The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1847-11-09 00:00:00

VARIETIES.

A letter-writer of the New Orleans Mercury says :
!` We had a charming passage round Cape Horn, losing
four persons and having four births during the trip."—
Which was the charm ?
PROOF OF MARRIAGE.—Before the revising barrister,
the other day, a witness being asked how he knew that a
man and woman were husband and wife, replied, because
he had often heard the lady blow the gentlemAn pp.'
evicloce was held t 9 ViIIaWAYV
:--- •

A pack of foxhounds costs about £5OO per annum in
meat and meal. A hunter, to be kept in good condition,
must have at least three good feeds of oats a day. Grey-
hounds that are kept for running have regularly new-
laid eggs given to them, to keep them in wind, besides
having the best joints of meat, such as legs of mutton, &c.
A VERY MEAN MAN.---“ I've known some very mean
men in my time. There was a Deacon Overreach, now;
he was so mean he always carried a hen in his gig-box
when he travelled, to pick up the oats the horse wasted
in the manger, and lay an egg for his breakfast in the
morning."—The "Old Judge," in Fraser's Magazine.
A Pools. GENTLEMAN.—Next to a fallen Christian, a
poor gentleman is, perhaps, the most pitiable object that
walks the earth. "He cannot dig, and to beg he is
ashamed." Let all who possess the means of showing
kindness, impose a double tax on their own tendency to
indifference and selfishness in alleviating a woe like this.
It will be both appreciated here, and rewarded hereafter.
Poynder's Literary Extracts.

TILE PARROT Si sr gentleman the other day,
visiting a school at Edinburgh, had a book put into his
hand for the purpose of examining a class. The word
" inheritance" occurring in the verse, the querist inter-
rogated the youngster as follows :—" Wh at is inheritance ?"
Answer : "Patrimony." " What is patrimony ? Answer :
" Something left by a father." " What would you call
it if left by a mother ?" Answer : "Matrimony."
" JERUSALEM SHALL BECOME HEAPS."—Now, in
digging for the foundations of the new church which is
erecting at Jerusalem, the workmen have discovered that
Jerusalem was literally, according to the prophecy of
Micah, a place of " heaps." They have had to dig forty
feet deep before they could reach a sure foundation—forty
feet of masonry was obliged to be buried in the loose soil
of that strange land.
THE FIRST FORGED NOTE.—Ten new and separate
Acts—all denouncing the punishment of death for differ-
ent acts of forgery or embezzlement of notes and bills—
nassed the legislature in quick succession ; making the
English Statute Book a dreary wilderness of blood. And
still the prevalence of these offences increased :—and im-
mediately after the passing of the last-mentioned act for
the protection of the Bank of England, the first forged
Bank of England note was presented for payment by
Richard William Vaughan, a Staffordshire linendraper.—
Lord Nugent.
DECIPHERING POWER OF PRINTERS.—You tax me
with illegible writing; but I fear I cannot amend it, for 1
must not stay to shape my letters, and I have, I believe,
got a bad habit from the facility with which the printers
here make it out. I verily believe if I shut my eyes, or
flung the pen at the paper, so as to make any kind of
mark, the London printers would know what I intended
to say. They always sent me back my manuscript with
my printed proofs for correction ; and I actually have
repeatedly been unable to make out what I had written
until I referred to the same article in print.—Gerald
Griffin.
INDIAN CAMP-FOLLOWERS.—An Indian army is
always attended by an extraordinary number, of men,
women, and children. These are ten times more nu-
merous than the troops themselves ; so that when the
whole employed force amounts to two hundred thousand
men, there are in the field at one moment, though in
different parts of the country, two millions of human
beings who derive their subsistence from the military ex-
penditure alone of the company. The march of even a
small army thus includes an enormous assemblage ; and
its usually slow progress, not more than ten or twelve
miles a day, keeps up a continuous excitement in the ter-
ritory through which it passes.
RAILWAYS IN INDIA.—It is scarcely possible to look
upon the results of establishing railroads in India, with-
out something of the enthusiasm which belongs more to
poetry than to statistics. But, "in the Golden Penin-
sula," there spreads before the Englishman a space of
nearly a million anda quarter of square miles, inha-
bited by about one hundred and thirty-four millions of
souls, with a sea coast of immense extent, washed by two
oceans, and bordering on vast countries of hitherto unex-
plored opulence. The resources of Birma, Siam, and the
Eastern Archipelago, have been scarcely touched by the
hand of man. Savage governments, savage nations, and
savage indolence, have left those countries almost in a
state of nature ; yet it is within the tropics that the true
productiveness of the earth is alone to be looked for. Our
long witers, our mountains, and the comparative sterility
of Europe, prohibit that richness of produce which only
waits the hand of man in the south, and it is only when
the industry of the European shall be suffered to throw
its strength into the Asiatic soil, thAt man will ever be
able to discover the true extent of the bounties provided
for him by creation. The three great divisions, or rather
three zones of India—the country comprehending the
great northern chain of mountains, the belt of plains,
from the foot of the mountains to the head of the penin-
sulas, a breadth of twelve hundred miles ; and the penin-
sula itself, a territory extending from thirty-five degrees
north latitude to the equator—give every temperature and
every product of the world. The mighty rivers intersect-
ing this region, the Indus, the Ganges, and the tributa-
ries, will soon be occupied by the steam-boat ; and the
railway, running through immense plains, on which the
harvests of thousands of years have been suffered to perish,
will soon develope the powers of the people and the fer-
tility of the soil, by opening to India the market of all
nations.—Blackwood.
THE EXTRA-TIDY HUMBUG.—Without disputing the
proverb which pronounces cleanliness to be next to godli-
ness, I fear I must class some of the extra-tidy folk in the
ranks of the minor humbugs. In every two or three
houses you will find one which boasts a room which is only
opened to be cleaned. Such a freezingly neat place. It
makes you shudder, like a boarding-school state parlour,
or a dentist's reception room. The grate, which looks as
cold as the North Pole—the bright poker, which never
stirs up a flickering blaze—the gaudy books, not intended
to be read—the prim chairs, never placed there to be sat
down upon—the sleek sofas, never meant to be rumpled
by a luxurious lounger—the very genius of chilly, formal,
finnikin Humbug haunts the place like a frost. Were
there a speck of dust visible on the gaudy carpet, you
would shake it from your feet as you turned away to look
for other quarters, less tidy, but more comfortable, with
fires you can poke and sofas you can sleep on after din-
ners. It is, however, on the whole, perhaps, rather a good
plan to give up one room in a house to the ravages of a
super-extra-tidy woman, if you can keep her tolerably
quiet in the rest. But beware of the Humbug of " put-
ting to rights." Beware of finding, after your return
from a day in the country, your study or your writing
room a perfect chaos of neatness ; all the books arranged
with reference to their bindings, the gaudiest boards of
course occupying the most prominent places ; and all your
stray papers, memoranda, jottings, and hints, to be ela-
borated in future pages, swept recklessly off to the dust-
hole, on the charge of being a mere " lot of rubbish of
papers lying littering about the room." An ill-natured
literary friend of mine states that he is in the habit of in-
diting his most valued lucubrations on paper cut in all
manner of fantastic forms. He finds that the women of
his household take it for patterns of unknown costumes,
and of course hold it as sacred as negroes do their Fetish.
There are some men absurdly finnikin in their personal
habits. It was no later than last autumn that I chanced
to encounter a gale of wind in a steamer in the Irish
Channel. It came on at night, and by dawn axe sea was
running high ; dead lights on all the cabin-windows, a
wooden covering over the sky-light, top-mast and yards
on deck, and the good ship pitching bows under. Stea-
dying myself in my berth, I looked round the gentlemen's
cabin. There were a couple of miserable candles, hardly
kept steady by their leaded sockets, flickering about on
the table, while by their dim and uncertain light half-a-
dozen fellows, in various stages of incipient and conva-
lescent sea-sickness, were staggered about before little
dancing swaying mirrors, hung from the berths, with ra-
zors in their hands, cutting and slashing away at their
chins, slicing off the skin, and leaving the beard, but still
impressed with the conviction that they were shaving, and
that shaving was an operation quite indispensable, even
for one day in a gale of wind, on board a Cork steamer.
With a sigh of pity for the unhappy Humbugs, I turned
round and went to sleep again.—Natural History of
Humbugs.
WANT OF A LAW OF COPYRIGHT STARVES THE
LITERATURE OF THE UNITED STATES.—The political
theorist would say beforehand, that under the proposed
copyright law the people would be deprived of cheap
books : and this is one of the popular delusions that expe-
rience must dispel. The present laws do indeed make
books very cheap, if cheapness is to be estimated only by
the cost per copy, and if legibility, convenience, durabi-
lity, and honesty are to go for nothing : and if the price
which a whole nation pays for such books in many serious
losses, is also to be excluded from the calculation. The
present laws encourage the rapid manufacture of such
books as will sell ropily. Novels and light reading of all
kinds are thus multiplied, to the exclusion of more valua-
ble books, which sell slowly ; and in consequence, an en-
tire nation becomes infected with the depraved appetite
of mawkish school-girls. But these novels must be
printed at the lowest rate ; for being unprotected, some one
will bring them out as cheaply as possible, and he who
does so will command the market. Thus book-making
becomes a mean and debased art ; and books are crowded
upon the public, at prices merely nominal ; having much
the appearance, and sharing the fate, of newspapers, which
perish in the using. At the same time, these worthless
books affect the prices of all books. Valuable works re-
quired for libraries must be printed with the least possible
investment of capital, or not printed at all. If any one
undertakes such publications, he must stint the editor,
shave the paper-maker, grind the printer, starve the
stitchers, and make the binder slight his work. This is
the kind of " living" which the report of Congress says is
furnished to thousands of persons by the republishing of
English work ; and such'it must be, where every publisher
has to make books to sell. The books thus published are
dear at any price ; and the best works do not get before
the public at all. No choice American editions can be
found of Burke, of Gibbon, of Hume, or even of Robert-
son, the historian of the continent ; but if one imports
such an edition, he finds himself taxed at the Custom-
house to pay for the miserable thing he refuses. You
look in vain for an edition of Jeremy Taylor ; and if you
import that of Bishop Heber, you pay a guinea to the
Customs to sustain the privilege of American publishers to
publish it if they choose. The writings of Lord Clarendon
cannot be had in an American edition ; your importation
is taxed, because at some future day it may be convenient
for some one to get up the whole in one volume. The
same is the case with the whole works of Milton, Dryden,
and many others quite as essential to libraries : but the
case is still more provoking with the better class of modern
works, such, for instance, as Alison's " History of Europe."
Unda a copyright law, it could be published in New York
from the English plates, and scla almost as cheap as the
poor affair now in the market, which cannot be better, be-
cause it would be immediately ruined by a less expensive
rival reprint. Yet, if I import a copy, to save my eye-
sight, I must pay for refusing this. Thus every time an
American bays a foreign book—and such books are
bought by thousands—he is paying for the broad privilege
of booksellers to make the books they import ; a privilege
which they do not in general care to use, except in the
C§§e of new pfd vWi it ePliemexal wvecif.--Macitwoq,

THE PRETENTIOUS HUMBUG.—Jack Cotherstone is a
good fellow enough, but he will set up, not exactly for a
millionaire, but for the possession of—" no matter : some-
thing handsome, comfortable, quite enough, my boy, to
keep the pot boiling, and a little over." I called on Jack
the other Sunday afternoon. He had just dined, and was
in the act of mixing a comfortable glass of humble gin-
and-water. He had heard my foot on the stairs, and I
caught him in the very act of smuggling the lowly com-
pound into the cupboard. " Just in time, my boy, for a
glass of wine—some port. I got it by mere accident ; but
I rather flatter myself you will find it slightly the thing
—vintage of eighteen." And in spite of my declared pre-
ference for the liquid vulgarly and familiarly denominated
Old Tom, Jack bolted out of the room to order the girl to
bring up a special red-sealed beaker. 1 heard the outer
door shut and open before she returned, but attributed it
to some peculiarity in the construction of the house, which
placed the entrance to the cellarage next door, or possibly
over the way. At length the damsel re-appeared, empty-
handed. " Please sir," depositing a half-crown on the
table ; " please sir, 'tad gone three, and the waults was
shut ; but—" Jack's awfully black looks stopped her.
Oh, Humbug ! how you punish the victim you delude !
Natural History of Humbugs.

A SCENE IN IRELAND.—What carts are these passing
along like the baggage trains of a retreating army ? I was
soon at their side—These are emigrant convoys ' • the last
of the season or nearly so—l counted six, loaded with
women and children, who, wrapped in cloaks but mostly
bare headed, sat upon their chests and boxes. The men
walked by their side, and were of all ages, from striplings
to the sexagenarian—some women as old as this were in
the carts: age will not be parted from youth, for in no
country under heaven does family affection more power-
fully reign. On all sides round the carts were their iron
and tin cooking utensils—yes, these people could evi-
dently cook, and well knew the value of such vessels,
being of an order far above the first poor family I had
seen. But precisely such as these, Ireland can least
afford to part with. These people had wended their way
from Roscommon. Children at the breast were among
them—lovely creatures, smiling at a fate hidden from
their view. Throughout the entire band there was not a
sad countenance. Hope seemed to struggle if not with
joy, yet with resolution, at leaving a land in which they
felt so little security, and so much sorrow ; and yet these
people have turned their backs upon millions of acres of
better land than any to be found in Canada—land still
lying as nature formed it—rich and productive ! And why
are these lands still waste? Ask the proprietors, (if you
can find them) ; inquire into the Court of Chancery;
solve the riddle if you can, and clever indeed will you be
if you can find it out.—People's Journal.
EFFECT OF NON-PROTECTION OF HIS WORKS UPON
THE AMERICAN AUTHOR.—But the nation pays for its
cheap books more dearly still, when you consider the
effect of its present system upon its literary men. It
forces this class of its citizens to " make brick without
straw." For the reasons I have shown, the books from
which authors collect their materials are not to be found
at home, and can only be imported at an aggravated ex-
pense, and often with great delays and trouble. Think of
my waiting ninety days in New York, to procure a work
like ' Lord Clarendon's History of the Rebellion !' Now,
I hazard nothing in saying that many an American author
has given up projected works of great importance, from
the discouragement of similar delays; whilst proofs are
manifold, that the chief defects of valuable works actually
produced in America may be traced to such inconveniences.
The patient author often confesses as much in his preface,
without seeming to know that his country, in stimulating
the almost exclusive publication of trash, and taxing him
to support such publications, is the fostering patron to
which he owes his difficulties. Thus does America nip
her young genius in the bud ; and when it perchance comes
to flower and fruit, she is not behind-hand with a blight.
The unknown production of the American author is
brought into a depressing competition with works which
have been tried in England, and found certain of success
in America. The popular British author, whom the
public have long demanded, is furnished at the lowest
price—while the yet unheard-of native aspirant, who can
only hope for a limited patronage, and cannot dispense
with his copyright, must of course be paid more. Whilst
all the poems of Mr. Tennyson, or his betters, may be
had for a dollar, the maiden effort of an American youth
cannot be furnished for much less. Of course. his
country has crushed her child, under the weight of an
unnatural disadvantage; and in proportion as he is worth
anything, the chances are less that he will persevere
against such odds. I know of a man of sterling genius,
whose early writings attracted the notice of Maga, who
has long since ceased to write for the public, in conse-
quence of the evils I now depict. His country may
thank herself that he has not taken rank with the first
English authors of his class. But the same system which
thus deprives American authors of natural patronage,
destroys their chances abroad. Until their own country
relieves them, by putting foreign works on a level with
theirs as to chance of success, England gives them no
copyright, and they cannot get aid from her as heretofore.
Cooper and Irving were encouraged by England under a
different state of things ; and it is safe to say, that under
present circumstances there will be no more Irvings and
Coopers. lam surprised that American scholars submit
with such equanimity to grievances under which genius
must languish and emulation dies.—Blackwood.
WINDOW GARDENING.— Another Point respecting
which plants suddenly transplanted to a room receive a
check, is the difficulty of supplying them with sufficient
light. While they were kept in pits, in the nurseryman's
care, they must necessarily have been placed close to the
glass, and thus had the surface of their leaves fully exposed
to the light, which was necessary to stimulate them to
perform their proper functions.. In a room, on the con-
trary, they receive only a side light ; and the leaves being
forced to turn themselves, so that the light may fall upon
their upper surface, the plant either grows out of shape,
or the leaves take a very odd and twisted appearance.
This is another of those evils attending window gardening
which it is extremely difficult to guard against ; and, in
fact, as long as the plants are kept inside a room, so as to
have only a side light, it is almost impossible that the
colours of their flowers should be as vivid, and the shape
of their plants should be as good, as when they are grown
in a green-house. Something may, however, be done in
choosing a favourable situation, even when plants can
have only a side light ; and windows having a south or
south-east exposure are the best, as they not only have
the light longer every day, but it is also more intense, and
the plants have the advantage of enjoying the warmth of
the sun—an advantage the want of which cannot be sup-
plied to them by any artificial means. It has been said
that flowers never attain their proper colour unless they
can enjoy the light of the sun for five or six hours every
fine day ; and that, in proportion as the quantity of sun-
light they receive is diminished, the plants lose their
vigour, and the flowers their brilliancy. The light of
the sun being of so much importance to the health of
plants, it is evident that window gardening is more likely
to be successful in the upper part of a house than in the
lower part ; and that plants are more likely to be grown
successfully in an attic than on the ground floor, unless
the street in which the house is situated happens to be
very wide. In the business part of Paris, it is by no
means uncommon to see a complete garden of plants, in
pots or tubs, on the leaden roof of a house, particularly
collections of carnations, ranunculuses, and tulips • and
some years ago, in one of the closest streets of Paris, there
was a garden of fruit trees cultivated with complete suc-
cess on the leads of a house—one cherry tree in particular
producing every year seven or eight pounds of fine
cherries, and an apple tree a large crop of apples. In
some parts of London, small gardens of plants, in pots,
are kept on the leads ; and some years ago, there was a
Paul's
of this kind kept on the leads of a house in R.
Paul's Churchyard by Miss Kent, author of the Flora
j
Domestics,ourn Journal.
other works.—Miss Loudon in the Peo-
ple's