cylinder of copper, about three feet long, and three or four inches in diameter, whose surface is engraved, not by the hand of the engraver, but by the mechanical pressure of a steel roller from one or two inches in diameter, and three inches long, which transfers the figures on it to the relatively softer copper. The first steel roller, called the die, is softened before being engraved in intaglio; it is then hardened, and made, by a powerful press, to transfer its design, in relief, to a similar die called the mill, which is the one used for transferring the design to the copper cylinder. The process of etching is sometimes had recourse to for covering the cylinder with various figures."

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But how comes it that a single machine can be made to print cloth at the rate of twelve miles per day of as many hours, from six to six working time?-to put a girdle of calico round the earth in rather better than three years and a half ?—that single machine being supposed to run day and night. Let us enquire! The engraved cylinders are mounted upon a strong iron shaft or arbor, carrying a toothed wheel at its end, in order to put in train with the rotatory printing machine, for one, two, or more colours. On a roller, at the upper part of this apparatus, are wound whole calico webs stitched together, the end of which is then introduced between the engraved copper cylinder and a large central cylinder covered with blanket, against which it is made to bear with regulated pressure. The engraved cylinder turns on the top of another cylinder covered with woollen cloth, which revolves with the former while its under part is plunged in an oblong trough containing the dyeing matter, which is of a pasty consistence. The engraved cylinder is thus supplied with an abundance | of impressible colour, and is cleared from the superfluity by the thin edge of a flat ruler made of bronze, called vulgarly, "the doctor," (ductor), which is applied obliquely to it with a gentle force. The cylinder, after its escape from this wiping tool, acts upon the calico, and rolls it onward with its revolution, imparting its figured design with great precision. And this is how Ariel-like speed is obtained, and miles are made sport of!

I could talk about mordants and resists, dischargers and colours, "steams" and "madderwork," adjective dyestuffs, which require a mordant or bond of union between the colour itself and the cloth to receive it, and substantive ditto, which of themselves will give fast colours to the calico. It were easy to discourse of "spirit-colours," "chintzes," and other styles of the art; to chat about gums and thickenings, starches and finishes, madder and indigo, cochineal, cutch, and catechu, but-my limits are exhausted, and such gossip could scarcely interest a reader who has not spent more than Three Hours in a Print-works.

To-Day.

BY CHARLES WILTON.

LET dotards grieve for childhood's days,
And only those look back

Whose wasted wealth or shattered health

Betrays a shameless track;

I cannot join in mourning time

For ever passed away,

For whilst I look on nature's book

I'm thankful for to-day!

The trees are still as fresh and green
As ever branches were;
And still, in primal vigour seen,

They wave their arms in air.
The rivers sing the self-same song
That they have sung for aye;
Whose burden, as they glide along,
Is-" God is here to-day!"

There's not a bird upon the bough,
Or leaf upon the tree,

But in the summer twilight now
As sweetly sings to me.

The bleakest wind that winter blows
Can chase disease away,

And shower blessings in the snows

That hide the earth to-day.

And everywhere a thousand gifts
Invite us to rejoice-

To grieve no more the days of yore

But raise a thankful voice;

That tell us, though the world were fair

In years removed for aye,

The earth and sky, and sea and air,

As lovely are to-day.

Then tell me not that childhood's days
Alone produce us joy-

That manhood's fancy cannot raise
The structures of the boy.

The childish mind is lost in dreams

Of pictures far away;

But man beholds majestic themes

In wonders of to-day.

Oh ye, whose eyes upbraiding rise,

Pronouncing fate unjust,

Who walk the earth with cherished hopes,

Low trailing in the dust;

Discard a false unmanly thrall,

Nor own so weak a sway,

But hope in Him who gave you all,

And thank him for to-day!

William Cowper.

BY PARSON FRANK.

LONG had artificiality swayed the destinies of English verse, when Cowper arose to do it battle. An artist himself, and of refined skill too, he waged war with the affectations of art. Nature, it has been said, was "expelled by a fork" under the hands of Pope's imitators. Nonconformity to the Establishment of poetical orthodoxy, with its canonical traditions, its

prebendal-stall stiffness, its collegiate routine, and its lawn-sleeve proprieties, became high treason to the heaven of the muses, and exposed the schismatic to all the terrors of ipso facto excommunication. Bards no longer launched forth prophetic fires, but played with syllables, and sported with song. Manner was all in all-the substitute for genius, sense, and wit. Not, "what shall I say?"--was the question,-but "how shall I say it?" Not, "have I a burden that must be delivered for the relief and the very life of my soul?"-but-"can I set a distich upon six and five-can I command a good array of approved epithets-can I do the thing correctly, genteelly, à la mode?" Themes the most trivial were chosen, whereon to exercise this divine art of poetry, sadly degenerated from its first estate, when it walked with God, and was divinely free, and soared, and anticipated the skies. The fruit of the muses' labour became whipped cream. The fashions curled and powdered and papered his fluent locks; and instead of issuing with frenzied eye from the hermitage of Night Thoughts, forth tripped my gentleman, sprucely and smirkingly, from the dulce domum of a band-box. He made magnificent exordiums and most impotent conclusions. invoked the beatific Nine in his dainty introduction, and then groped his way like a sightless mendicant :

He i

Not so William Cowper. While the million jogged on the beaten footpath, he was the courser that disdains the road,

"Snuffs up the wind, and flings himself abroad."

His mouth spoke out of the abundance of a full heart, and the great heart of the world beat responsively. Instead of repeating, as Mr. Craik says, "the unmeaning conventionalities and faded affectations of his predeces sors," he turned to the "actual world of nature within him and around him." "In his aversion from what is affected, he even appears to patronize rugged phrases and uncouth epithets and harsh rhymes, as though in pert defiance of the fashionable coteries. If to write a rough couplet was to be vile, he would be yet more vile. It was the reaction of Nature against the excrescences of Art.

We say, with a smile,-Poor Goldsmith. We might say, with a sigh,Poor Cowper. His biography is indeed a touching history. The man was so tender, so sensitive, so loving, so ill-fitted to cope with that sorrow which worketh death, so feebly prepared by nature to endure the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, and the pangs of blighted love, and dreadful surmises as to the something after death. As Mrs. Barrett Browning beautifully writes,

"O poets, from a maniac's tongue

Was poured this deathless singing;
O Christians, at your cross of hope
A hopeless hand was clinging!

O men, this man in brotherhood,
Your weary paths beguiling,

Groaned inly while he taught you peace,

And died while ye were smiling!"

His life is no changeful romance indeed, but a household story, over which we linger with something of household affection. Each epoch of the

*"Sketches of Literature and Learning in England." Vol. VI.

memoir has its interest ;-the happy infancy of the future poet in his good father's Hertfordshire rectory, where the gardener, Robin, day by day,

"Drew him to school along the public way,
Delighted with his bauble-coach, and wrapt
In scarlet mantle warm, and velvet cap,"-

and where a gentle mother's smile and solace had power to chase away his every grief-until the bell tolled that called her to the grave, and her bewildered child watched from his nursery window the departure of the hearse, and drew

"A long long sigh, and wept a last adieu."

Then the distresses of his boarding-school career, when coarse bullying broke the spirit of this "sensitive plant," accustomed, as it had been, to a constant flow of love that knew no fail;-and when he acquired that hatred of public academies which was one day to find utterance in his "Tirocinium, a Review of Schools." Then his seven years' course at Westminster, where timidity on his part invited persecution (and who can persecute like an unfeeling boy?), and the nervous shrinking lad afforded sport to his boisterous mates-for robust youth seldom makes allowances for constitutional incapacity to keep up, neck to neck, with its own wild race. Then his three years with Mr. Chapman, the solicitor, in whose office he and his fellow clerk Thurlow-lord chancellor that was to be--employed themselves from morn to eve in giggling and making to giggle. Then his life in chambers at the Temple, as a regular student of law, where he "rambled from the thorny road of his austere patroness, Jurisprudence, into the primrose paths of literature and poetry,"-cultivating the acquaintance of Colman, Lloyd, and other littérateurs-amusing them and himself with verse-making, and translations from the classics. Then, at thirty-one, his nomination to the lucrative post of Reading Clerk in the House of Lords-an office which excessive nervousness compelled him to resign; then his appointment to be Clerk of the Journals, which the same unhappy cause, or "effect defective" (as Polonius would say), made of brief tenure. This he brooded over until madness visited his troubled brain; and when the dark cloud was dispersed, under the influence of excellent Dr. Cotton, he sought to preserve tranquillity in complete seclusion from the world and its "madd'ning crowd's ignoble strife," for youth was over, and he was "left alone with ghosts of blessings gone,"--the bounty of a few friends enabling him to live in frugal retirement, and to "cultivate literature upon a little oatmeal," as the young Edinburgh Reviewers once construed Virgil. Then came his intimacy with the Unwin family, and with iron-nerved John Newton-a period subject to relapses and reactions of morbid depression, but characterised by that regular poetical régime which he now imposed on himself as his purpose in life.

"God suffered once the thunder cloud
Towards His love to blind him ;

But gently led the blind along

Where breath and bird could find him;

"The pulse of dew upon the grass
His own did calmly number;
And silent shadow from the trees
Fell o'er him like a slumber."*

*Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Painful, often, is the contrast between the placidity, wit, and sportive humour of his verse, on the one hand, and on the other the deep gloom which was consuming him piece-meal-preying on his vitals, like the eagle of Prometheus. How often are his letters "the proofs of rare heroism! how often were these flowers of fancy watered by a bleeding heart!"* It is the knowledge of this that imparts so peculiar a charm to his epistolary and other pleasantries; the contrast, as Mr. Gilfillan observes, between their airy buoyancy and his fixed morbid misery; and the view this gives us of the irrepressible spring of enjoyment originally possessed by a mind which not even the sorrows of madness could entirely choke up, and of that powerful sense of the ludicrous which could wreathe the grim features of despair into contagious smiles. It is beautifully true of this man stricken of God and afflicted, that when, one by one, sweet sounds

"And wandering lights departed,

He wore no less a loving face, because so broken-hearted."

His habit of surrendering his pen to the most obvious pleasantry at hand, : and dallying with the most casual thoughts of the moment, has been compared to Hamlet's talk about Old Truepenny in the cellarage, when the thought of his father's spirit is weighing with awful mystery on his heart; or amusing himself with badgering Polonius, when the thought of filial revenge is swaying the very depths of his soul. He made no parade of the trappings of woe; he wore no inky cloak; he obtruded no dejected 'haviour of the visage" upon the public; he traded not in the forms and modes and shows of importunate grief; but he had that within which passeth show ;-and, with something of Spartan endurance, he folded his mantle decorously over the struggle within, though his life-blood was ebbing, drop by drop, away. Poor Cowper!

His poetry is perhaps dull reading to people whose pulses are ever at fever heat, and who call nothing poetry that does not deal with corsairs and giaours, and Manfreds and Cains. But it is popular.still with a large number of steady old folks, who are addicted, rightly or wrongly, to English impressions of nature, English views of manners, and English sentiments of patriotism. It is manly, straightforward, unaffected, spirited, easy, hearty, domestic, John Bullish. It is truly earnest and sincere-another quality characteristic of John Bull, His Mark. The very general esteem for Cowper's poetry, at the close of last century, Mr. de Quincey calls "inevitable," because the poet's picture of an English fireside, with its long winter evening, the sofa wheeled round to the fire, the massy draperies depending from the windows, the tea-table with its bubbling and loudhissing urn, the newspaper and the long debate-Pit and Fox ruling the senate, and Erskine the bar-all held up a mirror to that particular period, and their own particular houses; whilst the character of his rural scenery was exactly the same in Cowper's experience of England as in their own; so that in all these features they recognised their countryman and their contemporary, who saw things from the same station as themselves;— whilst his moral denunciations upon all great public questions then afloat, were cast in the very same mould of conscientious principle as their own.+ Professor Wilson ascribes to him the earliest place among that modern generation of poets, who, going back to nature, have sought the elements of poetry immediately in the world of nature and of human life :-"the

Tuckerman's "Thoughts on the Poets."

"Autobiography of an English Opium Eater."