and falsest ends! This very phrase, which seems to hold, in the narrowest compass, the moral of all life, and to convey the verdict agreed upon by Truth the plain speaker, and Philosophy the oracle, in relation to all the vain and aggravated contentions of mankind,-this phrase is made a catch-word, a slang saying, a jest, becoming in the very meanest mouths, and fitted for the vilest objects. There is no form of words which has worked more mischief in the social world, as far as words alone can work it, than this simple phrase. It is caught up from lip to lip-repeated until sense is lost in mere sound; and the general truth becomes a particular falsehood in thousands of instances. Its real meaning is struck out, and a hollow lie is substituted. Where we should find the white, sweet kernel, the maggot fattens. Faults on both sides,' is the language, not of the philosopher, the moralist, the peace-making, pardoning Christian-but of the self-elected juror, the concealed and cowardly slanderer, the heartless and abandoned leveller, who would confound vice and virtue, and merge all distinctions, not merely of guilt, but of guilt and innocence, in a loose, easy, general, comfortable verdict-a safe one universally-faults on both sides.' "You are not far from the truth there,' is the cry of the sage babblers of society as often as the verdict is delivered-not very, in one sense, but awfully near a lie, dark and silent as assassination, perhaps, in another sense. A reputation is possibly sacrificed in the very utterance of the words-a life's life may be destroyed—a great cause, sacred as virtue, is given up at once-the broadest, simplest points of difference are confused and merged uninquiringly and honor and shame reduced to the same measure, color, and substance; all by the easy, current verdict, applicable to the most difficult and the most contradictory cases- there are faults on both sides.' "The Father of Evil never invented a more dexterous weapon for his agents to work with. The envenomed point is so concealed, while it looks so open and fair. Candor so shines in it, that inquiry is subdued at once. Remonstrance is silenced by a text so impartial. Once utter this decree, and there is no more to be said. 'There are faults on both sides,' generally settles all to everybody's satisfaction. "The lovers of peace are satisfied, for it cuts short the dispute. The sympathizers with virtue submit, for it spares her the dangerous intoxication of a triumph. The allies of the vicious are comforted, for their client is lifted up in repute to the virtuous level. The slanderers exult, because it gives them a cue for reviling both parties. The timid, selfish people are reconciled, for they are relieved from the risk of taking part one way or the other. The indolent are saved the trouble of investigating. The hypocrites admit that there may possibly be a fault or so more on one side than on the other, but protest vehemently against the practice of balancing hairs and reopening cases that are finally settled. The verdict is given: there is no new trial to be had when once human nature has heard the decree pronounced-There are faults on both sides.'" The special application of this view of the subject is beautifully made in the story of "Lyddie Erle," much of which is, unhappily, drawn from nature. In the same paper we find the following humorous but truthful remarks on "Trial by Jury:" "Certain it is, that at this instant, in the honest city we reside in, juries are, to say the least, as unpopular as in Botany Bay. We, who have unsullied characters, who abjure every vice that is unlawful, and who live in the practice of every virtue that is agreeable to our constitutions, all under the protection of the jury-box, rail as loudly at juries, as the rascals of whom juries rid us. "But then, how nicely we discriminate-with what a fine and delicate hand we draw the line between (as we may say) the box and its twelve tenants. How philosophically we distinguish between the jury and the juryism, between the practice and the principle. While we bully the hou est and intelligent' dozen, as often as we please, how rapturously we, on every occasion, extol the system. The blockheads assembled in the box are only not knaves and perjurers, because they are dense fools, or dreamers past waking; but the box itself is all the while religiously held to be a blessing invaluable." "An Englishman may just as well poison his grandmother, as rail at trials by jury. No false indictment was ever torn to pieces in the face of the world, under a jury's unerring and beneficent auspices, as that freeborn Briton would be who should dare to whisper in any popular assembly a syllable disparaging to that glorious institution." "But the jurymen are all forsworn-the whole defenceless twelve. They alone are without shield or protection; for them, no man, however chivalrous his nature, feels called upon to stand up. It is nobody's business to see a jury righted; at best, the verdict in their case would be justifiable illusage."" They are called 'honest and intelligent' by courtesy, but the words mean no more than honorable' before 'member.' If they follow the judge's dictation, they are handsomely pronounced to be servile, spiritless, and forsworn;' if they happen to differ with that learned person, and bring in a verdict contrary to his intelligible direction, they are pretty sure to be self-willed, prejudiced, ignorant, and reckless of law and evidence. If they come to a decision instantaneously, the decision, though right, is farcical for want of deliberation; if they have conscientious scruples and cannot agree, we lock them up and starve them into unanimity; thus obtaining a verdict, not by the strength of their understandings and the purity of their consciences, but by physical torture and the exhaustion of their animal powers. In a question of life and death, we force a decree, ay or no, not from the brain, but from the stomach." 'People who always keep their word" afford him a theme for much clever argument and happy illustration: "The people who always keep their word, if you will take their word for the fact, are to be met with in immense varieties. To portray them is to paint Legion. It is also to unite opposites under one head; for those who always keep their word are not to be known, sometimes, from those who never do." Here is a well-drawn character, Nick Froth: "In whatever water you may happen to be, there he is upon the surface floating buoyantly within hail, and anxious to play the friend in any emergency. But just as you are sinking, he lets go your hand, and swims off in search of the life-buoy, promising to return with speed. He enters eagerly into an engagement to get you out of hot water, and when the element has had plenty of time to cool, there he is at his post, ready to redeem his grinding toil, pining with hunger. The day depromise." voted to watchful tending by the bed of pain, when A variety of this class: the being we most deeply revere is helpless, pros"Men of their word, with a reservation-con-trate, and in peril, wears out less darkly than the science all over, when convenience is in the way." Very honest people as long as the sun shines and honesty can make hay. In the cold season, with nothing to do, they may be apt to thrust their hands into somebody's pocket-to keep them warm. They make the promise first and then bethink themselves what possibility there is of its fulfilment. They are often as good as their wordbut then, their word is good for nothing.' 66 fixed and hopeless monotony of the after day, when such tending is needed no more. Short and merry is the long, sad time, from early morn to noon, from eve unto deep moonlight, passed on the becalmed sea by the impatient, heart-sick mariner, compared with that one day—that now long, marvellous lifetime, sweet, and yet most horrible to bear-when the sunrise sees him sole survivor of the wreck, and the sunset leaves him hanging to a wave-washed point, or floating on a spar alone, and in the dark, between sea and sky." ་ But although all these people, the majority of the promising crowds who are about one everywhere, regard themselves as persons of their word, The absurdity of discovering "coincidences," and are so to this extent-that they rarely perhaps on every occasion is agreeably satirized: break a serious promise without some little shabby "To talk is not always necessary to think is show of an excuse for doing so; it is to be under-enough. How unlucky,' says Shiver, 'that 1 stood that the very best of them reserve points to should have thought this morning of that wine themselves on which they may break faith when bill, run up before I was married, after forgetting they like-points on which no expectation of their it for five years. The man will certainly send the fidelity is to be reasonably expected." account to-morrow, or perhaps call himself with it to-night." The following is wittily put: 66 999 This gentleman has a helpmate, who jumps at conclusions no less heartily than himself: It must be plain that even among persons who always keep their word, there are differences of position and circumstance by which we are all "One night, just before supper, she sprang moved to cherish preferences and prejudices, af- across the room, singing as she went. Talking fecting our belief in their faithfulness. When a of these things, it always happens so. Here is judge promises to hang a man, we are more apt to my lovely friend, Mrs. Wix." She then ran to put faith in him than in a physician when he prom- embrace a very pretty little figure. These things ises to cure one-yet both, perhaps, in them- which had just been mentioned were game and selves are equally worthy of trust. Of two prom- poultry; and it turned out afterwards that Mrs. ises made by the very worthiest of our acquaint-Wix was the daughter of a distinguished poulances-first, that he will come and dine with us, terer. That coincidence had flashed on the vigiand, secondly, that he will call and pay the bal-lant perception of Mrs. S." ance, we cannot, with the best of feelings, help relying more on one assertion than the other." Those who are really sincere in all they promise are thus characterized : In his "Persons who always keep their word recognize in it more and more a sacredness beyond the letter of it, and are the first to feel that they are sometimes bound by a solemn contract, even when they have uttered no syllable in sanction of it. More promises are made than ever can be spoken: an angel even in our company makes them for us." In the last thought the poet shines out. illustrations of the tedium vitæ, he truly says: "Nothing is liable to such continual and extraordinary variation as time, the present hour differing so from the next that the minutes of one may be as years in the other-nay, as a vast eternity, ever dying and yet endless. Our lamentations over the shortness of life might be spared when we reflect upon the many long days that fall to the lot of every creature in his turn, though there is little perhaps of liveliness in the thought that all those long days are emphatically and necessarily the dull ones of our year, and that this very dullness regulates the degrees of their duration. Nor is it of much avail to seek comfort by counting up the happier days that have intervened, for these are always found to be the shortest in the calendar." Speaking of the institution of a particular society for various purposes, he prettily and quaintly says: How it originated is of little consequence. Be sure of this, that its origin was small enough; what good work ever had any other? There is no crevice so narrow that good will not ooze through it, and gather and augment slowly, until it can force its way by degrees, and flow into a broad, full stream. Once set good going, and who can say where it will stop!" The change that takes place in men is well treated of in "Deceased People whom we meet daily."-[Copied into the Living Age, Vol. I., p. 222.] These are his ideas on the potent disenchantment of the worldly-minded who live for society alone : "Human nature, at home, then, is a true thing -a veritably honest existence. It is not a semblance of the man, but the man. He has scraped off his hypocrisy with the dirt from his shoes at the street door ere he entered; he has left his mask, comic or tragic, with his hat on the appointed peg, not wanting either by the fireside where he unfolds himself; and he has thrown off the garb of outward manner which he has perhaps all day worn, as effectually as he had relieved himself of his travelling incumbrances. now no more power to act a part than he would have in sleep. His face, is his natural face, his manner is his own personal property, and his "The long, dull, weary day of factory labor-speech is not a kind of ventriloquism, but describes restless, vigilant, and incessant-gathers, nevertheless, with a less grievous weight, hour by hour, upon the overtasked heart than would the slow and lengthening minutes of the morrow, if on that sunless day the father saw his children spared from The following, on the same subject, is a touching picture: He has his real feelings in tones unaffected. The sacredness associated with 'home' is, in plain English, (one of the dead languages) a convenient cloak for playing pranks in, securely and unobserved. When people find it a relief to leave off acting for a few hours, they fly to the domesticities. At home they are behind the scenes, out of view, and at liberty to be themselves again. As at the twirl of a wand, off goes the finery; the finished gentleman scowls, grimaces, kicks the cat, and curses the servants, with an exquisite relish of ease and freedom; the tragedy queen tosses off her pot of porter in comfort; the safe, grave man is a giddy vagabond; the dashing spendthrift, a sudden convert to penuriousness; the arbiter of all fashion, a seedy scarecrow; the advocate of temperance asks for a corkscrew; the saint swears he is tired as the devil; and the charming young lady sits down to sulk, and think spiteful things of that Miss Grigs, who was asked to dance eleven times to her nine." Shakspeare has told us that "homekeeping youths have ever homely wits;" of such a class is Mrs. Fixbury, "the lover of home :" "Home, in her idea of it, means certain rooms, with suitable fixtures and furniture. That was all! Observe: she was ardently attached to her home! that is, in other words, she had a wonderful liking for her nice apartments. She had an exquisite sense of all that is most elevated and refined in domestic associations! that is, in other words, she had a tender regard for every inanimate thing belonging to her on which her daily household eye rested." tion which so eminently characterized him. Speaking of Christmas, the last, poor fellow! he was destined to see, he says: "One of the charms of Christmas is the bounty it brings. It is an old constant distinguishing characteristic of the season to exhibit a soul too broad and embracing to be shut in by the narrow though equitable boundaries of commerce, too lavish to throw its heart's wealth into a scale, and weigh it out in scruples. It is no period for scant measures, or for bare justice; the cup must overflow. Who ever said at Christmas, 'But can't you take half a mince-pie?' The spirit of the time is ungrudging, hospitable, generous. It is not the meal of Enough, but the festival of Excess. At such a season the common law of debtor and creditor is repealed. It is all give and take. The simple rule is "That they should give who have the power, And they should take who can.' Less than happy be his new year, who could carp and cavil at the large, free, bountiful, openhearted, full-handed, gift-scattering philosophy of Christmas!"' But our limits, rather than our inclination or resources, warn us to pause. It will be a lasting source of satisfaction to us, if in what we have adduced, we have succeeded in directing the attention of the public to the literary remains of Laman Blanchard. For ourselves, we can only say, with Shenstone"Heu! quanto minus est cum reliquis versari, quam tui meminisse !" "Home never meant, in her clear, plain, domestic understanding-no, never meant husband, children, and friends-the cheerful meal, the social fireside, and the silent pillow; it only meant a collection of common-place conveniences and ornaments, sanctified and endeared by hourly use and habit. Now, if the reader, wandering and peeping about in the odd dark corners of the world, have not yet encountered a lady wrapped up in a fond regard for her own fire-irons and buffet, her EARL OF ROSSE'S TELESCOPE-POSSIBLE DISharpsichord and window curtains, then he has missed what assuredly he would have known had he been born sooner and encountered Mrs. Fixbury." The article "On considering oneself horsewhipped," is a happy application of imagination to the cure of positive evils.-[Living Age, Vol. III., p. 182.] Hear how he characterizes that gift, of which all the world are so liberal: From the Dublin University Magazine. COVERIES. THE public has been favored with many descriptions of Lord Rosse's magnificent telescope, and the successful arrangements by which he has been enabled to bring to perfection this splendid triumph of science and art; but it does not appear that any detail, however superficial, or prognostic, however fanciful, has yet touched upon the discoveries it may possibly effect, or the advances in least desired, from its extraordinary powers. It human knowledge which may be expected, or at may not be amiss to endeavor, in some degree, to supply this deficiency; and though the attempt may, in its execution, be stigmatized as fanciful and superficial, still it may act as a stimulus to others; and in the mean while gratify those who, satisfied with popular views, may take an interest in this deeply important subject. "Advice gratis wears a remarkably unscrupulous aspect. He has a long tongue which hangs half out of his mouth, a long sight which detects the approach of a victim, before he has turned the corner, a long finger to twine round the button of a hapless listener, and a short memory, which causes him to recommend two opposite remedies to the same patient, both wrong ones." But we might multiply examples without end, indicative of shrewdness of observation, felicity of 1. In the first place, it may be expected, with thought, and justness of expression, as well as certainty, that, in penetrating into still remoter adduce illustrations numberless of orders and de- regions of space, it will add considerably to the grees of men there are Jonas Fairbrow, the two thousand five hundred nebulæ, numbered honest, straightforward man : the openhearted by Sir William Herschel in our hemisphere ;* Mrs. Aspenall, the cautelous Johnny Stint; Rob- and that it will resolve into stars many of those ert Amber, "the man who had a reputation for integrity;" John Screw, the hater of the rich; Mrs. Dipple, the female arithmetician-these and a hundred more rise at once to our recollection, a dramatis persone large enough to stock the entire realm of comedy. One more extract, and we have done; it is from the last thing he wrote * See Sir William Herschel's papers on the Motion of in the "New Monthly Magazine," (December, the Sun and Solar System, in the Philosophical Transac1844,) and is full of that wit and genial dispositions of the years 1733 and 1785. which still remained luminous clouds in the most powerful telescopes of both the Herschels. In this well-informed age, it is well-nigh superfluous to observe that every nebula is, as it were, another universe, equal, or at least similar, to that which we behold in a starry night, when myriads of lu minaries condense their light in the milky-way, or bodies, and merely illuminated while traversing separately shed their rays upon us as they are our atmosphere, they cannot compose the subnearer to our eyes. Yet all these splendors, so stance of a permanently luminous nebulosity. magnificent to us, would appear but a nebula to a Can, the meteoric stones which have fallen on the spectator in one of those distant clusters of stars. earth at various times-one on the 7th of NovemEvery nebula, therefore, which Lord Rosse's tele-ber, 1492, another on the 27th November, 1627, a scope adds to those already known, brings to light third in September, 1753, &c. &c.-and those another universe, composed of millions of stars; others which have so frequently been observed every star a sun, attended by a system of planets, during earthquakes and volcanic eruptions*-be satellites, and comets, and contributing to the hap- one kind of shooting-stars-and that the multipiness of an infinitude of beings, capable of elevat- tude of meteoric bodies, seen periodically from the ing their thoughts and feelings to the stupendous 9th to the 12th of August, and on correlative days, Creator of such a creation. if such shall be decidedly ascertained, are another II. In the second place, this powerful instru-kind? and will Lord Rosse's telescope possess the ment may afford a clearer insight into the nature power of distinguishing between them? of that filmy, luminous substance in the girdle of III. In the third place, and of far more imAndromeda, and other parts of the heavens which portance, we may hope, because there are rational no telescopic power has yet sufficed to resolve into grounds for hoping, that Lord Rosse will be able stars, and which some astronomers suppose to be to discover the planets revolving round Sirius, the rudiments of future solar systems-universes Arcturus, Aldebaran, and other stars most near in the progress of arrangement.* Yet it must be our solar system. Professor Nichol, in his eloadmitted that a more intimate knowledge of this quent work on the Architecture of the Heavens, substance, although possible, is still scarcely to be observes that Sir John Herschel has lately reexpected. quested attention, in the most express way, to the It may, however, be found that this substance, minute and point-like companions of such stars apparently a mass of nebulous light, may be com-as-1. Ursæ, a.2 Capricorni, a." Cancri, y Hyposed of myriads of small meteoric bodies, at a dræ, and x Geminorum, &c., as in some cases considerable distance from each other, but con- shining by reflected light; and, still more redensed more or less to the eye, according to their cently, his impression has been confirmed by what relative remoteness from the earth; and that one he saw in the southern hemisphere. "If these of these nebulosities not only approaches, but small silvery points," continues Nichol, "lurking actually crosses, the ecliptic, and traverses a por- within the rays of their respective suns, should tion of the space within the orbit of the earth; indeed prove to be planets, the telescope will have that the star-showers, as they are called, and performed the greatest of its achievements; and which exhibit sixty or eighty of these star-like (if upheld by observation as far as it can stretch, meteors in a single hour-four or five hundred in our knowledge of the physical constitution of mata single night-are occasioned by the passage of ter shall ever enable us to state it as a general the earth through this nebulosity thus crossing its and necessary law, that all the orbs of space-not orbit; and although these meteors may be com- merely those which shine above us, but also the paratively in a state of rest, the rapid motion of myriads whose wonderful clustering is seen in our globe passing through the mass would give distant firmaments—that each one of this mighty them the apparent velocity of shooting stars. throng is, through the inseparable exigencies of Such bodies occasionally come in contact with the its being, engirt by a scheme of worlds proud as earth; and several of them, composed of iron, ours, perhaps far prouder, how immeasurable the nichel, and other solid substances, have from time range, how illimitable the variety of planetary to time been found, and exercised the ingenuity of existence!" philosophers in devising whether they were ejected from some lunar volcano, have travelled at random through free space, or rolled in regular orbits round the sun, the earth, or the moon. Sir John Herschel, from the phenomena observed by him on the 10th of August, 1839, and the 9th of August, 1840, inferred that a zone or zones of these bodies turn round the sun, and are cut by the earth in its annual revolution. This inference nearly coincides with the above hypothesis ; but he does not touch the question whether this mass of meteoric bodies is or is not a nebulosity similar to that in the girdle of Andromeda. This latter conjecture is, perhaps, more near the truth than any of them. It, however, without being singular in this respect, involves two startling objections-viz. How does it happen that these bodies remain, like the stars, in a permanent state of luminous combustion, in free and empty space?-and why are they not, one and all, absorbed in the attraction of the earth as it traverses their column? If they are ponderous, opake * Professor Nichol's views of the Architecture of the Heavens. 3d edition, page 137. + Transactions of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Belles Lettres of Brussels. Vol. VIII., 2d part, page 220. IV. Professor Nichol here decides that the discovery of the planets revolving round the fixed stars would be the greatest of the achievements of the telescope; yet there is another which may be justly pointed out as still greater, if among the possible achievements of any human instrument. In a word, the discovery of the grand centre of attraction, round which all the other heavenly bodies have been supposed to revolve. It is to be recollected that Sir Wm. Herschel has ascertained that several of the fixed stars have a proper motion: a fact, he observes, that will admit of no farther doubt, from the continued observations, since it was first suspected, by Dr. Halley, and which demonstrates that Sirius, Arcturus, Aldebaran, &c., &c., are actually in motion, and that, in strictness, there is not one fixed star in the heavens. But, he adds, many other reasons will render this so obvious that there can hardly remain a doubt of the general motion of all the starry systems, and consequently of the solar one among the rest; and he indicates a point in the heavens somewhere near Herculis, as that to which this motion is directed. * Id. Id. page 437. See also pages 62 and 434. In pursuing this inquiry, he adverts to the disap-| BODY, when the star which is lost, or diminished in pearance of certain stars, and the appearance of magnitude, might undergo occasional occultations, others, since the time of Flamsteed, (who com- would account for some of those changes. The pleted his catalogue in 1689,) observing that a following table will show the several circumstances slow motion in an orbit round some LARGE OPAKE adverted to on this occasion by Herschel :* Constellations. Hercules Cancer. Perseus Orion Pisces Hydra (80, 81. 4th magnitude. 70 or 71. 5th A star between 4th and 5th magmagnitude. 26, 56, 73 or 74. 6th magnitude 19. 6th magnitude nitude, following 3. A considerable star, between S Star of 5th magnitude, following t. 62.. 108. 6th magnitude 8 19, 34. 5th magnitude parts of the Milky Way. Many of these immense regions may well occasion the siderial motions we are required to account for; and a similarity in the direction of their motions will want no illustration."+ In four of these constellations certain stars have disappeared, and others have been recently observed. In three constellations stars have disappeared, but none new have been observed; and in six constellations new stars have been observed, where none have disappeared. These several This latter alternative can scarcely ever be constellations are dispersed in different parts of demonstrated by any telescope; because it can our hemisphere, and the area they encompass is only afford negative evidence against the existence immense, particularly at that distance where a of a great central orb; and such negative evidence star of the sixth magnitude would be eclipsed by could never be decisive, unless we were acquainted an opake body. Such a body, occupying such an with the actual extent of the universe, which in area, could never have been in the contemplation this remote corner is, we may assume, impossible. of Herschel as the centre of attraction of the The other alternative may be within the scope of universe. This is not the region in which he Lord Rosse's telescope, if, in penetrating into the would have sought it. An opake body of such profound infinitude of space, it can command a view vastness would there cause not only the occultation of the actual centre of creation, and the evidence of all stars of lesser magnitude than the sixth, but of will be equally positive, although not equally all the distant nebulæ intercepted by its disk. No satisfactory, whether the central orb be opake stars would be visible in the greater portion of or luminous. If opake, it may observe the ocour heavens but those of the most considerable cultation or reäppearance-not of stars of any dimensions. It is, therefore, evident that, if these defined magnitude, however small, for it must phenomena be caused by the interference of any lie far beyond them-but of the far distant opake body at such distant intervals of space, there nebulæ occupying the remotest skirts of the must be not a few of those bodies in our hemi-universe. Without some happy concurrence of sphere, and some of them still more near us than stars of the fourth and fifth magnitude. It is barely possible that Lord Rosse's telescope may throw some light on this mysterious subject. Herschel looks to a very different position, and a very different body, for the grand universal centre of attraction. "There are," he says, "two ways in which a centre of attraction so powerful as the present occasion would require, may be constructed. The most simple of these would be, a SINGLE BODY OF GREAT MAGNITUDE. This may exist, although we should not be able to perceive it by any superiority of lustre; for notwithstanding it might have the usual starry brightness, the decrease of its light, arising from its great distance, would hardly be compensated by the size of its diameter." "The second way of the construction of a very powerful centre may be the joint attraction of a great number of stars united into one condensed group." "If," he continues, “a still more powerful, but more diffused exertion of attraction should be required than what may be found in the union of clusters, we have hundreds of thousands of stars, not to say millions, contained in very compressed * events, ages of vigilant observation must elapse |
