The Sun.
London, England, 1855-09-25 00:00:00

CHURCH RATES AT TAUNTON.

We had one of the most exciting church rate contests
here last week that we ever remember. It arose re
specting St. Mary's tower, about the repair or restora-
tion of which we are almost tired of waiting, if our read-
ers are not of reading. A vestry meeting was held on
Thursday, when it was proposed, on behalf of the
churchwardens, that 2,0001. should be raised on secu-
rity of the rates, in addition to 1,0001. which the parish
had previously agreed to grant, in order to restore the
tower. Many of the inhabitants think that the tower
has been tampered with, and that if it bad not been
pulled about in the manner it has, since some busy-
bodies suddenly discovered it to be in a dangerous state,
it would have stood another century with but little out
lay on it. Others say that the parish has been misled
and deceived by Mr. Gilee, the architect of the work,
in the opinions which he has given from time to time
respecting it. Other persons oppose c'ltirch rates for
whatever purpose they are proposed, on principle, and
the resolution of the churchwardens also met with oppo-
nents in those who considered the subject in a financial
point of view more particularly. With these varied objec-
tions, it is not to be surprised at that the vestry (which
was numerously attended and was held in the Assize
Hall) should reject the churchwardens' proposition by a
large majority. The churchwardens determined to perse-
vere, and demanded a poll, which commenced at once,
and finally closed at four o'clock on Friday afternoon,
the votes when the number of persons who had voted was stated
as follows :—For the churchwardens' resolution, 392 ;
conclusive,
against, 402: majority against, 10. This was not of
made,co
urs e
and
en
different persona,as
a e
titled to give more than one vote enumerated. This was
done on Monday, and an Tuesday morning the Rev. H.
Parr, the chairman, officially announced the number of
votes actually recorded to be as follows :—For the
churchwardens' proposition, 414 ; against 420: ma-
jority against, 6. The churchwardens' partisans used
every effort to drag up voter,, and just before the final
close of the poll a number of persons who went up to
poll against the rate, were prevented by the mob. It
was more like a contested borough election than a
church-rate contest, and it crated almost as much in-
terest and excitement. The victorious party are much
elated at their success.—Sltcrbourne Journal.

r; j . .

“TERAPUB

110 N. ROBERT CURZON.

Visits to the, Monasteries of the Levant. By the
Hon. Robert Curzon, junior. Fourth edition.
1851. John Murray.
Armenia : A Year at Erzeroum and On the Fron-
tiers of Russia, Turkey, and Persia. - By the,
Ran: Robert Curzon. 1854. John Murray._
'..• .
,ct p curious
ro be
uupssesd
aercltio be stowedaftera w
jumbleaaoyfiannTh'ea aii
ancient rntaigni7;
dwellings kill occupied by the celebates of St.
Sabba, of Thebes,.of Mount Athos, and of Meteora,..
would,' at the first blush, seem to give but small :1
promise through the narrative of 'its prOieCutiOnl
of anything like even the most moderate entertain
went. Nevertheless, all the world knows that
this was literally and precisely the very enterprise
to which we have been indebted for one of the.
most charming books of travel ever offered to the
popular examination—the picturesque record of
the visits made some twenty years since by. Mr.
Curzon to the "Monasteries of the Levant"—a-
classic descriptive of thiental adventure such as
the future student will not fail to treasure .up de
lightedly with Warburton's " Crescent and the
'.Croas," and Kinglake's " Eothen," with the poetic
reveries of Lamartiue, and the eloquent medita-
:ions of Chateaubriand. Immediately on its first
appearan de, Curzon's Monasteries of the Levant
was felt to be a genuine book, and as such was
welcomed accordingly. Its refreshing vivacity, its
perfect good humour throughout, its keenness of
observation, its instant and snbtite appreciation of
the ludicrous, its unaffected enthusiasm wherever
enthusiasm happened to be 'called. for by heroic ,
associations, its homage for' whatever deserved

tomage, its respect for -Whatever spoke of the past,
and in doing so appealed to our nobler sympathies
(old books, old paintings, old churches, and, above
all and beyond all, old mouldy, worm-eaten maim-
scripts)—all these peculiarly distinguishing quali-
ties of the work commanded for it at first our in-
terest, and at last (when we had fairly entered into
the spirit of the narrative), our thorough and un-
stinted admiration. We abandoned ourselves,
after the introductory chapter, to a sense of com-
plete enjoyment while following our traveller in
the story told by him of his personal adventures.
It mattered nothing whether it conducted us
into Egypt or into Turkey, to the Natron
Lakes or to the islands of the Greek archiumlago.
The narrator was still the same, though the scene
visited and described might, in all essential respects,
he entirely different. The voice we listened to had
still for us the same charming influence, still in-
spirited by its frank hilarity, still delighted by its
evidence through every syllable of being the utter-
ance at once of the scholar and the gentleman, the
voice in fact of the wandering child of civilisation.
Whoever has once read the book, remembers it,
reverts to it, recalls to mind now one, now another
of its incidents or its characters, the incidents re-
counted and the characters delineated with a pen
of such luminous observation. Who, for example,
that has once turned over those pages, can ever
forget that wonderful picture of the young monk
of Xeropotamo, a magnificent-looking man of thirty
r thirty-five, a study for Titian or Sebastian del
.iombo, who had never seen a woman, retained no
remembrance of his mother (having been conveyed
shortly after his birth in Roumelia to his perma-
nent dwelling place upon the Holy Mountain) who,
in fact, had no idea at all as to what sort of things
Women were, or what they looked like—listening
Open-eyed, and perhaps open-mouthed from under
the groat cowl out of which streamed forth his
black hair and long beard, while the young English-
man assured him that women have no resemblance
whatever to the stiff, hard, dry pictures of the
Penagia, the Holy Virgin, hanging up in every
Greek Church as the accustomed altarpiece ? 'Who
again can ever lose the recollection of that garrul-
ous old Abbot of Caracalla who crammed down the
throat of the traveller those unwelcome hazel-nuts
of Athos and then spoilt his dinuer of stewed fish,
and olives, and caviare, and salad, and papus
yaknesi, by allowing it all to cool upon the brass
tray of the sinni perched on the legs of the inverted
table, while he—my lord the agoumenos—was
telling very inopportunely one of his interminable
long stories ? One of some interest it happily
chances to be for once, about the Calabrian Monk
Barlaam, who about the year 1336 in his antagen-
iam to the system of the ascetic quietists undertook
to reconcile the Eastern and Western Churches and
apparently all bet succeeded in establishing a per-
manent concord in Christendom. Have we not
also a vivid reminiscence of each one among our tra-
veller's laughable first-surprises, when he conies,
as it were breathlessly, every now and then, plump!
upon some eastern custom fraught to his western ob-
servation with mat csr for wond Ting amazement? As
when he marvels from tIL, window of his inn at Alex-
andria—much as Lever's Jack Masingbred marvelled
from the lattice of his ho-telry iu the little Celtic bo-
rough of Oug,hterard —over chest range phenomenon
presented by a (to hi in) wholly unaccust, )med specta-
cle. Watching with an eye of surprise the half-naked
men running about, each with something like a
dead pig under his arm, shouting out "Mother
mother!" in a doleful voice—yet who turned out
after all to be only the poor sakis or water-carriers,
bearing their skins of the divine element and
" Moyah ! moyah !" (water ! water !) to the
thirsty bystanders. How exquisitely and with
what a photographic pencil he sketches them all off,
one by one, those variegated figures in the wonder-
ful panorama. The Bedouin Arab of the wild de-
sert, one of thoselimber children of the wilderness,
thin, gaunt, and dirty, looking as if he could climb,
and run, and leap over anything, crowned with
the graceful birnoose, and robed with the ma-
jestic abba, glittering in eye, lissome in step, per-
fectly free from any restraint, and altogether un-
embarrassed by conventional manners ! " I had
never pictured to myself," says Mr. Curzon, " that
anything so like a wild beast could exist in the
human form "—adding, comically enough, " An
English gentleman in a round hat, arid a tight
neck handkerchief, and boots, with white kid gloves
and a little cane in his hand, was a style of man so
utterly and entirely unlike a Bedouin Arab, that
I could hardly conceive the possibility of their
being only different species of the same sort of ani
mal." A reflection calling to mind the astonish-
ment expressed by Elliot Warburton when (wend-
ing his way homewards again from the east,
coming back once more to the boundary line be-
tween the lands of the Cross and of the Crescent),
he came once more in sight of the shaven chins of
civilised life—mean and degraded, he tells us, they
seemed in his eyes, habituated so long to the flow
of the ample beard furnished by nature as the in-
signia of perfected manhood ! Other denizens of
the far-off countries bordering upon the Levant,
Mr. Curzon delineates no less skilfully than the
nomadic Bedouin—pourtraying them by a few
master-touches in a miniature outline of marvellous
verisimilitude ! The kawass, or armed bodyguard,
in his whity-brown frock coat, and carrying in his
hand a thick cane as his badge of office, a sort of
dingy policeman transformed into an extempora-
neous retainer ! The chaoush, or hired officer of a
similar description, bearing a comical silver-headed
staff or wand of °thee, and stalking upon the scene,
a melodramatic representation of a Brummagen
Chamberlain ! With these the yassakji, or for-
bidder, carrying a stick without a knob, and look-
ing in all respects like a dirty kawass, the dimmer
copy of a dim original ! And then that all-essen-
tial personage—the cicerone, interpreter, drago-
Man, Oriental-Figaro-Factotum ! Describing whom
our author tells us plainly that the servant is
master and the master servant, so far as the
eccentric relationship existing between the tra-
veller and the dragoman can in any way be ac-
curately defined with anything like a scrupulous
regard to minute truthfulness. " The newly-
arrived European," says he, " eats and drinks
whatever his dragoman chooses to give him ; sees
through his dragoman's eyes ; hears through his
ears; and, although he thinks himself master, is,
in fact, only a part of the property of this eastern
servant, to be used by
.him as he thinks fit, and
turned to the best account like any other real or
personal estate." What imparts a peculiar charm
to Mr. Curzon's narrative is the circumstance that
he speaks of everything precisely as it appeared to
him when he sa it. Just as Mr. Dickens told us
in his " Pictures from Italy," that Rome looked
to him when he first got sight of it, for all
the world, exactly the very counterpart—of—
London 1 Or as Albert Smith in a some-
what kindred spirit realised Constantinople
to Cockney imagination by likening Galata
to Wapping, and observing that Scutari was to
Stamboul itself precisely what Birkenhead is to
Liverpool ! So also, in like manner, the Hon.
Robert Curzon—satisfied no doubt with the wis-
doM of the principle inducing us to call a spade a
spade—declares as he slowly advances up the cur-
rent of the Father of Rivers, that the Nile, as it
rolled by him in eddies and whirlpools of smooth
muddy water, bore to him, in its colour, a close
resemblance to a sea of mutton broth ! Weltering
along in their old-fashioned and painted Nile-
boat, our loyageur and his companions get into a
pickle—(don't we all recollect it, and grin as we
do so, tickled back into risibility by the mere force
of the recollection ?)—crashing down upon a little
vessel of the kind called a djerina, sinking it, but
saving its passengers. Have we not a grotesque
memory of " our rein, or captain," returning to
the roof of his cabin after the catastrophe, and
lighting his pipe and smoking away steadily in
spite of the mishap, while the victims of it are
swearing, and vociferating, and shouting all man-
ner of invectives ? And of (three hours after-
wards) the local authorities arriving in the persons ►
of two old villagers, M long blue shirts and dirty

turbans, and of their taking their seat upon the
bank and smoking away in a serious manner for
tome time I And of our captain making no more
reply to the fresh accusations of the re-assembled
multitude than he had done before ; but lighting
another pipe, and declaring that God was great I
" At last"—let us hear Mr. Curzon himself tell
the end of the adventure—" the two elders made
signs that they intended to speak; and, silence
being obtained,. they, with all due solemnity; de-
dared that they agreed With the Captain that God
was great, and that undoubtedly Mohammed was the
Prophet of God, All parties having come to which
conclusion; it appeared that-there was nothing more
to be said, and we returned. to our boat," and
sailed away for a Tillage, in the neighbourhood I
A genuine glimpse of :Egyptian life and manners,
recounted with our traveller's customary facetious-
ness. It is surprising, by the way, how large a
share the luscious puffs of the chibouk, and the
gurg?ing bubble of the .narghile have in the luxu-
rious flow, or rather trickle of oriental conver-
sation, and how Very frequvntly the dialogues of
those,ssmoking the ever - delebtable latakia is
sprinkled with. the pious ejaculation, 66 La allah
allah, Mohammet resoot allah !" There is
but one God, and Mohammed. is his Prophet I
Converse throughout the East, indeed, being little
more than tobacco-smoke and adoring apostrophies.
But little leisure was allowed himself by Mr. Cur-
zon during his memorable visits tc the monasteries
of the Levant, for the proper enjoyment of that
profound state of listless repose, popularly known
among the Asiatic races as kef. His progress
onwards seems to have been as uniutertnitting-es
that of .the flying 'Tatars (or, as we have found
them lately, without the f) the native couriers
F iii the laud of the sun-rise. Slowly, or rapidly,
as occasion admits,. he is ever advancing in
those famous travels, of 1833, through Egypt,
:Ilona the borders of the Natron Lakes, high up
(eoaringly) into the Couveut of the Pulley, among
the splintered fragments of the ruined monastery
of Thebes, away, across the &saute to the white
monastery and the. red monastery;' into the luxuri-
ant verdure of the Island of Philoe, the green and
beautiful, among the holy wonders of Jerusalem,
over the sacred soil of Palestine, into the monas-
teries of St. Sabba and Meteora, and finally into
those of the classic Athos, the giant rock that was
to have been sculptured into a colossus of Alex-
ander ! Onward, and ever onward he goes, mer-
rily, musingly, laughingly, meditatively, observant,
and appreciative, our roving Heraclitus in search,
not like Ccelebs, of a wife, or Syntax of the pic-
turesque, but of rare, old, mouldy, dust-begrimed,
worm-eateu manuscripts, on vellum, on skins, on
pap-'r, on papyrus, palempsist and uncial, with
his saddle-bags bulging out morceand more protu-
berantly as he moves on from one to another of
those not easily numerable monastic institutions.
Greeting the old monks, as he comes upon them
suddenly in the mulberry-bearing solitudes of
Athos, with a "Kalewera sas, ariste, kalemera sas
(good day to you, sir, good day to you); or a kali
s a; (good morning to you) ;" being answered in re-
turn, " Kalos orizete ? (how do you do T)" as he.,
advances to some polite old hermit of the Holy.
Mountain—one of whom presents the young Eng-
lish traveller with a large rosy apple, "evidently
the best thing lie had," says Mr. Curzon, " and I
was touched when he gave it me." Hear him fur-
ther—" I took a great bite ; it was very sour in-
deed ; but what was to be done ? I coulsi not bear
to vex the old man, so I went on eating a great
deal of it, although it brought the tears into my
eyes." And thus genially and humorously—
does our author encounter adventure after adven-
ture. His perception is alike keen for the sublime
and for the ridiculous. He takes equally appre-
ciative note of the awful pillars of sand, columns
of dry and heated dust, raised by the whirlwind,
and met, every now and then, stalking through
the desert, "like the evil genii of the storm "
and of the horrid dissonant bray of old Fatima's
jackass in the tomb, visited atter nightfall iu the
Thebes Necropolis: The latter incident interrupt
ing, very laughably, a earth made there after cer-
tain Coptic manuscripts. Mr. Curzon's account
of his interview with Mohammed Ali—according
to him "a hale, broad-shouldered, broad-faced,
man Hi 1833]," with a "short grey beard stuck
out from each side of his face, his nostrils very
much opened, and with his quick sharp eye, look-
ing like an old grey lion"—is, altogether, a capi-
tal piece of aerie-comic description. Following
out a hint offered by the very remarkable calcu-
lation that it takes the wits of-
-4 Turks to overreach one Frank :
2 Franks to cheat one Greek :
2 Greeks to cheat one Jew
6 Jews to cheat one Armenian :
Mr. Curzon tells a delightful anecdote about the
ingenious manner in which a poor devil of a Jew
is regularly (there is no other word for it) bam-
boozled by a Turk, acting upon a plan suggested to
him by a venerable Hadji, "a sly, long•bearded,
grave personage, who had made two pilgrimages
to Mecca." First of all, the Turk is the poor devil,
rather than the Jew, upon whom he is ultimately
revenged, thanks to the ingenuity of the cunning
old Hadji aforesaid—for we learn that "every day
when the Turk brought back his purchases to
Valid 6 Khan, where he put up during his stay in
the city [Cairo], he invariably found that somehow
or other he had been taken in : lie was sure to find
that he had been cheated either in measure, weight,
quality, or something else." Bono Turco, under
this daily infliction, gets at last, as a matter of
course, thoroughly exasperated—sore and touchy
to the last degree—and the more he is fleeced the
more and more thin-skinned he becomes on the
subject of his dealings with the Hebrew. In de-
spair he flies to the Hadji already mentioned—
" Oh ! Hadji," he cries, "in the name of the
Prophet help me in this thing : tell me of your
charity of some device by which I may be revenged
on this Citifoot, this Jew, for the shameful way in
which he has continually cheated a true believer
like myself. I might beat him certainly, I might
make him eat stick ; but then I should put myself
in the wrong, I should get into trouble with the
Cadi, and the end would be worse than the begin-
ning." Tile Hadji having listened with becoming
gravity delivers a long whiff of smoke from kis pipe
from among the hairs of his umbrageous mous-
tache, and thus replies—" My son, return again to
the Jew's shop, look about among his wares, and,
seizing upon some insignificant-looking thing, ask
eagerly the price, holding it in your hand and
taking out a purse of gold at the same time : pay
him down upon his counter board immediately
whatever he may ask ; walk away rapidly with a
smiling countenance : do this, and you will be re-
venged." The poor Turk is so bewildered at first
by this strange advice that he is almost tempted to
fancy his countryman is joking, only he knows very
well, says Mr. Curzon, " that the Hadji is no joker,
and [in fact] had never made a joke in his life."
However away he starts to the Jew's shop, in
which lie pounces upon a little old box worth per-
haps some 20 piastres—but for which the villain
of a Jew asks him, unconscionably and without
any bowels of compassion-200 ! " His great dif-
ficulty now was," says our narrator, "to pay this
money with a cheerful countenance, for he felt that
he was being cheated again ; however, he made an
effort, paid the 200 piastres with a smile, and
walked off with the shabby little box with the air
of a man who had done something clever," "Well,"
says the Hadji to him when they met again towards
evening', "have you done what. I said I—have you
followed my advice ?" " Yes," replies the Turk,
" I have : see, hero is a box ; what is it worth ?
ten piastres ? Cursed be a!l *IOWA 1 What do you
think I gave for it ? Blessed be the Prophet, Jews
have no chance in the next world; that is some
comfort anyhow : hut how
am I revenged, 0
Hadji ? Tell me, 0 father ; do not laugh at my
beard, for the son of abomination is counting my
200 piastres at this moment : may his soul be
' grilled and made into 200 skewers of kabobs !
Behold, I do not sea how I am to be revenged."
" Yavash, gently, my son,"
says the Hadji,
" yaVaSll • to-morrow, Inshallah, you will see , '—
and speaking thus he puffs away at his pipe com-
placently. To-morrow comes in due course—and
lo ! our friend Bono Turco of the simple-mind,
wandering through the bazaar with a rueful visage,
finds the Jew's shop shut up ! "Oh, sir," rays a
bystander. in reply to his inquiries upon this some-
what unusual circumstance, "Oh, aga, be it known
to your nobility that yesterday a merchant, who
had many dealings with this Jew, and to whom he
was as it were an estate, a kliasno.dar, a treasurer,
from the profit which the Jew made out of him—
this merchant bought a box at his shop ; it was
evidently worth nothing so far as its appearance
went ; hut the merchant having paid two thousand
rather than lose this mean-
lpoioakstirnegs,boaxs is said,
a thought came into the head of the
Jew—there must have been a diamond in it ! He
considered, and, shutting up his shop in vexation,
he went home and told his wife. Perhaps it was
a talisman,' she said. ' Oh, fool I' said his wife's
mother, 6 miserable dog that thou art, doubtless it
was Solomon's seal ; for otherwise why should a
Turk give such a sum for a mean box worth no-
thing ? Alas ! thou fool, what bast thou done ?
Thou disgrace to our house, hest thou kept a shop
in. the bazaar so long for this ? Oh, small man, a
woman indeed would have been more awake. Alas,
that we have married our daughter to an ass ! Woe
is me ! Dost thou call thyself a man ?—a man !
where are thy brains, oh man ?—say hast thou any
brains or not ? Hast thou ruined thy family or hest
thou not ?—what dirt has thou been eating ? Alas !
alas ! amaau, amaan, amaan !' The poor man had
no peace. . . • and therefore, Oh aga, in the
morning, his life being a burthen, he went out into
his garden and hanged himself." Bono Turco is
much shocked by this news of the unhappy end of

the Jew, but, adds Mr. Curzon, a Persian dealer
in Kirmann shawls standing by e observes, " By the
name of Ali, I am glad that the- Jew hanged him-
self, but I am sorry he did not leave me the 200
piastres in his will." So does our humorist-tra-
veller chuckle over "ye manners and customs" of
the motley Orient population, as he saunters obser-
vantly among-them, jotting down notes for
the " prenting." with-, a
‘sense of the droll as
sly ,anal dry as -esti' isci•awled a grin upon
Hogarth's thumbnail I It were superfluous,
hOwtver, to_ consider either the beauties or the
comicalities of this delightful book, seriatim et
literatim; apiinicled plentifully through it a 3 they
are—yea, aililentifully as plums and candied peel
in a Christinqs pudding. Scarcely less a matter of
-supererogation would it be so to analyse the merits
and demerits of the volume recently given to us by
the same deft hand, and coloured into picturesque
life by the same skilled ability—the volume de-
scriptive quite as. luminously of a residence in
Armenia and a year's sojourn in Erzeroum as its
predecessor was of our author's far-famed visits to
the alicie. t mouniteiles of the Levant. Enough
for our present purpose if we commend Curzori's
Armenia with, the like unstinted cordiality with
Which the heartiest eulogist could ever lip the
praises due to Curzon's. lonasteries. Both are
books of a rare value to the lover of adventurous
travel and picturesque description—of a value as
difficult to estimate with anything like minute
accuracy as it would be to calculate that of a solid
ton of ambergris, or of an extended hill-side of
unflawed and unbroken malachite.
A ( entury of Acrostics, Simpkin, Marshall, & Co.
This elegant little volume comes before us with
a strong title to consideration. We don't mean
the merit attributed to it of containing the first
series of acrostics which has appeared in a sepa-
rate- form ; but -the fact that its contents have
been composed in order to relieve the tedium con-
sequent on the author's deprivatien of sight. We
are the more gratified, therefore, on being able to
award it a considerable degree of approbation, be-
cause, however deplorable the fact of the author's
affliction may be, that were an insufficient reason
for us to aid in extending the tedium be experiences
to others. It is decidedly a clever little book, all
things considered, and turns the acrostic to really
useful account, the hundred it contains being writ-
ten on some of the most eminent names in litera-
ture, sciesice, and art, down to the present time,
the whole, commencing with Homer, being chrono-
logically arranged with dates of birth, &c. The
peculiarities and merits of many ofithe subjects are
very happily hit off in elegant verse, and in several
instances where exception may be taken the fault
lies mainly in the exigency of the restricted lines.
Among those most successfully delineating the
moderns are Burns, Burke, Dickens, Brougham,
Tennyson, and Macaulay. Singularly enough,
" the Lord Hamlet" is the subject of two acrostics;
and, after all, why should not the philosophic prince
of Shakspere be treated as a celebrity that has
moved and breathed, that moves and breathes,
indeed, in human form ? To thousands he
is less of an abstraction than his creator, the im-
mortal dramatist himself. We would rather take
exception to the introduction of Prince Albert,
who, though real enough, is somewhat imagina-
tively dealt with. Passing this by, however, we
have felt pleasure in the perusal of the work, a
pleasure greatly increased by the proofs it affords
not only of the writer's talent, but also of the
cheerful spirit in which he contends against his
misfortune, evidenced in its healthy tone and the
puns he perpetrates in it. 'We cordially recom-
mend the " Century of Acrostics" to the notice of
our readers.

My First Season. By Beatrice Reynolds. Edited
by the Author of " Counterparts." Smith,
Elder, and Co.

One Of those books which will be welcomed in
most circles and be asked for at the libraries.. The
heroine records in propria persona her experiences
in her '' first season," prefacing the account with
a sketch of her early life. Until fourteen she .has
owed her desultory learning to her own fancy, and
her father, a studious clergyman and a widower's
tuition ; and afterwards her naturally vigoarous
powers of mind arc further strengthened by the
instructions of her cousin's tutor, a Pole of com-
manding abilities and. character. Thus prepared
she enters on her first season, during which ample
scope is given by the author for the exercise of her
keen analytical powers on the folly, duplicity,
worldliness, or virtue of the characters introdi iced.
Some of these aro sketched with masterly :skill,
more especially her chverone, Lady Barres ; and
of the work generally we may say, to a neat .and
vigorous succinctness of style are added the re-
sults of a keen observation of character and mut:l
independence of tho ight—by one duly alive to
high and generous influences.

Blenham. By E. Elliott. W. and J. G. Cash.
An interesting story, founded on facts, and ex-
hibiting the iniquity of church-rates and the equity
of voluntaryism in religious matters in a forcible
manner. The hero and martyr is a sturdy and en-
lightened village smith, brought before the eccle-
siastical court, and cast into prison, where he
contracts jail fever, and suffers otherwise in mind,
body, and estate, for conscientiously refusing to
pay a church-rate, and that, by the way, illegally
levied, the result, though ultimately fatal to the
individual, being the virtual establishment in the
parish of the principle in vindication of which he
suffered. The work is characterised by a good deal
of fairness and moderation of tone, in conjunction
with not a little hard hitting, shrewd reflection,
and successful delineation, and is likely to conduce
to the spread of voluntaryism.

The Harper Lstablishment. By Jacob Abbott.
Harper and Brothers, New York.
One of " Harper's Story Books," in which a lucid
description of the magnificent printing establish-
ment of the Messrs Harper, of New York, and the
mode in which the story books are made, is given.
Those who wish to become acquainted with
the mysteries of composing, printing, engraving,
marbling, furnishing, die—, may consult these pages
with advantage, while those who need no informa-
tion, on these heads may learn anrnething from the
admirable arrangement of the establishment, amd
the construction of the building, which is rendered
fire proof.

The Liues of our Heroes in the Crimea. By George

J ames Field and Co.
A cheap edition of this popular work, which
cannot be perused without •motion, so heroic are
most of the careers therein recorded. It is
but just, while creditable to Mr. Ryan, that
the chivalry of the humble subaltern should thus
be associated with that of his military superiors.
But how cane the author, who has executed his
task con ainore, to omit such of the non-commis-
sioned officers and privates as have remarkably dis-
tinguished themselves in the same field ? In a
future edition this omission, it is to be desired, will
be supplied.

Lizzie Leigh, and other Tales. By the author of
" Mary Barton." Chapman and Hall.
These tales, which have already appeared in
" Household Words" and elsewhere, we have here
published in connection with the " Select Library
of Fiction," and which we do not hesitate to say
will be generally regarded as a most valuable
contribution. Among the tales associated with Lizzy
Leigh, that story of homely pathos, deepening to
tragic intensity, will be found " Morton Hall,"
" The Heart of John Middleton," " The Nurse's
Story," " The Squire's Story," and the graphic
and amusing " Confessions of a Mr. Harrison,"
the whole forming a more than ordinarily fasci-
nating volume of this cheap and startling series.

Was Lord Cardigan a Hero at Balaklava? By
George Ryan. James Field and Co.
The author is of opinion his lordship was not,
and adduces startling reasons (ill or well founded)
for thinking so, at the same time challenging con-
tradiction with the utmost boldness. The inquiry'
is taken from the guinea edition of the preceding
work, and contains remarkable additions.

The south of England
Papers record numerous in-
stances of dinners, public and private, on the 20th inst.,
to celebrate the anniversary of the battle of the Alma.
TESTIMONIAL TO SIR Cutes Narrsa.—A nume-
rously attended meeting convened by a committee ap-
pointed to carry out the 'object, was held last night at
the Gordon Hotel, Covent-garden, for the purpose of
obtaining a testimonial to Sir Charles Napier. Mr.
James Homes, who presided, adverted to the circum-
stances connected with the command of the Baltic fleet
by Sir Charles Napier, and his dismissal on rt turn, and
contended that the Admiral had been goaded, vilified,
and misrepresented. Several gentlemen warmly de-
fended Sir Charles Napier, and
in called upon the meeting
not only to sympathise with him, but to expre,s a dis-
approval of the mode which the affairs of the Ailmi-
' ralty were managed. Resolutions were then adopted,
to the effect that, having carefully considered the facts
in connection with the dismissal of Sir Charles Napier
from the command of the Baltic fleet, and the imputa-
tions
cast upon his character avid conduct, the meeting
was of opinion that he had been unjustly treated, and
was therefore determined to present to him a testimonial
both as an expression of their esteem and sympathy, and
as an evidence of the public sense of right and wrong ; that
the qualities exhibited: by Sir Charles while in command
were those of sound jntlement firmness, and discretion,
whereby he had remtiered great' service to his country
and deserved their tla anlce and gratitude. It was also
determined that teas cription lists should be opened
throughout the canntry, the amount of each individual
subscription being reittricted to the sum of le., in order
to see how widely tl so opinions expressed were liberal.