SPIRIT OF THE Public Journals. FUNERAL CEREMONIES OF THE TURKS AND CHINESE. IT has been my fortune to witness the funeral ceremonies of two of the most singular people on the earth-two nations the most dissimilar to ourselveskingdoms, either of which, in point of manners, customs, and religion, may be considered our Antipodes-I mean the Chinese and Turks. The burials of these two nations not only differ widely from our own, but in many respects from each other, and both have many curious peculiarities highly descriptive of the manners and customs of the people to whom they refer. During a residence at Canton, I was witness to many funerals; but my attention was more particularly drawn to one, that of an excellent and upright man of considerable wealth and importance, with whom I had many dealings. He had died before my third arrival at Canton, but it is the custom to delay the funeral for a long time, and his body was still unburied. I understood there had been a sort of lying in state, something simiiar, I presume, to what is still practised in Scotland, where the corpse is dressed out in white, and the female friends of the deceased are admitted to view it. I have been informed, that it is the Chinese custom, upon such occasions, to prostrat themselves before the corpse, which is placed in the coffin, surrounded with flowers and perfumes, but I was never present at any such ceremony. The foreman, or chief servant of my deceased friend, informed me, upon my arrival, that I might be admitted to view the coffin, which was closed, but still uninterred, and as I was desirous of doing so, he appointed to meet me at a certain hour, and we proceeded to the house of the deceased. The room into which I was introduced, was one of considerable dimensions, entirely hung round with white, which is the Chinese colour for mourning. In the centre of the apartment was a kind of long table, covered with white, upon which was placed the coffin, also covered with a kind of pall, all white. My companion, after prostrating himself upon the floor, approached the coffin, and withdrew the pall from a part of it, in order that I might observe its neatness and workmanship, and the paintings and gilding with which it was covered. He informed me, that his late master had caused it to be made during his life-time, which is, indeed, te prac tice of even the poorest Chinese. All contrive to spare a sufficient sum to secure a reputable shelter for their lifeless bodies. In the room were several pedestals, all covered with white, and upon them incense and lights were kept burning. The coffin was placed against the wall, and just above it, a scroll was fastened to the white hangings, upon which were emblazoned the name and degree of the deceased. The whole appearance was extremely striking, and affected me very powerfully. After I had been at Canton about a month, the funeral took place. It is the custom of the Chinese to keep dead bodies above ground for a very long time; the rich people delay the funeral even for a year or longer, and are thereby esteemed to afford proof of their respect and reverence for the deceased. My friend was kept nearly two months. Upon the day fixed for the funeral, a great number of relatives and acquaintances of the deceased assembled at his residence, and were all marshalled in procession as at our English burials. A number of hired musicians, performing slow and melancholy tunes upon a variety of instruments, preceded the corpse, as did also some persons bearing painted scrolls and silken banners, on which were inscriptions indicative of the rank and character of the deceased. Incense bearers followed these, and then, under a white canopy, the coffin covered with a white pall was borne by men. Upon each side of it were persons employed in burning pieces of paper and pasteboard with inscriptions upon them; some circular, and some cut into curious fantastic figures, all which, it is believed, are wafted upwards with the soul, and accompany it in its next state of existence either as coin, bread, or whatever else the inscription denotes. After the corpse, came the relatives of the deceased, all in white clothes, soiled, dirty, and unornamented, and therefore descriptive of excessive grief. Some of them howled and exclaimed most vehemently, and every one had a friend on each side to assist him on, and also a servant, bearing over him a huge umbrella with a deep white fringe, which nearly screened the mourner from the public gaze. Some women also followed as mourners, borne in small coaches similar to our sedans, and they were very loud in the expression of their lamenta tions. After them came a crowd of friends, all walking slowly, and thus the procession closed. The burying-places of the Chinese are erected in the shape of grottes, without ars a dead body grave, will thereand this opportuis by some anxiThe male relations weeping-no grief ued amongst them Alms and prayers ch a Mahometan me for the dead, is -the same reason y, namely, that if Mussulman he is -hich ought not to t he, by any deprevented at once ment of it; if, on ot a good Mussulrve to be grieved e to be sent from Erst instance, carreligious service n thence to the rayer is delivered prus trees round ecause it is imahe dead is denotcondition of these in two lines, one -if only those on it denotes happie left, misery. If betokens that the Amitted to all the 1 fail, he is tor5, until, at some be released from sion of the proine. -RAYLE. n old word for a the one which is Saint Grayle, or as it was then termed, "il sacro cattino." Of course it was considered an invaluable relic, and was an object of great reverence and veneration, more especially as some spots were pointed out in it, which were said to be stains produced by drops of blood of our Saviour's, which were caught in it by Joseph of Arimathea, whilst Jesus Christ was upon the cross. It is of an hexagonal form, and made of a coarse green glass. The legend which was told of it at Genoa was, that it was taken at the capture of Cæsarea, in the holy wars, and was presented to the Genoese by Baldwin, king of Jerusalem; an account which certainly does not harmonize well with our pretended title to it through Joseph of Arimathea. It remained at Genoa until the year 1806, when Bonaparte, in his rage to transport every thing curious or celebrated in art to Paris, carried off the Saint Grayle, and it was deposited in the Cabinet of Antiquities, in the Imperial Library. We understand it still remains there; whether it has ever been claimed by the Genoese or not, we have not been able to ascertain.-Ibid. A LANDSCAPE, ON to the mountain! let us from its verge View nature stretching forth the varied scene, Where foot of man profane has seldom trod. ble to hear that the proorwich A Port, is again Parliament, because the of Yarmouth Harbour to co-operate with the folk and Suffolk. On the may be well to hesitate version of Norwich into a of Lowestoft into a seahe rivers Waveney, Yare, a channel for ships, in for wherries. The great ays, in his Report, that e there is no physical ob8 Lowestoft Harbour will water than low water, so r be incapable of scouring sides the above principle acting on itself alone, but and shingle; which, betimes heavier than water, 'esistance. retorted that Yarmouth Iso less high water than there rests to be explainwashed by three rivers, rt of Lowestoft will not river. As to lake Lothwill cease to be raised t of the sea at high water; 1 become replenished from of being refilled by the h now flows into the lake's oreover, as the communithe haven intended at H is within the tideway of Yarmouth Ha bour, so may its commissioners, unle prohibited by a special enactment, hay a right to levy their port-dues on th trade of Norwich A Port. There can be stated of Lowestoft Ha bour, if made, that it will require tw piers of an equal length, and not on long south pier only; for this harbou will possess a lowland in lieu of a head land; or, in other words, a foreland o shingle, and therefore one which is mov able. The cliffs at Lowestoft, receding from the sea, have an inland position. Mr. Baylis writes in the body of a let ter, that he will contract to do the work at Mr. Cubit's estimate; but, in a postscript to the same letter, Mr. Baylis remembers that he has not included a charge for steam dredge-machines; accordingly Mr. Cubit and his "whipper in" disagree, however cordial they have wished to appear. Nor does the one, any more than the other, put lock-gates at each termination of the cut designed between the rivers Yare and Waveney; for this reason their old channels must either choke, if shallower than the new channel, or it will do so if shallower than them. A cut from Rotterdam to Helvoetsluys was contemplated on the preceding false principle, which Mr. Baylis may not know; yet he cannot but be aware that the Gloucester and Berkeley ship-canal, executed by himself, has lock-gates at Westerdyck mentions, that "if you di- As to a ship-channel, let the three rivers be formed into a canal, having a wear and sluice at its lower end for their regulation during floods by sea and land; whilst the Breydon Lake, whose upper end could occasionally be scoured by the rivers, and whose area is 1,218 acres, would be an ample space for the tide, and might bound its flow and ebb. The Selector, AND LITERARY NOTICES OF NEW WORKS. OUR poetical friends will doubtless be THE TWO FOUNTAINS. "Oh Love," said I, in thoughtless dream, But who could bear that gloomy blank, And brought the past all back again THE PALACE OF ST. CLOUD. THE palace of St. Cloud is an agreeable, and, according to the favourite English phrase, a comfortable habitation, splendidly, but not too richly furnished. The salle-à-manger particularly attracted my notice, being the first good specimen I had seen of a French dining-room. It is a room large enough for about forty persons to dine in it conveniently. A round table of mahogany, or coloured like mahogany, one fauteuil, and half a dozen chairs, seemingly not belonging to this room, but brought from another, standing round the table on a mat which went underneath it; a chandelier, or lustre, hanging over the tables;—such, with a few articles for the use of the attendants, was the furniture of the room. Instead of a sideboard, a painted shelf went round the room at about four feet from the floor. On one of the panes of the window, a thermometer, with the scale marked on glass, was fixed on the outside; thus the temperature of the outer air might be known without opening the casement. An English family of moderate fortune lives very much in the dining-room; a French family would as soon think of sitting in the kitchen as in the salle-àmanger at any other than eating hours. The English think it marvellous that a French lady should receive visits in her bed-room; but to this bed-room is annexed a cabinet, which conceals all obthe bed is either hidden by the drapery, jects that ought to be put out of sight; or covered by a handsome counterpane, with a traversin or bolster at each end, which, as it is placed lengthways against the wall, the two ends resembling each other in the woodwork also, gives it during the day-time, the appearance of a couch. English sense of the word; it is a pretty The park of St. Cloud is not a park in the pleasure-ground, with great variety of surface. If king George III. had been as much accustomed to the continental notion of a park as the king his grandfather probably was, he would not have expressed so much surprise, when, on his visit to Magdalen College, Oxford, he was asked if he would be pleased to see the park. "Park! what, have you got a park ?"-"We call it a park, sir, because there are deer in it."" Deer! How big is it ?"-"Nine acres, an it please your majesty."-" Well, well, I must go and see a park of nine acres ; let us go and see a park of nine acres." From the elevated ground of the park of St. Cloud, where the lantern rears its head, Paris is seen over an extent of flat and marshy ground, over which the Seine winds with as many evolutions and curvatures as a serpent. The fable of the sun and the wind contending which of them could first induce a traveller to quit his cloak, might be paralleled by one invented on the sinuosity of rivers in plain countries. Let nature oppose rocks and mountains, the river holds on its way by torrent and by cataract; arrived at a level country, it seems to amuse itself by delay. If it were told at an English gaming club, that the mountain and the plain had engaged in a contest, which of them should most effectually divert the course of a river from its direct line to the ocean, the odds would, most likely, be in favour of the mountain. But the result is otherwise. Four Years in France. DOMESTIC ECONOMY IN FRANCE. I WILL endeavour to enable any one to judge how far it may be worth his while to come to reside in France from motives of economy. With his motives for being economical I have nothing to do; any one may be economical at home who pleases; but it does not please some people to be economical at home; others wish to have more for the same money. The French are sometimes puzzled to make out why the English come abroad; perhaps the English are sometimes equally puzzled themselves; but with reference to economy, sometimes the English seem to them to be travelling for the sake of spending money; sometimes to be staying in France for the purpose of saving it. The riches as well as the high prices of England are exaggerated; the latter to a degree that would make the riches to be merely nominal. Then the difference between French and English prices is supposed to be so great, that the saving, by living in France, must be enormous. Many English have, at first, no clearer notions than the French on these subjects. The price of almost every article, the produce of agricultural or manufacturing industry, has been increased one-third, some say two-fifths, in France since the beginning of the revolution; the taxes have been trebled. We know that, within the last thirty years, prices and taxes have been augmented in England at about the same rates; so that, on both sides of the water, the proportion has been preserved. But the English knew very little of France during the war; whereas the French knew England by their emigrants, who reported truly the high prices then prevalent: thus some unsettled or erro neous opinions on domestic economy may be accounted for. I left England while paper currency was still in force, and before prices were lowered as since they have bee; my estimate must be corrected accordingly. The result of between three and four years' experience is, that about one-sixth is saved by living, not in Paris, but in a provincial town in France, or that a frank will go as far as a shilling. Set against this saving the expenses of the journey, and the saving will not be great to those who do not retrench in their mode of life, but live in France in the same style as at home. The exchange on bills drawn on England may be favourable; but some little money sticks in every hand through which money passes, which balances this advantage. House-rent is higher in France than in England; fuel much dearer; some manufactured articles, as woollen-cloth for coats, and linen or cotton for shirts, are equally dear; colonial produce, as sugar and coffee, is of a variable price, but not much cheaper; tea is cheaper, as the Americans supply it, or England with a remission of the duty. But there are no assessed taxes, no poor-rates; provisions I found to be cheaper by about one-third than I had left them in England; and my younger children, instead of small beer, with half a glass of wine each after dinner, now drank wine, with discretion indeed, but at discretion. The more numerous my family, the greater was the advantage to me of this diminution of the daily expense of food. will Yet I calculate that at the end of fortytwo months, including what the journey to Avignon cost me, and the difference between the price at which my furniture was bought and that at which it was sold, I had spent, within one-twentieth, as much as it would have cost me to live in my county town in England with the same establishment and in the same man. ner. The smaller the income annually expended, the greater in proportion be the saving, because it is chiefly on the necessary articles of living that expense is spared; but a man of large, of moderate fortune, will hardly think it foreign country merely for the sake of worth his while to dwell many years in a saving five pounds in a hundred. The less the distance to which he travels and acquainted with the mode of dealing and the longer his stay, the more he becomes proportionably will be the savings of the learns what are just prices, the greater economizing resident. A saving of five per cent. is at least not a loss. Wise men should not entertain extravagant expecta or even |