old man as he lay opposite to it, and glanced fitfully on the figures of Rose, Gabriel, and the two children; the great gloomy shadows rose and fell, and grew and lessened in bulk about the walls like visions of darkness, animated by a supernatural spectre-life; while the dense obscurity outside spreading before the curtainless window seemed as a wall of solid darkness that had closed in forever around the fisherman's house. The night-scene within the cottage was almost as wild and as dreary to look upon as the night-scene without. For a long time the different persons in the room sat together without speaking, even without looking at each other. At last, the girl turned and whispered something into Gabriel's ear. "I was telling him," answered Rose simply," that it was time to change the bandages on his arm; and I also said to him, what I have often said before, that he must never play at that terrible game of the Soule again. The old man had been looking intently at Rose and his grandchild as they spoke. His harsh, hollow voice mingled with the last soft tones of the young girl, repeating over and over again the same terrible words: "Drowned! drowned! Son and grandson, both drowned! both drowned!" "Hush! Grandfather," said Gabriel, "we must not lose all hope for them yet. God and the Blessed Virgin protect them!" He looked at the little delf image, and crossed himself; the others imitated him, except the old man. He still tossed his hands over the coverlid, and still repeated "Drowned! drowned!" "Oh, that accursed Soule!" groaned the young man. "But for this wound I should have been with my father. The poor boy's life might at least have been saved; for we should then have left him here." "Silence!" exclaimed the harsh voice from the bed. "The wail of dying men rises louder than the loud sea; the devil's psalmsinging roars higher than the roaring wind! Be silent, and listen! François drowned! Pierre drowned! Hark! Hark!" Still with terror, his hands were stretched out convulsively towards his grandson. "The White Women!" he screamed. "The White Women! the grave-diggers of the drowned are out on the sea!" The children, with cries of terror, flung themselves into Rose's arms; even Gabriel uttered an exclamation of horror, and started back from the bedside. the old man reiterated, "The White Women! The White Women! Open the door, Gabriel! look out westward, where the ebb tide has left the sand dry. You'll see them bright as lightning in the darkness, mighty as the angels in stature, sweeping like the wind over the sea, in their long white garments, with their white hair trailing far behind them! Open the door, Gabriel! You'll see them stop and hover over the place where your father and your brother have been drowned; you'll see them come on till they reach the sand; you'll see them dig in it with their naked feet, and beckon awfully to the raging sea to give up its dead. Open the door, Gabriel or, though it should be the death of me, I will get up and open it myself!" Gabriel's face whitened even to his lips, but he made a sign that he would obey. It required the exertion of his whole strength to keep the door open against the wind, while he looked out. "Do you see them, grandson Gabriel? Speak the truth, and tell me if you see them," cried the old man. again. A terrific blast of wind burst over the house, as he spoke, shaking it to its centre, overpowering all other sounds, even to the "I see nothing but darkness-pitch darkdeafening crash of the waves. The slumber-ness," answered Gabriel, letting the door close ing child awoke, and uttered a scream of fear. Rose, who had been kneeling before her lover, binding the fresh bandages on his wounded arm, paused in her occupation, trembling from head to foot. Gabriel looked towards the window; his experience told him what must be the hurricane fury of that blast of wind out at sea, and he sighed bitterly as he murmured to himself, "God help them both man's help will be as nothing to them now!" "Gabriel!" cried the voice from the bed in altered tones- very faint and trembling. He did not hear, or did not attend to the old man. He was trying to soothe and encourage the trembling girl at his feet. "Don't be frightened, love," he said, kissing her very gently and tenderly on the forehead. "You are as safe here as anywhere. Was I not right in saying that it would be madness to attempt taking you back to the farm-house this evening? You can sleep in that room, Rose, when you are tired-you can sleep with the two girls." "Gabriel! brother Gabriel!" cried one of the children. "O! look at grandfather!" Gabriel ran to the bedside. The old man had raised himself into a sitting position; his eyes were dilated, his whole face was rigid "Ah! woe! woe!" groaned his grandfather, sinking back exhausted on the pillow. "Darkness to you; but bright as lightning to the eyes that are allowed to see them. Drowned! drowned! Pray for their souls, Gabriel — I see the White Women even where I lie, and dare not pray for them. Son and grandson drowned! both drowned!" The young man went back to Rose and the children. Grandfather is very ill to-night," he whispered. "You had better all go into the bedroom, and leave me alone to watch by him." They rose as he spoke, crossed themselves before the image of the Virgin, kissed him one by one, and, without uttering a word, softly entered the little room on the other side of the partition. Gabriel looked at his grandfather, and, saw that he lay quiet now, with his eyes closed as if he were already dropping asleep. The young man then heaped some fresh logs on the fire, and sat down by it to watch till morning. Very dreary was the moaning of the night-storm; but it was not more dreary than the thoughts which now occupied him in his solitude— thoughts darkened and distorted by the terrible superstitions of his country and his race. |