when an "element" is in a muddle of that This country has been so given up of late to political faction that there is hardly any social measure or incident to report. The Constitution still remains, for the most part, an unembodied abstraction, and clergy, half-pay officers, and holders of securities are still waiting for their pay and dividends. A somewhat singular attempt to renew the censorship in another form has been tried upon the Madrid press, not without effect. A society called the Compañia de la Porra, or, as we might render it in English, the Companions of the Cudgel, has been formed in the capital for the purpose of visiting newspaper offices in force and beating with sticks writers of unpalatable views. The advantage of this mode of controversy is seen at a glance, especially when we remember that the assailants are three or four to one, and are armed beforehand. Fair play, so valued in England, is despised in Spain as deliberate weakness, and not only custom but law is in favour of assassins. Thus everybody who sees a man stabbed here runs away, and as nobody can be convicted except on the evidence of two eye-witnesses, few practices are safer than assassination. The judges, too, even when not bribed, are so dilatory that the murderers of the Acting Civil Governor of Taragona last year are still waiting the friendly hug of the congenial garrots. When to this kind of fact we add that though the taxation has become almost intolerable the town councils are generally insolvent, it will be seen that it is nearly time for the revolutionists of 1868 to be beginning the practical part of their reforms. Ir is a long lane that has no turning, and it | of the correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, is pleasant to be able to record one circumstance appears to have been the treatment of the Châin connection with the invasion of France that teau de Beauregard, the seat of the De Bauffrereflects credit on all concerned. The correspond-mont family, about two miles distant from Verent of the Cologne Gazette, writing from Versailles, says he is living quite alone in a most beautifully furnished house which has been forsaken by its owner, who, before leaving, fastened a strip of paper to the door, on which was written an expression of his confidence that his property would be safe under the chivalrous protection of Prussian officers, to whose care he entrusted it. He has not been disappointed in this confidence, for not a pin has been moved from its place; the only thing that has been disturbed is a small needle-case belonging to the lady of the house, nor was it meddled with except under circumstances of a most urgent and distressing nature. The correspondent of the Cologne Gazette had the misfortune to tear his trousers; in the agony of the moment he could not resist taking advantage of the contents of a small étui with silver mountings lying on the table, but having repaired the rent in his garment he failed not to put everything back in its place, also enclosing his visiting card, on which were written bis excuses for the liberty he had taken. Very different, according to the account sailles, which is occupied by a Prussian general and his staff. The correspondent of the Telegraph paid a visit to this officer, and gives not only an account of the mass of confusion in which every article of furniture was lying in heaps, but also enters into a detail of various articles of ladies' clothing scattered about, and also minutely describes the arrangements of the duchess's bedroom. The visit was enlivened by the facetious general diving into drawer after drawer and fishing out with the tips of his fingers "some mysterious article of intimate clothing," occasionally "throwing over his epauletted shoulder a burnous glowing with all the colours of the rainbow, or investing his martial grey head with a smart capuchin of the latest Parisian mode.' The general's conduct may have been justified by the "rules of war," but it was hardly necessary to publish in the Telegraph a correct list of the wardrobe of the unfortunate lady whose property has fallen into hands less scrupulous than those of the cor respondent of the Cologne Gazette. Pall Mall Gazette. of the arch. But it is now known that very perfect arches were built in Egypt, in Assyria, and in Babylonia, centuries before Nebuchadnezzar's time, and so the question is simplified. The ancient Romans, when they had to carry stone aqueduct across a deep ravine, sometimes built three or four tiers of arches one above another, till the required level to which the water was to be carried was reached. In the same manner, only on a larger scale, were the hanging gardens raised. They bullt one storey of arches, covering the required space; on this was placed a second storey, and thus was storey after storey raised. The Architect, DESIROUS of aiding the English Eclipse Expedition, Prof. Peirce has addressed the following letter to Mr. Lockyer. It is to be hoped that observers will take advantage of the opportunity so magnificently afforded them: "Fenton's Hotel. THE fickle Parisians, it seems, were not content with effacing every allusion to the Emperor in public places; their dames have determined upon abolishing all marks of the Empress's influence from their dress. According to a Bordeaux paper, which professes to have received a communication upon this important subject by balloon, all the fashions set or sustained by the once supreme Eugénie have received their final sentence of condemnation. Every style of form or adornment which has been prevalent under the Empire-notably the many details which were adopted from Marie Antoinette or Mme. de Pompadour is being ruthlessly abandoned, and a reform of a radical nature introduced. Even the luxuriant coiffures which have been so long in favour are said to be doomed. The chignon itself is no more; and blonde hair, which has turned so many heads during the last ten years, is to be abjured, as the remnant of a barbaric age. The terms in which this natural, or artificial, peculiarity is stigmatized by the writer are so personally spiteful towards an illustrious lady and her Court that it ought not, perhaps, to be quoted. This is what she says- the sex of course is taken for granted :-" Taking advantage of the flight of certain personages who had grey, thin, or red hair, and who inflicted on fashion their indispensable false hair, our Parisian ladies have at once restored to liberty their own locks, so long hid under the despotic artificial chignon. Brown plaits, carefully smoothed down, light ringlets, at once graceful and natural, have alone adorned for some days the delicate and pretty heads of our young ladies, who are delighted to have their most beautiful adornment restored to them." We are not told what ladies are to do who are not young, and who have not delicate or pretty heads, or whose hair, besides not being brown, is not abundant enough to bear careful smoothing or to flow in the form of ringlets; but it may be supposed that under the one fashion as under the other, the principle of assuming a virtue if you have it not will equally prevail. We suspect, however, that prudent ladies, in or out of France, will pause before revolutionizing their charms until the elections shall have declared for or against the Provisional Government. It is all very well Lo! as the marshalling shades of eve invest for men to pull down such things as empires The wide gray earth, and wide wild heavens without having anything to maintain in their "MY DEAR SIR, I have been directed by the Governm nt of the United States to have the best possible observations made of the total eclipse of next December. If I could aid the cause of Astron omy by assisting the observers of England in their investigation of this phenomenon I should be greatly pleased. I take the liberty therefore to invite your attendance, and also that of other emi nent physicists of England, with either of the parties of my expedition, one of which will go to Spain and the other to Sicily. Yours very respectfully and faithfully, "BENJAMIN PEIRCE. "J. Norman Lockyer, Esq., F.R.S." Of course it would have been better had English observers, who have devoted their attention to solar physics, gone out under the English flag; but science is of no country, and they may well be proud to join such a distinguished corps as that with which they are asked to associate themselves. To gray, A WINTER EVENING. ing west, Nature. warm them at the embers of the day! place; but it is not to be expected that ladies How the coll clouds crowd round the smoulderwill make frights of themselves unnecessarily by following fashions set by doubtful authority. In the cause of consistency, too, they might find it necessary to assume sackcloth and ashes before many days are over. Pall Mall Gazette. THE ARCH IN BABYLON. -It had long been a question how the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were supported at so great a height the idea being, until lately, taken for granted that the Babylonians did not understand the principle A night, A star-point pierces keenly here and there; No. 1390.-January 21, 1871. CONTENTS. 1. CASTLE ST. ANGELO. By W. W. Story. Part I., Blackwood's Magazine,. PRENTICESHIP. Part IV. Translated for 3. THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF IMPERIALISM IN 1870, . Fritz Reuter,. Fraser's Magazine, 223 Spectator, 251 Spectator, 253 234 194 MARTIAL'S EPITAPH ON a Child, 234 234 222, 234, 255, 256 POETRY. 194 NOVEMBER, NUMBERS OF THE LIVING AGE WANTED. The publishers are in want of Nos. 1179 and 1180 (dated respectively Jan. 5th and Jan. 12th, 1867) of THE LIVING AGE. To subscribers, or others, who will do us the favor to send us either or both of those numbers, we will return an equivalent, either in our publications or in cash, until our wants are supplied. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for. warded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor where we have to pay commission for forwarding the money. Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars. Any Volume Bound, 3 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers. PREMIUMS FOR CLUBS. For 5 new subscribers ($40.), a sixth copy; or a set of HORNE'S INTRODUCTION TO THE Bible, unabridged, in 4 large volumes, cloth, price $10; or any 5 of the back volumes of the LIVING AGE, in num bers, price $10. Listen, oh, listen! Is not that their singing?. That ever-eddying round, Now sinks and pauses dying, and then rises, And if the words be theirs that fill my fancy, Cease ere your song prevail! Ah!- it is over!- and I was but dreaming Where yet lies hid a truth of subtle meaning, come down, oh, Except as he becometh beast, or angel, Come down, and taste the cool calm rest that And though in truth we hear no Syren voices waits you, Below the changeful seas! "Above, the fiery summer sunbeams scorch you, And the hard winter chills, Below, is neither burning heat of summer, "Above, your eyes are blinded by the sun- Or look in vain for light. Below, a soft green twilight reigns for ever, Of equal day and night. "The earth is full of care, of wild endeavour, That seldom brings suceess, Of griefs that sap the strength, and dim the eyesight, And joys that do not bless. "There all things change,- your very griefs pass by you, And fast your joys decay, And the strong passions of your hate and an "Life flieth fast, and falleth quickly from you. "But, down with us, no wear iness nor labour And the fierce fire of passion, and of longing, "For here, perpetual pleasure steeps the senses Closing the wounds you bring from life's wild struggle, With its soft healing balm. Luring to shameful ease, Yet yearnings rise within us as we listen From Blackwood's Magazine. PART I. BY W. W. STORY. "Das grosste Werke dieser Art im Abendlande zugleich das Schicksalreichste in seinen Erinnereine Geschichte in der Geschichte."- Von Reumont, "Geschichte der Stadt Rom.," vol. i. ungen p. 471. the great days of Rome bore the ashes of her pagan emperors across that bridge to the sounding chambers of the mighty Mausoleum, have vanished, and a motley Christian crowd now passes over these ancient arches, through which the swift river has whirled its turbulent current for so many generations; swift, like the river of time - turbulent, like the hisAMONG the massive remains of Imperial tory of the place; fleeting never to reRome, one of the most imposing is the turn, like the generations that have Mausoleum or Mole of Hadrian, now passed. known as the Castle St. Angelo. It stands on the site where once were the gardens of Domitia,* overlooking the undulating plains of the Campagna in its rear, and stretching out its long covered corridor to the Vatican. Poised on its summit, and dark against the blue Italian sky, towers the bronze figure of the Archangel Michael, as if he had just alighted with outspread wings and floating mantle, and paused there in the act of sheathing his sword. Beneath it flows the Tiber, in whose tawny and troubled waters it has cast its wavering reflection for nearly eighteen centuries. There, standing apart from all other buildings, it lifts its battlemented towers and bastions like a guard or a menace to the closely-built city lying across the river before it, and challenges every passenger who, crossing the ancient Ælian Bridge, passes before it on his way to the great Basilica of St. Peter. The bridge has changed its name as well as the Mausoleum, and is now called the Ponte St. Angelo. The statues of gods and heroes placed there by Hadrian have disappeared, and on their pedestals stand the sculptured saints of Bernini, fantastic in their draperies and grotesque in their attitudes, but picturesque in their general effect. The funeral processions, which in So, at least, it would seem from a passage in Capitolinus, where he says of Hadrian, "Reliquias ejus Romam pervexit sancte et reverenter atque in hortis Domitia collocavit." But, according to Casaubon, the term "collocare" is to be distinguished from "condere " and "sepelire"-and the meaning of this passage may be, that the ashes of Hadrian were merely temporarily collocated or laid in state in the gardens of Domitia, and afterwards transferred to the Mausoleum. Where precisely these gardens were we are nowhere clearly told by any ancient writer- unless they be the " Hortes Domitii" (not Domitia) mentioned by Publius Victor as being in the fourteenth region of the city. On festal days from the tower and bastions of the Castle float the great painted gonfalons of the Church, and from its battlements whirl out white wreaths of smoke as the black mouths of cannon thunder forth their salvos. Along its ramparts flash the glittering bayonets of soldiers, and the shriek of trumpets and the rattle of drums is heard. The bridge, too, is alive with crowds that are hurrying to St. Peter's. Over its pavement jar the gilded coaches of cardinals, dragged by black stallions with nodding scarlet plumes, and clung to by lackeys in harlequin liveries. There, too, may be seen the more modest equipages of ambassadors and princes and nobles not of the Church. Mounted dragoons with gleaming helmets wave their swords at the head of the bridge to warn off the rush of cabs that are forced to take the other route- - forced, despite the earnest remonstrances of ladies in black veils, who lean out and implore the dragoons, and of English improvised lord-lieutenants in red uniforms, sometimes mounted on the box with the driver, who threaten and gesticulate in an unknown tongue. But the motley mob of foot-passengers are all free to pass; and picturesque enough they are as they crowd along, mixed quaintly together, monks, soldiers, and beggars of course, for, as the saying runs, the bridge is never free of these. Then there are peasants in bright-coloured costumes; sisters of charity in black, with their stiff white linen head-gear; schools of boys dressed like little sad old men in black coats and tall hats; flocks and trains of charity-children; all the lame and mutilated beggars in town limping on crutches; laughing squads of Paini and Trasteverini, the men with their jackets hung over their |