(To the Editor of the Mirror.) SIR,-Accounts (with one engraving) of two "genuine" lances that pierced our Saviour's side have been given in a contemporary weekly periodical, and it may perhaps be gratifying to your numerous readers, if it only goes to show the extent of human credulity and superstition, to be presented with a view of a third true and genuine lance. On the road from Constantinople to Ispahan, and on entering Armenia, the eye is struck with the sight of numerous churches and monasteries. Previous to reaching Erivan, the first town of note in Persia, there is a lake, situated in a large plain, on which no less than six monasteries are built, one whereof is hewn out of an insulated solid rock. It is called by the Armenians Kickaert, and by the Turks Guieurghiéce, meaning, "look, and pass on." In this church, agreeably to the tradi tions of the Armenians, the ance that pierced the side of our Saviour is carefully preserved, and exhibited to strangers at the close of the service, whose devotion leads them to request a sight of so precious a relic. It is held in the highest veneration, and said to have been brought into Armenia by St. Matthew, The preceding engraving is a representation of this lance, which my curiosity induced me to delineate upon the spot. I am, Sir, &c. J. B. T. SPIRIT OF THE Public Hournals. THE JEW SLOPSELLER. We know not if, among the several qualities, to the possession of which philosophers have ascribed our superiority over frogs and jackdaws, the spirit of commerce has been duly registered-whether the continually working principle of barter, wanting in all other animals, has given a triumphant distinction to humanity, and thus proved the immortal essence of man in his day-book and ledger. We think the fact too evident to have been unknown to ancient wisdom; although we cannot, at this moment, take upon ourselves to particularize the discoverer. The Of course, there are none of our readers that have not seen a Jew: the sight amounts to nothing-it is a common spectacle, which neither does nor ought to excite an unusual thought. Have they, however, beheld a Jew slopseller? sun scarcely attracts a momentary gaze-so general is its influence; let a rainbow appear, and old gray headed men and crawling children stay still and gaze at it. So with the common Israelite, and he of the sea-poit. The term "Jew," abstractedly-like the first of the two words "laurel water," or the half of a severed viper-may represent an object useful or harmless; but Jew slopseller-aye, there is the deadly meaning of the united words there, the full venom of the active snake! Those who would pass through Rosemary-lane without the least emotion, would start and turn pale at an Israelite inhabitant of Gosport or Sheerness. Lest, however, some of our readers should not wholly comprehend the term "slopseller," we may briefly inform them, that it applies to those individuals who, on our seamen receiving their hard-earned pay, infest the decks of English men-of-war; there they toil, and there they fatten. Let us, however, strive to make out a schedule of the effects, natural and acquired, which com pose a Jew slopseller. It is not the face alone of our hero which needs delineation : the painter who would simply portray the visage of the slopseller, and afterwards trust to the general observance of other men whereby to supply the absent members, would err most criminally. Horace himself never imagined such a monster; it would be the head of a fox on the body of a mastiff -of a cat, fixed on the neck of an antelope. There is such a subtle and constant communing between his features and every other part; such a continual, and yet repressed agitation, from his eyelids to his toes; such a catching up of the fingers and acting of the vertebræ, that it would seem some spirit of gain inhabited his every tendon and nerve, and that his body echoed and throbbed through out with their clamour and their stirring. If nature has ever placed the least principle within him, like Ariel in the pine, it requires more than mortal power to bring it to the light. There is no looking at the face of the slopseller-the eye can take no hold of his features; they do not, as the old poet says of amber, "stroke the sight," but evade, actually slip from it. He is only to be rightly viewed whilst asleep, when the flaccid lineaments, untenanted by the thousand antics which inhabit the waking lines, have retreated back, and lie, like gorged spiders in their webs, in the modicum of brain which engendered and sustains them. Then, and then only, might the limner take the features of our subject, and thus the likeness could only be known to a few of his creed and craft-for never yet did customer hear a slopseller snore. The whole life of our Israelite is a long game of verbal and practical lies of substitution and of sycophancy. His prime god is made at his majesty's mint; a bank-note is to him the glorious sky, and the sum it carries, either moon, sun, or star, according to the amount. If he can give to second-cloth the passing freshness of superfine, he is, in his own esteem, a second Descartes; if he can replace copper for gold, another Newton. He has no love of nature, animate or still; if ever he stay to look at a bullfinch, it is simply to reflect on the possibility of painting its hues on a sparrow; if ever he gaze at the veins of a pebble, it is to see if it will pass for an agate or a cornelian. Shew him Mount Vesuvius in full eruption, and he will speculate on getting it up in a raree-show; point out to him, by the glare of lightning, a ship's crew struggling in the billows, and he will instantly ponder on what the men have in their pockets. We must picture a seaman about to pass the door of our slopseller; he is in a moment captured, and, although penniless, becomes a ready prey to the Israelite, who buys the next three years' pay of the reckless tar. The seaman laughs within himself—aye, and when he gets aboard his mates laugh with him—at the certain trick practised on the Jew; for when did a sailor ever think of time? Did he ever think it possible for the day three years to arrive? If he have money in one hand, he thinks he holds the skirts of Time with the other. The slopseller, like his brother crocodile, is amphibious, and can snap up a mouthful of unwary humanity ashore as well as in his native deep. However, it must, we think, be owned, that the slopseller is more potent at sea. By sea, we mean the waste or forecastle of a man-of-war. His peculiarities become more startling. Like Charles Brandon's armorial bearings, the gold cloth and frieze strike out a contrast sufficiently powerful to awaken the poetry of thought -philosophy. To the proof. We have before us a sailor, who hath felt the sun in every region of the world; heat, wind, and rain have so worked upon his face, have here so seared it, and there so adorned it with protuberance, that his features are like a patch of old wall; here, showing a fearful chink-and here, tufts of red and brown moss. He stands before us the very embodied idea of unthinking valour and honesty: there is a reposing strength in his legs, which straggle from each other like two clumps of leafless oaks; his hands drop before him, like two slabs of red granite; his hair-that is, if he do not nourish the coxcombry of a pigtail mightily resembles bell-wire in a tangle; his very hat seems dropped upon his head (as though for a wager) from the main-top. This man appears a hard creature to digest; and yet our slopseller shall swallow him, as though he were a man of paste-the mere sugared image of a confectioner. Observe, gentle reader-and also ye philosophers-if here you would see the whole deceit and trickery of the world, if here you would look upon the game where is pitted craft against honestyvillany against ignorance-smiles, assertions, oaths, and pledges of reputation, against the profits of years of toil, perhaps of insult and of bloodshed. The bit of gold, for which our tar hath groaned in hopeless agony beneath the surgeon-for which he hath been literally sheeted in his own gore-the wages of such pain and terror shall, in a trice, become the gain of the Jew, for a wheedling word, a smiling look. Is not this a true representation of the tragedy, or-Democritus, if you will have it so the comedy of Gain and Loss, played on the world's wide stage, alike by emperors, by lords in waiting, and by chimney-sweepers? Many a veteran hath gone down, a most lean subject, to the grave; whilst a musk-carrying juvenile, who could sing an amorous ditty at the table of my lord, hath died of indigestion or of apoplexy; the shrill pipe of a boy hath carried it before the indented cicatrice of gray-headed men. We repeat our assertion: our sailor and slopseller may, in their simple selves, represent the whole two parties of the human racethe tricksters and the tricked. Three feet of the forecastle of the Bellona may serve for the whole globe. We beg our readers to keep before their eyes the person of our sailor, and also narrowly to observe the movements of the Israelite, now preparing to assail and attack the huge round tower before him. See, how the varlet makes towards the tar! how he curls and bends himself up, as though he would absolutely make himself into a ball, and roll into the confidence of the betrayed! Now this Proteus of pinchbeck and stained glass alternately flutters and stoops, and his eye burns with brightness-not with a common brilliancy-it is not the ray of common satisfaction, but the gleam of a spear's point held to the heart of the devoted. As yet, however, the contest has been held at a distance; the slopseller has only attacked with greetings, gentle inquiries, and salutations; the pike is only hooked-the grand beauty of the art is yet to be displayed in playing with him, and bringing him panting to the shore. Jack himself throws a dash of the ridiculous into the business; he checkers with individual whim the else unrelieved baseness of the slopseller. As the Jew advances, the sailor (and we would be sworn he has never read Sterne) seems "pre-determined not to give him a single sous." Jack straightway becomes blunt and bristling; he puts his memory on hard duty, and summons to his aid a recollection of the grievous wrongs he has before endured from "the tribe;" he, moreover, doubly arms himself with the legendary iniquities of every slopseller, from Wapping to Spithead; and thus strengthened, Jack receives, with deadly determination, the first advances of the aquatic merchant. Vain man! weak in your vanity-lost in your conceit! Bound and delivered up to the enemy, even by the weapons which you were to use against him; your strength avails you not with him. What are the deep-set grinders and the rigid muscles of the bull-dog against the tortuous faculty of the worm? The brute may startle wolves from their dens, and tear into powder the hard earth beneath it, whilst the reptile glides through a crevice, and evades pursuit. It is almost melancholy to observe the unsuccessful trials of the sailor to look cunning and business-like; his features are rebellious and will not submit to order; whilst he, unconscious man! believes them to be admirably disciplined. An elephant, inquiring into the legitimate construction of a sixpence, is, we think, a ludicrous object; no less whimsical is our sailor attempting to be shrewd. He has, at this time, but one thought-security against the Jew; and this thought runs, darkling and confused, within him, like a half-smothered mouse in the body of the elephant just noted. At every turn he becomes more bewildered; and our slopseller, gaining strength as the sailor sinks back again to his accustomed state, in the moment of triumph slips the article of purchase into the half-unresolved hand of the man of the waters. And what has Jack purchased? Of course a watchone that hath survived a three days' possession by nearly half the scamen of his majesty's fleet. The first article a sailor purchases, and the last he parts with, is a watch; it is the Alpha and Omega of the alphabet of prize-money; and, even if it does not survive the first winding-up, still the outside looks creditable and land-like, and, long ere Blue Peter is flying at the fore, it is once again duly returned to the slopseller, with a loss of pounds not to be thought of in the middle-watch. As were the fatal seeds to Proserpine, so is the silver monitor to our tar; having once tasted the fare of our slopseller, he is wholly and unreservedly condemned to him. A fox comes into a farm-yard with a more bold and upright countenance than does a Jew slopseller enter a man-of-war; there is a vile slinking principle curling about his lips-a fitful puckering-up of his eyes a thrilling of chicane at the very tip of his nose-presenting, on the whole, a so abject and contemptible being, that, were your dog to leap from your side, and pin down the trader, we fear, instead of punishing the animal, your momentary feeling would be to pat the sides of the brute, and exclaim, Well done, honesty!" Our slopseller is not avaricious and grasping by accident; he is trained up. deeply educated in the game. When scarcely the height of his father's knee, the watchful parent points out to his offspring the bluff and sturdy defenders of their country, and tells him that on such as they he must in due time thrive and fatten. If any of our readers doubt the fact, let them but glance at the young pigmies of gain, thriving in the Minories. We confess, were we asked to instance a startling contrast of the vastness and majesty of nature, and the subserviency and meanness of man, we should incontinently name the wide and wonder-striking ocean, bearing on its top the puny shallop of the Jew slopseller. Certainly, there may be many such dealers imbued with every fair and benevolent feeling in practices of trade with the ignorant and unthinking. We may gather peaches from a holly. Monthly Magazine. The Selector; AND LITERARY NOTICES OF A VISIT TO A MOUNTAIN DEW WE ambled along the rocky strand of waters the sublime solitariness of its "Blue, dark, and deep, round many an isle," and these isles are set like precious gems, with just enough of trees for ornamentthe birch, the rowan ash, the service, the holly and high from the central, largest and most distant island, arose a blue and wreathed smoke, that bespoke the manufacture of mountain dew-the smoke certainly added much to the picturesque accompaniment of the scene, and we could just discern a small cabin or sheeling in the island, half concealed amidst the copsewood in which it was enveloped. I could not help expressing a wish to see the process whereby this admired liquor was compounded, that in the estimation of every Irishman--aye, and highborn Englishman too-is so superior in sweetness, salubrity, and gusto, to all that machinery, science, and capital can produce in the legalized way, and which verifies the observation of the wise man, "that stolen waters are sweet." Just as we were conversing in this way, a man, turning the point of a rock, stood unexpectedly within a few yards of us. He was one of the largest men I have ever seen amongst the Irish commonalty. He was tall, that is not unusual; but he was lusty, his bones and muscles were covered with flesh; there was a trunk-like swell in his chest, and a massiveness in his body; a pillar-like formation of limbs, bespeaking that he was a man moulded to be a giant, and was fed up to the full exercise and capability of his frame. He had a bull-like contour of head and neck, short and crisp curls appeared from under a small hat, which seemed unable to settle itself over his ears, from the full development of the organ of combativeness that -protruded itself in this region of his cra nium. The man stood before us with the assured look of one who was prepared saucily to say, what business have you "Well, Teigue, you know me, don't you?" "I do, your honour, and am sartain sure that you are true and of the right sort, and every inch about you honest." "Well, Teigue, I want to get this gentleman, who is a friend of mine, on the lake; he desires to get into a boat to see its beauties more conveniently; besides, he has a longing wish to see how the hearty drop is made; can you indulge "That I will, and a thousand him ?" great deal of determination, a constant view of his own interest, and luckily he considers that interest best promoted by keeping the country in peace. Those that fall out he beats into good humour, and when the weight of his argument cannot prevail, the weight of his fist enforces compliance with his wishes. Then he is the patron of illicit distillation; he is co-partner in the venture, and is the watchful guardian over its process; there is not a movement of a gauger that he does not make himself acquainted with; there is not a detachment leaves a village or town that he has not under watch, and before a policeman or a red coat comes within three miles of these waters, all would be prepared for them; still and worm sunk, malt buried, barrels and coolers disposed of, and the boat scuttled. There is not a man in Ireland lives better in his own way than Teigue; his chests are full of meal; the roof of his kitchen is festooned with bacon ;, his byre is full of cows; his sheep range on a hundred hills; as a countryman said to me the other day, "Teigue O'Gallagher is the only man of his sort in Donegal that eats white bread, toasted, buttered, and washed down with tea for his breakfast." In the mean time the boat came near, and Teigue joined us; and after some difficulty in getting aboard from the rocks, and adjusting ourselves in proper trim in the most frail bark that perhaps was ever launched on water, we rowed out into the lake. And here, really, the apparent peril of our situation deprived me of the pleasure that might otherwise be enjoyed in the picturesque scenery around; the bottom of the boat was covered with water, which oozed in through a sod of turf, that served as a plug to a hole in its bottom, the size of my head; and Teigue O'Gallagher, who sat at the head of the boat surrounded by his dripping dogs, almost sunk it to the gunwale, and every now and then the dogs, uneasy at their confinement, tumbled about and disturbed our equilibrium; if a gust of wind had come, as it often does on a sudden from the hills, we should have been in a perilous state. As it was, the two young men who rowed us, and who, it is to be supposed, could swim, enjoyed our nervous state, and, out of fun, told us stories of sudden hurricanes, and of the dangers and deaths that have happened to navigators on this lake; we, therefore, declined a protracted expedition, and only desired to be landed on the island, where we arrived in a short time, and then had an opdistillation. portunity of witnessing the arcana of illicit The island that at a distance looked so pretty with its copsewood, |