most part. Individually, she will throw off any number of novels that Messrs. Soap and Diddle will pay for; and collectively, by the aid of self and friends, scores of "Lyrics of Loveliness," "Beams of Beauty,' "Pearls of Purity," &c. Who does not recollect the success which her "Pearls of the Peerage had? She is going to do the "Beauties of the Baronetage; then we shall have the "Daughters of the Dustmen," or some such other collection of portraits. Lady Flummery has around her a score of literary gentlemen, who are bound to her, body and soul: give them a dinner, a smile from an opera-box, a wave of the hand in Rotten Row, and they are hers, neck and heels. Vidis mi fili, &c. See, my son, with what a very small dose of humbug men are to be bought. I know many of these individuals: there is my friend M'Lather, an immense, pudgy man: I saw him one day walking through Bond Street in company with an enormous ruby breast-pin. "Mac!" shouted your humble servant, "that is a Flummery ruby;" and Mac hated and cursed us ever after. Presently came little Fitch, the artist; he was rigged out in an illuminated velvet waistcoat-Flummery again— "There's only one like it in town," whispered Fitch to me confidentially, "and Flummery has that." To be sure, Fitch had given, in return, half-a-dozen of the prettiest drawings in the world. "I wouldn't charge for them, you know," he says, "for hang it, Lady Flummery is my friend." Oh Fitch, Fitch! from Italian operas, German phrases fiercely mutilated, and a scrap or two of bad Spanish: and, upon the strength of these murders, she calls herself an authoress. To be sure there is no such word as authoress. If any young nobleman or gentleman of Eton College, when called upon to indite a copy of verses in praise of Sappho, or the Countess of Dash, or Lady Charlotte What-d'ye-call-'em, or the Honourable Mrs. Somebody, should fondly imagine that he might apply to those fair creatures the title of auctrix-I pity that young nobleman's or gentleman's case. Doctor Wordsworth and assistants would swish that error out of him in a way that need not here be mentioned. Remember it henceforth, ye writeresses—there is no such word as authoress. Auctor, madam, is the word. "Optima, tu proprii nominis auctor eris;" which, of course, means that you are, by your proper name, an author, not an authoress: the line is in Ainsworth's Dictionary, where anybody may see it.-Heads of the People. THE ARTISTS. IT is confidently stated that there was once a time when the quarter of Soho was thronged by the fashion of London. Many wide streets are there in the neighbourhood, stretching cheerfully towards Middlesex Hospital in the North, bounded by Dean Street in the west, where the lords and ladies of William's time used to dwell, till in Queen Anne's time, Bloomsbury put Soho out of fashion, and Great Russell Street became the pink of the mode. Fifty more instances could be adduced of her ladyship's ways of bribery. She bribes the critics to praise her, and the writers to write for her; and the public Both these quarters of the town have flocks to her as it will to any other trades- submitted to the awful rule of nature, and man who is properly puffed. Out comes are now to be seen undergoing the dire the book; as for its merits, we may allow, process of decay. Fashion has deserted cheerfully, that Lady Flummery has no Soho, and left her in her gaunt, lonely old lack of that natural esprit which every age. The houses have a vast, dingy, woman possesses; but here praise stops. mouldy, dowager look. No more beaux, For the style, she does not know her own in mighty periwigs, ride by in gilded language, but, in revenge, has a smatter- clattering coaches; no more lackeys acing of half-a-dozen others. She inter- company them, bearing torches, and lards her works with fearful quotations shouting for precedence. A solitary from the French, fiddle-faddle extracts | policeman paces these solitary streets,— the only dandy in the neighbourhood. ing fabulous goods. There is a sedanYou hear the milkman yelling his milk chair opposite a house in Rathbone Place, with a startling distinctness, and the clack that I myself have seen every day for of a servant girl's pattens set people a forty-three years. The house has comstaring from the windows. monly a huge India-rubber-coloured door, with a couple of glistening brass plates, and bells. A portrait painter lives on the first floor; a great historical genius inhabits the second. Remark the first floor's middle drawing-room window; it is four feet higher than its two companions, and has taken a fancy to peep into the second-floor front. So much for the outward appearance of their habitations, and for the quarters in which they commonly dwell. They seem to love solitude, and their mighty spirits rejoice in vastness and gloomy ruin. With Bloomsbury we have here nothing to do; but as genteel stock-brokers inhabit the neighbourhood of Regent's Park, —as lawyers have taken possession of Russell Square,- -so Artists have seized upon the desolate quarter of Soho. They are to be found in great numbers in Berners Street. Up to the present time, naturalists have never been able to account for this mystery of their residence.-What has a painter to do with Middlesex Hospital? He is to be found in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. And why? Philosophy cannot tell, any more than why milk is found in a cocoa-nut. Look at Newman Street. Has earth, in any dismal corner of her great round face, a spot more desperately gloomy? The windows are spotted with wafers, holding up ghastly bills, that tell you the house is To Let." Nobody walks there —not even an old clothesman; the first inhabited house has bars to the windows, and bears the name of "Ahasuerus, officer to the Sheriff of Middlesex;" and here, above all places, must painters take up their quarters,-day by day must these reckless people pass Ahasuerus's treble gate. There was my poor friend, Tom Tickner (who did those sweet things for "The Book of Beauty"). Tom, who could not pay his washerwoman, lived opposite the bailiff's; and could see every miserable debtor, or greasy Jew writbearer that went in or out of his door. The street begins with a bailiff's, and ends with a hospital. I wonder how men live in it, and are decently cheerful, with this gloomy, double-barrelled moral pushed perpetually into their faces. Here, however, they persist in living, no one knows why-owls may still be found roosting in Netley Abbey, and a few Arabs are to be seen at the present minute in Palmyra. The ground-floors of the houses where painters live are mostly make-believe shops, black empty warehouses, contain I don't say a word here about those geniuses who frequent the thoroughfares of the town, and have picture-frames containing a little gallery of miniature peers, beauties, and general officers, in the Quadrant, the passages about St. Martin's Lane, the Strand, and Cheapside. Lord Lyndhurst is to be seen in many of these gratis exhibitions—LordLyndhurst cribbed from Chalon; Lady Peel, from Sir Thomas; Miss Croker, from the same; the Duke, from ditto; an original officer in the Spanish Legion; a colonel or so, of the Bunhill-Row Fencibles; a lady on a yellow sofa, with four children in little caps and blue ribands ;-we have all of us seen these pretty pictures, and are aware that our own features may be "done in this style." Then there is the man on the chain-pier at Brighton, who pares out your likeness in sticking-plaister; there is Miss Cripps, or Miss Runt, who gives lessons in Poonah-painting, japanning, or mezzotinting; Miss Stump, who attends ladies' schools with large chalk heads from Le Brun or the Cartoons; Rubbery, who instructs young gentlemen's establishments in pencil; and Sepio, of the Water Colour Society, who paints before eight pupils daily, at a guinea an hour, keeping his own drawings for himself. All these persons, as the most indifferent reader must see, equally belong to the tribe of Artists (the last not more than the first), and in an article like this should be mentioned properly. But though this paper has been extended from eight pages to sixteen, not sixteen pages,-not a volume would suffice to do justice to the biographies of the persons above-mentioned. Think of the superb Sepio, in a light-blue satin cravat, and a light-brown coat, and yellow kids, tripping daintily from Grosvenor Square to Gloucester Place; a small sugar-loaf boy following, who carries his morocco portfolio. Sepio scents his handkerchief, curls his hair, and wears, on a great coarse fist, a large emerald ring that one of his pupils gave him. He would not smoke a cigar for the world; he is always to be found at the Opera; and gods! how he grins, and waggles his head about, as Lady Flummery nods to him from her box. He goes to at least six great parties in the season. At the houses where he teaches, he has a faint hope that he is received as an equal, and propitiates scornful footmen by absurd donations of sovereigns. The rogue has plenty of them. He has a stock-broker, and a power of guinea lessons stowed away in the Consols. There are a number of youngladies of genius in the aristocracy, who admire him hugely; he begs you to contradict the report about him and Lady Smigsmag; every now and then he gets a present of game from a marquis; the city ladies die to have lessons of him; he prances about the park on a half-bred cock-tail, with lacquered boots and enormous high heels; and he has a mother and sisters somewhere-washerwomen, it is said, in Pim is an idiot, which a poor, sick mother is ever carefully tending. Sepio's great aim and battle in life is to be considered one of the aristocracy; honest Rubbery would fain be thought a gentleman, too; but, indeed, he does not know whether he is so or not. Why be a gentleman ?—a gentleman Artist does not obtain the wages of a tailor; Rubbery's butcher looks down upon him with a royal scorn; and his wife, poor gentle soul (a clergyman's daughter, who married him in the firm belief that her John would be knighted, and make an immense fortune),—his wife, I say, has many fierce looks to suffer from Mrs. Butcher, and many meek excuses or prayers to proffer, when she cannot pay her bill,-or when, worst of all, she has humbly to beg for a little scrap of meat upon credit, against John's coming home. He has five-and-twenty miles to walk that day, and must have something nourishing when he comes in-he is killing himself, poor fellow, she knows he is: and Miss Crick has promised to pay him his quarter's charge on the very next Saturday. Gentlefolks, indeed, "" says Mrs. Butcher, "pretty gentlefolks these, as can't pay for half-a-pound of steak !” Let us thank heaven that the Artist's wife has her meat, however there is good in that shrill, fat, mottle-faced Mrs. Brisket, after all. Think of the labours of that poor Rubbery. He was up at four in the morning, and toiled till nine upon a huge damp icy lithographic stone; on which he has drawn the "Star of the Wave," or the Queen of the Tourney," or "She met him at Almacks," for Lady Flummery's last new song. This done, at half-past nine he is to be seen striding across Kensington Gardens, to wait upon the beforenamed Miss Crick, at Lamont House. Transport yourself in imagination to the Misses Kittles' seminary, Potzdam Villa, Upper Homerton, four miles from Shoreditch; and at half-past two, Professor Rubbery is to be seen swinging along towards the gate. Somebody is on the look-out for him: indeed, it is his eldest daughter, Marianne, who has been pacing the shrubbery, and peering over the green railings this half-hour past. She is with the Misses Kittle on the "mutual system," a thousand times more despised than the butchers' and the grocers' daughters, who are educated on the same terms, and whose papas are warm men in Aldgate. Wednesday is the happiest day of Marianne's week: and this the happiest hour of Wednesday. Behold! Professor Rubbery wipes his hot brows and kisses the poor thing, and they go in together out of the rain, and he tells her that the twins are well out of the measles, thank God! and that Tom has just done the Antinous, in a way that must make him quite sure of the Academy prize, and that mother is better of her rheumatism now. He has brought her a letter, in large round hand, from Polly; a famous soldier, drawn by little Frank; and when, after his two hours' lesson, Rubbery is off again, our dear Marianne cons over the letter and picture a hundred times with soft tearful smiles, and stows them away in an old writing desk, amidst a heap more of precious home relics, wretched trumpery scraps, and baubles, that you and I, madam, would sneer at; but that in the poor child's eyes (and, I think, in the eyes of One, who knows how to value widows' mites, and humble sinners' offerings) are better than bank-notes and Pitt diamonds. Oh, kind heaven, that has given these treasures to the poor! Many and many an hour does Marianne lie awake with full eyes, and yearn for that wretched old lodging in Howland Street, where mother and brothers lie sleeping; and, gods! what a fête it is, when twice or thrice in the year she comes home.Heads of the People. [SIR FRANCIS BOND HEAD.] THE PAMPAS. THE great plain, or pampas, on the east of the Cordillera, is about nine hundred miles in breadth, and the part which I have visited, though under the same latitude, is divided into regions of different climate and produce. On leaving Buenos Ayres, the first of these regions is covered In for one hundred and eighty miles with clover and thistles; the second region, which extends for four hundred and fifty miles, produces long grass; and the third region, which reaches the base of the Cordillera, is a grove of low trees and shrubs. The second and third of these regions have nearly the same appearance throughout the year, for the trees and shrubs are evergreens, and the immense plain of grass only changes its colour from green to brown; but the first region varies with the four seasons of the year in a most extraordinary manner. winter the leaves of the thistles are large and luxuriant, and the whole surface of the country has the rough appearance of a turnip-field. The clover in this season is extremely rich and strong; and the sight of the wild cattle grazing in full liberty on such pasture is very beautiful. In spring the clover has vanished, the leaves of the thistles have extended along the ground, and the country still looks like a rough crop of turnips. In less than a month the change is most extraordinary: the whole region becomes a luxuriant wood of enormous thistles, which have suddenly shot up to a height of ten or eleven feet, and are all in full bloom. The road or path is hemmed in on both sides; the view is completely obstructed; not an animal is to be seen; and the stems of the thistles are so close to each other, and so strong, that, independent of the prickles with which they are armed, they form an impenetrable barrier. The sudden growth of these plants is quite astonishing; and though it would be an unusual misfortune in military history, yet it is really possible that an invading army, unacquainted with this country, might be imprisoned by these thistles before it had time to escape from them. The summer is not over before the scene undergoes another rapid change: the thistles suddenly lose their sap and verdure, their heads droop, the leaves shrink and fade, the stems become black and dead, and they remain rattling with the breeze one against another, until the violence of the pampero or hurricane levels them with the ground, where they rapidly KK decompose and disappear- the clover rushes up, and the scene is again verdant. -Rough Notes Across the Pampas and Among the Andes. www [SIR CHARLES LYELL.] GEOLOGY COMPARED TO HISTORY. WE often discover with surprise, on looking back into the chronicles of nations, how the fortune of some battle has influenced the fate of millions of our contemporaries, when it has long been forgotten by the mass of the population. With this remote event, we may find inseparably connected the geographical boundaries of a great state, the language now spoken by the inhabitants, their peculiar manners, laws, and religious opinions. But far more astonishing and unexpected are the connections brought to light, when we carry back our researches into the history of nature. The form of a coast, the configuration of the interior of a country, the existence and extent of lakes, valleys, and mountains can often be traced to the former prevalence of earthquakes and volcanoes in regions which have long been undisturbed. To these remote convulsions, the present fertility of some districts, the sterile character of others, the elevation of land above the sea, the climate, and various peculiarities, may be distinctly referred. On the other hand, many distinguishing features of the surface may often be ascribed to the operation, at a remote era, of slow and tranquil causes-to the gradual deposition of sediment in a lake or in the ocean, or to the prolific increase of testacea and corals. To select another example: we find in certain localities subterranean deposits of coal, consisting of vegetable matter formerly drifted into seas and lakes. These seas and lakes have since been filled up; the lands whereon the forests grew have disappeared or changed their form; the rivers and currents which floated the vegetable masses can no longer be traced; and the plants belonged to species which for ages have passed away from the surface of our planet. Yet the commercial prosperity and numerical strength of a nation may now be mainly dependent on the local distribution of fuel determined by that ancient state of things. Geology is intimately related to almost all the physical sciences, as history is to the moral. A historian should, if possible, be at once profoundly acquainted with ethics, politics, jurisprudence, the military art, theology; in a word, with all branches of knowledge by which any insight into human affairs, or into the moral and intellectual nature of man, can be obtained. It would be no less desirable that a geologist should be well versed in chemistry, natural philosophy, mineralogy, zoology, comparative anatomy, botany; in short, in every science relating to organic and inorganic nature. With these accomplishments, the historian and geologist would rarely fail to draw correct philosophical conclusions from the various monuments transmitted to them of former occurrences. They would know to what combination of causes analogous effects were referrible, and they would often be enabled to supply, by inference, information concerning many events unrecorded in the defective archives of former ages. But as such extensive acquisitions are scarcely within the reach of any individual, it is necessary that men who have devoted their lives to different departments should unite their efforts; and as the historian receives assistance from the antiquary, and from those who have cultivated different branches of moral and political science, so the geologist should avail himself of the aid of many naturalists, and particularly of those who have studied the fossil remains of lost species of animals and plants. The analogy, however, of the monuments consulted in geology, and those available in history, extends no further than to one class of historical monuments those which may be said to be undesignedly commemorative of former events. The canoes, for example, and stone |