The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1845-08-05 00:00:00

THE LIVERPOOL STANDARD.

EXTRAORDINARY SPECIMENS OF MOSAICS.—As an
example of the extraordinary minuteness of the work in
some mosaics, we may state that there is one specimen, a
portrait of Pope Paul V. in which the face alone consists
of more than a million and a half of fragments, each no
longer than a millet seed ; and from this size up to two
inches square, pieces are employed in various ways.
Another celebrated specimen is that which Napoleon or-
dered to be made when his power was paramount in Italy.
It was to be a mosaic copy of the celebrated " Last Sup-
per," by Leonardo da Vinci, and to be of the same size
as the original, viz., 24 feet by 12. The artist to whom
the task was entrusted was Giacomo Raffaelle, and the
men under his direction, eight or ten in number, were en-
gaged for eight years on it. The mosaic cost more than
seven thousand pounds, and afterwards came into the
possession of the Emperor of Austria.-2'lie Builder.
GENIUS.—Genius should not be confounded with the
fumes of physical excitement, though many thus erro-
neously class and confound it. Its fury is not, to use the
words of Milton, " the trencher fury of a rhyming para-
site." It is not, he says again, "to be raised from the
fumes of wine, but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spi-
rit who can command his seraphim to take a live coal from
the altar wherewith to touch and purify the lips of his
chosen." Genius is a thing too etherial to be extracted
from any narcotic weed, or liquorous distillation, or any
such compound of " fire and dirt" as oozes from the
pierced poppy. Often indeed has this haughty power
condescended to call in such auxiliaries to its aid, but sel-
dom without loss, never without danger, and often with
the absolute, slavish, and irremediable subjection of the
higher to the inferior influence. Let the case of Cole-
ridge, who, like the Genie in the Arabian tale, shut up in
the iron pot, though his freed stature reached the sky, vo-
luntarily inclosed his stupendous powers in a laudanum
phial, stand a perpetual lesson to all youthful aspirants to
beware how they tamper with such tyrannous enslavers.
Burns wrote his earlier and better pieces on the regimen
of porridge and milk. Cowper found in tea a sufficient
stimulus to his mild but powerful genius. Wordsworth
sings of his lake water with a gusto which seems to inti-
mate that it is his favourite beverage. The leading lite-
rary men of the present day, though not all practisers of
total abstinence, are sober and regular in their habits.
And Milton, stateliest of the sons of men, and only a lit-
tle lower than the angels, found in music an excitement
richer and more ravishing than was ever extracted from
the blood of the grapl.—Hogg's Weekly Instructor.
OPPOSING ENGINEERS.—Of all the tribunals ever in-
vented by the ingenuity of man, a parliamentary commit-
tee is the most extraordinary. It is a court of inquiry con-
sisting of five members, whose principal qualification is
absolute previous ignorance of the localities and conflict-
ing interests with regard to which they must decide. Of
their impartiality, therefore, there can be no doubt. You
or I might just as well sit down after a moment's notice,
and adjudicate upon the merits of three competing lines
between Pekin and Canton, with an equal chance of ar-
riving at a satisfactory conclusion. Of course they must
be guided entirely by evidence, and have plenty of mate-
rials laid before them from which they may pick and choose.
It is the richest thing in the world to see two crack engi-
neers pitted against each other. The first, who-appears
on behalf of the line, does not know and cannot conceive
the slightest engineering difficulty. If a mountain stands
in his way, be plunges fearlessly into its bowels, finds in
the interior strata of surpassing mineral wealth, yet mar-
vellously adapted for the purposes of a four-mile tunnel,
and brings you out sound and safe at the opposite side, as
though he had been perforating a gigantic cheese instead
of hammering his path through whinstone coeval with the
creation. If a lake stands in the way, he will undertake
to drain it, with immense advantage to the neighbouring
proprietors. If a valley intervenes, he will bridge it with
a viaduct, which shall put to shame the grandest relics of
antiquity. He bas no knowledge of such bugbears as
steep gradients or dangerous curve ; a little hocus-pocus
with the compasses transforms all these into gentle undu-
lations, and sweeps of the most graceful descriptioa. He
will run you his rails right through the heart of the most
populous city,—yea, even Glasgow herself,—and across
the streets, without the slightest interruption to the traf-
fic. He will contrive so that the hissing of the locomo-
tive shall be as graceful a sound as the plashing of a foun-
tain in the midst of our bisected squares ' • and he ikindig-
nant at the supposition that any human being can be be-
sotted enough to prefer the prospect of a budding garden,
to a clean double pair of rails beneath his bedroom win-
dow, with a jolly train steaming it along at the rate of
some fifty miles per hour. The opposing engineer has a
contrary story to tell. He has the utmost confidence in
the general ability of his scientific friend, but on this oc-
casion he has the misfortune to differ in opinion. Very
carefully has he gone over the whole of the line surveyed.
He is sorry to say that the gradients are utterly.impossi-
ble, and the curves approaching to a circle. Tunnelling
is out of the question. How are two miles of quicksand
and two of basaltic rock to-be gone through ? The flu st is
deeper than the Serbonian bog, and would swallow up the
whole British army. The second could not be pierced in
a shorter time than Pharaoh took to construct the pyra-
mids of Egypt. He considers a rails ay in the heart of a
town to be an absolute and intolerable nuisance ; and, on
the whole, looking at the plan before him, he has come to
the conclusion, that a more dangerous and impracticable
line WaS never yet laid before a committee of the United
Parliament of Great Britain.—Blackwood.

RAILWAY TRAFFIC RETURNS.

(From the Railway Magazine of Saturday.)

NAME. Cor. wk., Last
gers.
Passen- Money.lastyear, Div.
,
Arbroath and Forfar — 4257 4276 32
Birmingham and Gloucester.. 4
Chester and Birkenhead .... 938 648 i
Dublin and Drogheda
Dublin and Kingstown
Dundee ai,d Arbroath . 8738 398 331 4
Durham and Sunderland .... 39426 414 498 i
Edinburgh and Glasgow .... 25434 3378 2459 42
Eastern Counties. . .
Glasgow and Ayr 19481 2203. 1621 5
Glasgow and Greenock 22448 1341 1075 22
Grand Junction
Gravesend and Rochester 14050 341
Great North of England
Great Western 64234 19805 18927 7i
Hull and Selby — -- 1638 7
Hartlepool Dock and Rail.
Liverpool and Manchester
London and Birmingham — 22504 20741 10
London and Blackwall 87215 1435 1701 189.
London and Brighton
London and Croydon.. 2!532 1777 632 42
London and Greenwich 53403 1107 844 2gs
Southwestern
Manchester, Bolton, and Bury 981 920 5
Manchester and Birmingham. 4565 3511 5
Manchester and Leeds and
Hull and Selby — 7623 7
Midland Counties
Newcastle and Darlington
Newcastle and Carlisle
Newcastle and North Shields 24822 531 568 4
North Union .. 19783 2222 1731
North Midland — 4-1
Paris and Orleans
Paris and Rouen 21587 6193 5920 7
Preston and Pyre
Sheffield and Manchester n3o3 1524 757
South Eastern .. -
Taff Vale .
Ulster
Yarmouth andiNorwich .. 5363 459 834 5
York and North Midland , 21298 5626 3001 10