for nature is never idle for one moment: every thing is action, even to the inmost particles of matter. Every change of temperature produces motion. We cannot touch a bar of iron without elongating it to an extent that can be rendered evident by machines constructed for the purpose. Our razor becomes sharper by dipping it in hot water, because the edge is elongated and rendered thinner in proportion as the length is so much greater than the thickness. Nature has discovered perpetual motion, though man searches for it in vain. Again: we are unable to destroy or annihilate matter, do what we will with it. We may burn, crush, and scatter to the winds of heaven all material substances; but we only change the form, and diminish nothing. We can at most resolve them into one or other of about sixty elementary bodies, of which every thing created is composed; and even the number of these bodies may possibly be reduced. H. W.

To Thaliarch.

(Hor. lib. i. carm. ix.)

HARK! 'tis the moan of bending woods.
See! how Soracté crown'd with snow
Is white and glist'ning, and the floods
In icy fetters cease to flow.

Pile high the fagots on the hearth;
Drive all these chilling frosts afar;
Pour forth the wine that bringeth mirth—
'Tis four years old from Sabine jar.
Leave to the Gods the rest;-the roar
Of winds, that with the seething main
Are fiercely battling, soon is o'er;
See ash and cypress calm again.

Heed not to-morrow's doom, O boy;
Sufficient to have gained to-day;
Sport with thy love,-she is not coy,-
And wreathe the dance in festive play.
Now hie thee to the Plain of Mars,
Ere age's frost destroys youth's flower.
Soft whispers fall beneath the stars:
Be punctual at the trysting hour.

If in the corner where she's hidden

The girl's sweet laugh ring out, pursue;
Snatch ring and bracelet, though forbidden:
She'll struggle and will yield it too.

W. S. A.

Annus Mirabilis,

EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY.

Annus Mirabilis! It may be asked whether every year that passes over our heads, and leaves some of us alive, be not a Year of Wonders ? How easy to magnify the petty, to exalt the mean and base, to be astonished and lift our hands at that which every day of small things brings forth! Take Robinson Crusoe in his island, and he will make notches in his post to commemorate as wonders the killing of an extra goat, the jabbering of a parrot, the finding of a foot-print in the sand. Take a prisoner in his cell, and the month will seem wonderful to him in which he finds a pin in his pannikin of gruel, or a bird's feather blown from between the bars of his cell, or the surly keeper tells him with an unwonted grin that his time is nearly out. We live among wonders, and reck not of the marvels we have seen until they are past, and the contemplation of fresh wonders engrosses our thoughts. The days follow, seemingly alike, hour for hour, minute for minute, in their dull round of duties, common hopes and fears, common necessities; yet we need no proverb to tell us that they do not resemble each other, and that no instant of Time is the exact counterpart of its predecessor and its successor, but varies from them as infinitely as each sparkle in an icicle and each phase of form and colour in a cloud.

So vain, so weak, so gross, and prone to earth we mortals are, that grandeur and glory may have escaped us and have been passed by with indifference, while our eyes, riveted clod-wards, have been mistaking the glitter of a glowworm for eternal radiance, and the evanescent hues of a chameleon for the golden splendours of the firmament. We may have mingled in some wretched squabble in a church at Wapping, while the great battle of Truth against Error was being waged without. We may have weaved a laurel crown, and embroidered a robe of state, for some dolt or some quack, while the champion of all good and beautiful human things was begging his bread or pining in neglect. We do not, cannot, will not know, in our ignorant perversity, when great things are really being accomplished on earth; and how many thousand men, common men, there must have been who went to bed that night in old Jerusalem when the Deed had been done on Calvary, and cared little for what had become 'of the good thief or the bad thief, or who was He doomed by Pontius Pilate to hang between them!

To the ordinary, we take it, this year EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY-ere this sheet is published dead and gone-must seem a year of wonders. For the face of the earth has been changed, and its governors have been cast out, and new rulers appointed in their place. The captives have

been set free, and the most hopeless nation in Europe gladdened with freedom, complete and triumphant. The old Mystery of Iniquity has been shaken to its very base; and the giant of John Bunyan's allegory sits among powdery bones and dried-up blood-stains in his cave, impotent and forlorn, gnawing his fingers and grinning malisons, that fall down again on his bald discrowned head like flakes of soot from a foul chimney. That other Mystery, the silken barbarism of the "Middle Kingdom," with its rotten civilisation, as old, perhaps, as the Flood, has been solved and sifted, ripped up and torn to brocaded tatters. In this same year, which we must perforce call wonderful, the eldest son of the Queen of England has stood bareheaded before the tomb of the Man who tore the fairest jewel in the British crown from his great-grandfather. While these things have been wrought in the domain of History, we have to mark in our own more intimate social annals a strange parliamentary session of abortive schemes, lame compromises, "constitutional" motions advanced on the most miserable party grounds, and talking, endless talking. While, thank God, men seem to have set themselves heart and soul to the good work of teaching the ignorant, of feeding and housing the destitute, of affording succour to the remorseful Magdalen and the penitent thief, and specially, and most nobly, of catching up from the kennels and the night-cellars the naked wolfish little wretches whom we call "street boys," and training them to be honest and industrious, to fear God and honour the Queen, in reformatories and industrial schools;—while the Church has gone forth, earnest and prayerful and untiring not to be vanquished by the apathy of the indolent or the sneers of the sceptic, but still preaching and teaching and praying and working, showering tracts by millions into lanes and hovels, sending her missionaries to the uttermost ends of the earth, delivering the message of God's love and mercy, and delivering it without lawn sleeves,-in stable-yards, on the stages of theatres, on the platforms of concert-rooms, in the parlours of low taverns;-while every week-day and Sabbath of the year have been full of memories that our sepulchres are not all whitened, and that we do not all pass by on the other side while our brother lies bleeding in the ditch,the awful reminder to vain-glory and self-complacency has come over and over again to us, bidding us mark that, with all our tracts and missions, our baths and washhouses, our schools and midnight meetings, we are yet steeped to the lips in sin, and need yet a giant's strength, a more than giant's courage, before we can finally beat down Satan under our feet. Murder, the foulest, the most unnatural, has been rife in the land. The poisoner has been fiendishly busy and has escaped detection. A new Herod has stalked forth and smeared the blood of little children on the doorposts. Drunkenness, profligacy, robbery, fraud, in the highest and the lowest classes of society, have been frightfully prevalent.

-

Let us take this year 1860, and see what has come of it,-what we have to be joyful for, and what to regret, as to the past; what to amend, and what to be hopeful for, as to the future. Stand forth January. The year opened in doubt and misgiving. An uneasy anticipation, less than a

positive dread, of an invasion on the part of France was generally diffused. The public misgivings were increased by the resignation of one of the Emperor Napoleon's wisest counsellors, Count Walewski. Pacific negotiations of a commercial nature between the two countries were interrupted by this secession from the Imperial cabinet; but on the 12th of January Lord Cowley, our Ambassador in Paris, arrived in London, to endeavour to knit up the ravelled sleeve of diplomacy. In Africa, the Moors and Spaniards were fiercely fighting. There was an action near Tetuan, on the 10th, in which the Moors were totally routed. These saturnine barbarians carried on hostilities in their own apathetic, fatalist, Oriental fashion, straggling about wrapped up in uncouth blankets, on lean longmaned horses, firing random shots from bell-mouthed carbines, usually contriving to leave a little cholera behind them with their captured tents and pack-saddles; and, we dare say, warring in precisely the same manner as their ancestors warred with our Charles the Second's Colonel Kirke, before Tangier. In Italy the Pope was wavering between flight and ferocity; but on the 17th the doctrine of non possumus reached its culmination. His Holiness declined to grant any reforms, and he refused to cede the province he had chiefly misgoverned-the Romagna. On the 24th inst. the Queen of England opened Parliament, and the largest hopes were entertained of the measures of the coming session. We were to have a commercial treaty with France eminently favourable to English manufacturers (especially in iron and cotton), and permitting, on the other hand, the importation at reduced rates of French wines and silks to this country. We were to have definitively the long-promised Reform Bill, deficient, it is true, in the "fancy franchises" which the Conservatives had so ingeniously devised in the bill planned during their tenure of office, but prolific in promises of increased political power to the working classes. We were to have a thorough assimilation and codification of the laws of bankruptcy and insolvency. Intemperance and the trade in poisonous spirits were to be discouraged by a Refreshment-Houses and Wine-Licenses Bill; and what had been termed a "tax upon knowledge" was to be abrogated by the remission of a vexatious duty on paper, bringing in to the Government much annoyance and obloquy, and about a million of money every year.

February opened with grumblings at Naples, so long oppressed by a semi-cretin, semi-Feejee islander, called Francis II.; student-riots at Rome; the resignation of General Filanghieri; and a sudden refusal on the part of Austria to consent to the arrangement for the settlement of the Italian question proposed by the cabinets of England and France. Austria had not forgotten the humiliation of Magenta and Solferino, or the halcyon days when her white-coated officers sate in the sediti chiusi of the Scala, and girls who were rash enough to sing patriotic ballads in cafes were dragged to the police-office, to be fastened to benches and whipped with rods, tenpence "Austrian currency" being solemnly awarded to the executioner for each female patient. Our Parliament had

met, and thenceforth talked incessantly. The Chancellor of the Exchequer unfolded his very remarkable budget on the 10th, and was inordinately praised by the Liberals, just as he was inordinately censured by the Conservatives. The licensed victuallers of the kingdom, especially in the metropolis and the larger towns, were enraged at Mr. Gladstone's threatened interference with their profits, by the creation of decent places of accommodation where light clarets and wholesome refreshments could be consumed by ladies and children, without the tyranny and the degradation of the tap-room and the tavern-bar. On the other hand, the advocates of the Wine-Licenses Bill (which has now become a law of the land) were much too sanguine in their hopes of the benefits that might accrue from it. An immediate millennium of temperance was not reasonably to be expected; and it remains yet to be seen whether the stomach of a northern people will prefer sour wine to wholesome beer. Four hundred years ago Lord Chief Justice Fortescue, drawing a contrast between the state of the French and English peasantry, complimented the latter on the fact that they never drank water save in Lent, and for pious mortification; and in 1817 William Cobbett, a very genuine Englishman, lamented the passing away of the days when every labouring man brewed a barrel of ale for his wife's lying-in, and another to be drunk at the christening of the child, instead of being brought down, as in 1817, to "the cat-lap of the tea-kettle."

On the 11th of February the Moniteur published the text of the Anglo-French treaty. The Times took exception to it on principle, denouncing treaties of commerce as antiquated and useless modes of negotiation. On the 25th there was a hideous explosion at the Burradon colliery, attended by great loss of life. As a domestic event, let us also signalise the attempt made by some well-meaning members of the "serious world" to better the condition of fallen women. A midnight meeting was convened at St. James's Hall, Piccadilly, on the 9th, to which the poor creatures who prowl or flaunt about the Haymarket and its purlieus were invited by circulars, distributed in their usual haunts. They were hospitably regaled on a hot meal, to which many of them had probably been long strangers, and subsequently they were kindly and piously exhorted by Mr. Baptist Noel and other gentlemen. This, and the meetings which afterwards took place, effected, we are glad to believe, an appreciable amount of good. Many of the young women so gathered together left the hall at once for places of reformation; and it is to be hoped that their majority did not relapse into the sad calling from which they were rescued. The midnight meetings were exposed to a vast amount of derision; but the intentions of their promoters were most excellent and be nevolent; and if only one woman in a hundred was saved, it might be conceded that at least as great a meed of praise is due to him who reclaims a fellow-creature from a path which must surely end in irremediable despair, as to him who makes a blade of wheat to grow where it never grew before.

On the third day of March the Emperor of Austria, who for years