ning, no less than in the firmness of their abiding, may most truly be said to have in them the characteristics of a Divine revelation.

A CORNISH GIANT.

Cugnot; but his model proved unruly, and
threw itself in a headlong manner over a wall,
wherefore it was considered dangerous, and
was suppressed accordingly. Then, in 1772,
Oliver Evans, an American, made a steam-
carriage for common roads; so did William
Symington, one of the inventors of steam-boats;
but neither creation came to any good. Syming
ton's, indeed, was exhibited at Edinburgh; but
the roads were so bad that it could not be used
or brought into any practical use.
Two years
before this, in 1784, William Murdoch, assistant
of James Watt, made one on the high-pressure
principle, which went on three wheels, was

a spirit-lamp. But the Lilliputian ran away
one night, and frightened the parish rector
out of his wits; he, being officially more versed
in demonology than in mechanics, taking it for
a fiery imp of Satan, that had escaped, roaring,
from his master. Finally, TREVITHICK, a valiant
Cornish man, with whom we have specially to do
in this paper, took the matter in hand.

NOTHING is perfected in a moment. It was only Cadmus who could raise a crop of fullgrown men, ready armed and prepared for action, without the preface of nurses and pedagogues; but Cadmus was as exceptional as his corps of Dragon's-teeth Volunteers. Elsewhere, we find men and things with long periods of infancy and immaturity-wherein a foot high, and was worked by means of dwells the law of their growth; and steam and railroads have had their times of gradual development like the rest. They have not sprung up in a night, nor grown to their perfection in a generation. It is so long ago as 1602 that Mr. Beaumont, of Newcastle, first laid down wooden rails for carriage traffic: an invention improved by Mr. John Curr, in 1776, into a cast-iron railway, nailed to wooden sleepers, for the benefit of the Duke of Newcastle's colliery at Sheffield. For this piece of interference with the vested rights of ponderous labour, Mr. John Curr was forced to fly, and hide himself in a wood four days, in fear for his life, which the colliers thought was better in their keeping than in his. Steam has been still longer in coming to its maturity. Steam was one of the Century of Inventions published by the Marquis of Worcester, generations ago; hints of even earlier discoveries of the dangerous properties of that elastic vapour, lie, half hidden, half revealed, among the dust and mildew of the past. Thus, both steam and railroads have had a longer term of existence than we generally give them credit for, and have not risen all at once to their present fullblown condition of vitality.

Trevithick was a pupil of Murdoch's, and though ignorant of Leupold, was nevertheless as favourable to the high-pressure principle as Watt was averse to it. He made a steam-carriage for common roads, set it in motion, and away went the creature, tearing like mad along the road to Plymouth, breaking down walls, rushing into the gardens of sober-minded gentlemen intent only on their roses and their peaches, careering through toll-gates flung open free of pay by terrified tollmen-who thought that this, too, was an invention and a device of Satan; perhaps his ordinary chariot, with himself inside, sitting among the live embers. As Trevithick and one Vivian were steaming along the road, the latter caught sight of a closed toll-bar, just as they had torn down the front rails of a gentleman's garden. Captain" Vivian called to his partner to slacken speed, which he did, and came dead up to the gate, which was opened like lightning by the toll-keeper.

"What have us got to pay ?" asked Captain Vivian, careful as to honesty if reckless as to

"Na-na-na-na!" stammered the poor man, trembling in every limb, with his teeth chattering as if he had got the ague.

"What have us got to pay, I ask?"

'Na-noth-nothing to pay! My de-dear Mr. Devil, do drive on as fast as ever you can! Nothing to pay!" This story rests on the authority of Coleridge; and, "if not true, is too well found," as the Italians say, to be overlooked.

The railroad came to its majority first. While tramroads were almost as good as they are now, the carriages that ran on them were of barbarous inequality. From the depths of his inner consciousness, however, Leupold, a German philo-grammar. sopher, did, in 1723, fashion out the idea of a high-pressure steam-engine, which idea he set down in good sound German letters in the Theatrum Machinarum. The idea obtained various supporters, conscious and unconscious. Some projectors, certainly, wanted to propel their railway carriages Chinese fashion, by huge sails; but most of them proposed steam power on the high-pressure system: mixing this up, however, with an earlier and still more favourite project-that of traction by steam on Trevithick's wonderful engine, after performcommon roads, without the aid of rails. This ing such exploits, and generally choosing to was Savery's great dream; and Watt-who knew upset its passengers in a hedge, or over a nothing of Leupold's notion but who abhorred stone wall, midway to their destination, was exthe high-pressure principle-included this trac-hibited in London. Its owner and originator tion-engine in the specification of his patent of showing it off, with wonderful effects, in Lord's 1769, almost at the same time as when Moore, Cricket-ground carrying it along the New-road the London linendraper, took out his patent of and Gray's Inn-lane, down to that coach-builder's moving carriages by steam. Yet the first actual who had supplied the phaeton that ran with it. steam-carriage was made by the Frenchman The next day it was exhibited in a cutler's shop,

[Conducted by

and the machinery worked for the pleasure of all Trevithick was undoubtedly in advance of his age, comers; then it was run on a temporary tram- and saw the coming of much that neither science road laid down on the spot now called Euston-nor society was then prepared to receive; though square, and thrown open to the public as an ordinary sight of the time. But on the second day Trevithick, "in one of his usual freaks," closed the exhibition, and left hundreds waiting round the ground in a state of great wrath. The engine was about the size of an orchestra drum, and could be attached to a phaeton or other carriage.

But a more useful triumph over difficulties was the railway locomotive, which Trevithick was the first to make; and which was used for the Merthyr Tydvil Railway in 1804. This was an engine of an eight-inch cylinder, placed horizontally, as at present, with a four feet six inch stroke, and which "drew after it upon the railroad as many carriages as carried ten tons of bar iron, from a distance of nine miles, which it performed without any supply of water to that contained in the boiler at the time of setting out, travelling at the rate of five miles an hour." This was considered a great triumph at the time; but Trevithick, like all the earlier locomotive projectors, was retarded and much troubled by the false idea that smooth wheels on a smooth rail would have no bite, and that, when dragging a heavy weight, they would just slip round and round, and do nothing else. Consequently, he put sundry rough projections on his wheels, much on the same plan as 'roughing" a horse-shoe; and even we may well wonder at the five miles an hour, with ten tons of bar iron, under all these disadvantages. Trevithick made another engine for the Wylam waggon-way, which at first could not be got to move at all, and, when it did, it flew all to pieces, as its best exposition of the laws of motion. Near this Wylam waggon-way George Stephenson lived, whom all other men's railway failures and short-comings set thinking and planning how he could make things work more easily together. And the result was an engine "which included the following important improvements on all previous attempts -namely, simple and direct communication between the cylinder and the wheels rolling upon the rails; joint adhesion of all the wheels attained by the use of connecting rods; and, finally, a beautiful method of exciting the combustion of the fuel by employing the waste steam, which had formerly been allowed uselessly to escape into the air."

he was a man of vast genius and grand ideas; yet he could not look to everything, and it was reserved for another and a more practical man to disencumber the wheels of locomotives, and take them out of leading-strings. But Trevithick was very vast, very universal, in his science. In the Catalogue of the South Kenand constructor of the first high-pressure steamsington Museum he is described as "inventor engine, and of the first steam-carriage used in England; constructor of a tunnel beneath the Thames, which he completed to within a hundred feet of the proposed terminus, and was then compelled to abandon the undertaking; inventor and constructor of steam-engines and machinery for the mines of Peru (capable of being transported in mountainous districts), by which he succeeded in restoring the Peruvian mines to prosperity; also of coining-machinery for the Peruvian Mint, and of furnaces for purifying silver ore by fusion; also inventor of other improvements in steam-engines, impellingcarriages, hydraulic-engines, propelling and towing vessels, discharging and stowing ships' cariron buoys, steam-boilers, corking, obtaining goes, floating docks, construction of vessels, fresh water, heating apartments," &c. Surely a sufficiently wide range for one mind to travel over! It was he also who conceived the first idea of the screw-propeller; for nothing seemed to come amiss to him, and his science had a kind of prescient prophetic character only found when there is genius as well as knowledge.

That tunnelling under the Thames was a thing had been tried, Ralph Dodd being the strange affair. It was the second time the first of the unsuccessful borers. Trevithick raised a large sum by subscription, In 1809, and began his work at Rotherhithe. Of course he kept too near the bottom of the river: his object in this, being to save both labour and exnine hundred and thirty feet under the river, pense; but he met with no harm until he was when he got into a hole at the muddy bottom; and once, a piece of uncooked beef which had fallen from one of the ships, drifted into the works.

work again, always under greater difficulties, He stopped the hole and set to both pecuniary and engineering, than any which his successful successor, Brunel, had to This was in 1815; but, we have no business encounter. He made from four to ten feet of with such a date yet, and must go back to the feet. And now Mr. Hyde Clarke shall tell the excavation a day, and soon got to a thousand time of Trevithick's traction-engine and Lord's Cricket-ground.

Shortly after the creation of that "chariot of the De'il," which ran streaming and shrieking along the road from Camborne to Plymouth, Trevithick and Vivian took out a patent for the application of high pressure to steam-engines, and erected many high-pressure engines in Wales and elsewhere; which, however, were of less value than they might have been, owing to that fallacy of the rough wheels. For, though

rest:

"On arriving at this distance, according to a pre

vious arrangement with the committee, Trevithick was to receive a hundred guineas, which, after the verification of the work by a surveyor, were paid to which seems to be in perfect keeping with Trevihim. According to a contemporary-sud the end of thick's character-the surveyor reported to the subscribers confirming the measurement, but asserting that the line had been ran a foot or so on one side. This statement, which, if well founded, was not ma

1

terial, Trevithick took in high dudgeon, and chose to water in the Peruvian mines must stay there till consider as a severe reflection on his engineering, the day of judgment, the Swiss gentleman His Cornish blood was excited; and, with his usual chanced to see a small working model of Treviimpetuosity, he set to work to disprove the assertion thick's engine in a shop window near Fitzroywithout any regard to his own interests or those of the subscribers. He is said to have adopted the absurd contrivance of making a hole in the roof of the tunnel at low water, and pushing up a series of joint rods, which were to be received by a party in a boat, and then observed from the shore. On the prosecution of this scheme Trevithick was engaged below, and as delays ensued in fitting together the rods, the gulley formed by the opening in the roof at length admitted so much water as to make retreat necessary. With an inborn courage, worthy of a better cause, he refused to move first, but sent the men before, and very nearly fell a sacrifice to his devotion. It has been already observed that the driftway was parallel to the bed of the river, and therefore curved. It necessarily happened that the water would lodge, as in a syphon, at the bottom of a curve, at which part, on Trevithick's arrival, he found so much water as hardly to enable him to escape; and as he got up the slope on the other side, and climbed the ladder, the water rose with him at his neck. The work thus ended, after having reached 1011 feet, being within 100 feet of its pro-raised to its highest, and in due time the posed terminus, and is a melancholy monument at once of his folly and his skill.”

square. This model he carried out with him, and saw it working successfully on the high mountain ridge of the Sierra de Pasco. Flushed with hope and busy with projects, Uvillé returned to England, having obtained from the viceroy the privilege of working some of the abandoned mines. On his way hither he was speaking with a fellow-traveller of his plans, his model, and his desire to discover the maker of that model; whereon, his fellow-passenger, Mr. Teague, said quietly that he was a relation of Trevithick, and could bring them together within a few hours of their arrival. The result of that bringing together was, that in Sep. tember, 1814, three engineers and nine of Trevithick's engines-Watt and Boulton would not touch the enterprise, and laughed the whole thing to scorn-embarked for Lima and the rich silver mines of Peru. Uvillé and his charge landed under a royal salute, expectation being

engines, which had been "simplified to their greatest extent, so divided as to form adequate loads for the weakly llama, and the beams and boilers made in several pieces, were transported over precipices where a stone may be thrown for a league."

Many great schemes and notable creations came after this practical failure and scientific success of the Thames Tunnel; but the chief part of what was done went to the advancement and better working of the Cornish mines, the The engine was erected at Lauricocha, in the increased prosperity of which is principally due province of Tarma, and the first shaft of the to Richard Trevithick and his engines. "To Santa Rosa mine was drained to perfection. In the use of high-pressure steam, in conjunction 1817, Trevithick, hearing of this success, gave with the cylindrical boiler, also invented by Mr. up family and fortune, home, wife, and children, Trevithick," says Mr. Williams, one of the prin- and embarked for South America. The whole cipal mine-owners in Cornwall, "I have no hesi- of Lima was in a ferment. When he landed he tation in saying that the greatly increased duty was received with the highest honours; his arof our Cornish pumping-engines since the time rival was officially announced in the Government of Watt is mainly owing." The working power Gazette; the viceroy met him with enthusiasm, now attained doubles and trebles that of the old and the Lord Warden of the Mines was ordered to Boulton and Watt engine, the cylindrical escort him with a guard of honour to the seat boiler saving at least one-third in the quantity of his future labours." When the people found of coal previously consumed. Certainly the man that his engines cleared the mines of water, that who first put the fire in the boiler instead of the mines yielded double produce, and that the under it, who introduced the system of high-coining-machinery was increased sixfold, they pressure steam, made the first locomotive, were beside themselves with joy. Trevithick trebled the working power of engines, and saved was created a marquis and grandee of old Spain, one-third of coal in the working, did great things for the world of steam.

Now we come to the most romantic and stirring period of Trevithick's career. In 1811 M. Uvillé, a Swiss gentleman, living in Lima, came to England to see what could be done for the silver mines in the Peruvian mountains, which had been abandoned from the impossibility of getting machinery out there which could clear them of water. But M. Uvillé did not meet with much encouragement. The difficulty of transporting cumbrous machinery on the backs of feeble llamas over the Cordilleras, and the difficulty of working the engines even if they could be got there, seemed imperative. Watt and the rest gave no hope, and Uvillé was in despair. On the eve of departing from England with the conviction that the

and the Lord Warden of the Mines proposed to raise a silver statue in honour of this commercial Las Casas, this Columbus of the Cordilleras, this greatest of all living engineers, this most valiant of Cornishmen, Don Ricardo Trevithick.

Everything looked bright until the revolution began, and the Cornish engineer found himself in a sufficiently disagreeable position between the two parties. The patriots kept him in the mountains, in a kind of honourable captivity, holding him as the Plutus of the war; while the royalists, holding him as precisely the same thing, as the great means whereby the patriots obtained the sinews of war, ruined his property wherever they could, and mutilated his engines." They sold his shares, and alienated his mines; Trevithick, never very patient, soon determined to put an end to this kind

of thraldom, and so made his escape by stealth,
ran many dangers, but finally cleared him-
self and his liberty from the oppressive love
and veneration of the mountain patriots. On
the 9th of October, 1827, he returned to Eng-deserved it, bear the palm !"
land, bringing a pair of spurs as the sole rem-
nant of the colossal fortune made-but not
realised-in the Peruvian mines. But before he
returned he spent four years in Costa Rica, in
the countries now so well known as the route of
the Nicaraguan transit, and the scene of General
Walker's filibuster warfare. Here, he mined
and projected mines, had magnificent designs,
and foresaw many material improvements which
afterwards came to pass; but he realised no per-
manent good for himself out of anything-not
though he had an estate with a mountain of
copper ore on it, from which he proposed to lay
down a railroad to the sea, that so the working
of it might be profitable.

Burnard, and some others, we may hope for the
fuller recognition of his merits in days to come,
and the application to them of that famous old
motto, the best of its kind, "Let him who has

Trevithick was born in 1771, in the parish of Sllogan, in Penwith, the most western hundred of Cornwall. His father was a purser of the mines, and one day was not a little amazed when his son Richard, not yet twenty-one, and by no means learned, was made engineer to several mines-rather a more responsible situation than the one the father himself held. It is said that he remonstrated with the gentleman proposers, but they had their own ideas, and Richard was appointed. The lad was not well educated in common things: that is certain. He could not speak good English; he could never write a good hand; he was backward in figures, and he knew but little save his own special subject. But he After this return from South America, we was sufficiently colossal there. In person he hear but little of Trevithick. All we know is, was tall and finely made; six feet high, and that he prepared a petition to Parliament, broad in proportion. His muscular strength was wherein, after distinctly stating his claims on remarkable, for he could lift two blocks of tin, his country by reason of the superiority of his placed one above the other, and weighing seven machinery, he asks for some grant or remunera- hundred-weight. His manners were blunt but tion. The saving to the Cornish mines alone, by unassuming, and his dress was somewhat pethe use of his engines, he calculates to be culiar for the time and mode: a dress-coat 100,000l. per annum: adding that but for his with the skirts very broad, broad trousers: invention many of these mines, which produce all his clothes made loose. In this small matter, 2,000,000l. per annum, must have been aban- as in larger matters, he went before public doned. Before presenting this petition, Trevi- opinion and the time. He married and had thick met with a moneyed partner, who supplied children, as became a good citizen; had his him with the means of perfecting his "never-picture painted by Linnell (now in the South ceasing inventions." And, as this was all he wanted, the petition was laid on one side, and never taken up again. In 1833 he died, at Deptford, in Kent, and since then his name has almost died out too. Mr. Hyde Clarke is the only man who has attempted a sustained biography of him, and his biography is not longer than this notice. Though the Institution of Civil Engineers offered a reward for a full and sufficient biography of one of our greatest of the craft, no one has yet come forward to claim it. The reputation of Trevithick has suffered, as often happens, because more practical men took up his ideas, and worked them into greater notice. It is well said by one of his friends and greatest admirers, "his reputation has been purposely kept back by the partisans of Watt, on account of the high-pressure engine; of Stephenson, on account of the locomotive; and of Bruncl, on account of the Thames Tunnel. But as he was clearly the inventor, not only of the high-pressure steam-engine and the steam-carriage, but also of that boiler without which (or a modification of which) no steamboat could have ventured to cross the Atlantic, he has undoubtedly contributed more to the physical progress of mankind than any other individual of the present century." The first part of this statement may be questioned; the Stephensons and Brunels having been leading members of the Institution when it offered a prize for Trevithick's memoirs. Thanks to Mr. Hyde Clarke, Mr. Edmonds, Mr. Neville

Kensington Museum), and his bust done in marble by Neville Burnard; but he has had no statue, no monument, no biography, and his name is hardly known even by vague report, to people to whom Watt, Stephenson, and Brunel are household words. This is not just; not a meet division of that golden ore of fame which all brave men and gallant souls have the right to demand from posterity and their own generation alike, where they have done their work well, and have borne the heat of the day without flinching. When will Trevithick have done for him what Stephenson, and Watt, and Crompton, and Arkwright, have had done for them, that so the world may know what manner of man he was, and may learn the guise under which his spirit lived, while his body dwelt upon the earth? His history is a good subject for a biographer; that South American time alone is, in itself, a romance, and his sons, who are still alive, could possibly furnish material for a pleasant volume.

FAIRY LORE.

GLAD were the children when their glowing faces
Gathered about us in the winter night,
And now, with gleesome hearts in verdant places,
We see them leaping in the oummer light;
For they remember yet the tales we told them
Around the hearth, of fairies long ago,
When they could only look out to behold them,
Quick dancing, earthward, in the feathery snow.

hundred times more probable than improbable. Perhaps some little self-sufficiency may be at the bottom of this; facial expression requires no study from you, you think; it comes by nature to you to know enough about it, and you are not to be taken in.

I confess, for my part, that I have been taken in, over and over and over again. I have been taken in by acquaintances, and I have been taken in (of course) by friends; far oftener by friends than by any other class of persons. How came I to be so deceived? Had I quite misread their faces? No. Believe me, my first impression of those people, founded on face and manner alone, was invariably true. My mistake was, in suffering them to come nearer to me, and explain themselves away.

As I have retired, and live at my ease, I possess the means that I used to want, of considering what I have seen, at leisure. My experiences have a more remarkable aspect, so reviewed, than they had when they were in progress. I have come home from the Play now, and can recal the scenes of the Drama upon which the curtain has fallen, free from the glare, bewil-with a polite air, had a particularly well-fitting derment, and bustle, of the Theatre.