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house yard. She had just laid me on a corner of the table while she took out of her pocket the leather bag in which she kept her treasures, as four young men dressed in modish surtouts came along. Arm in arm, they engrossed the whole breadth of the pavement, a long skirt, expanded by a puff of wind, brushed me to the ground, and I flew down the street faster than the enraged huckster could pursue me. The young men laughed, while she scolded and swore: "This comes, said she, of sweeping the streets with your nasty coat tails-you had better cut half of them off, and give them to poor folks that have none!" Some children that were passing, assisted her, and I was recovered, not much to my gratification, for a flight in the air was a pleasure I could not often obtain. I went from her to a black woman who had made her a Sunday bonnet. She carried me to her master's kitchen and stuffed me into the socket of an old candlestick, a habitation not quite so pleasant as Elizabeth's perfumed handkerchief.

(To be continued.)

REMARKABLE MOUNTAIN IN CHINA.

(With an Engraving.)

THE engraving prefixed to this number of The Port Folio, represents a pass through or over one of the mountains that divide the province of Kiang-see from the province of Quang-tong. They form a chain running from east to west. Their basis is of strata.

granite, over which are gravelly and calcareous

As it is a monument of that true benevolence which is rarely to be found, we have been induced to preserve the memory of it in our Journal. The following extract will illustrate the engraving.

The travellers began in a little time to ascend the highest of these eminences, the summit of which was confounded with the clouds above it. Two of these clouds, as they appeared to be to some of the spectators, were without motion, and left a void regular space between them; but after the travellers had ascended a long way upon a circuitous road, so traced for the purpose of be

ing practicable for horsemen, they were astonished to find that these apparently steady clouds formed, themselves, the summit of the mountain, cut down by dint of labour, to a very considerable depth, in order to render the ascent somewhat less steep. Difficult as his passage still continues, it is so much less so than before the top of the mountain was thus cut through, that the statue of the mandarin who had it done, is honoured with a niche in some of the Chinese temples hereabouts. At this pass a military post is established.

While the volume is in our hand, we are tempted to copy a few instances of the cunning of this singular people.

I bought of a blind man in the street, says our traveller, a cornelia japonica, which had fine double white and red flowers. But by further observing it in my room, I found that the flowers were taken from another tree, and one calyx was so neatly fixed in the other with nails of bamboo, that I should scarce have found it out if the flowers had not begun to wither. The tree itself had only buds, but no open flowers. I learned from this instance, that whoever would deal with the Chinese, must use his utmost circumspection, and even then run the risk of being cheated.

One of my countrymen who bought some chickens, the feathers of which were curiously curled, found in a few days time the feathers growing straight, and that the chickens were of the most common sort. The Chinese had curled the feathers like a wig a little before he was going to sell them.

This is an instance of a Chinese who spares neither time nor pains if he can only gain money, whether by fair or fraudulent

means.

Sometimes you think you have bought a capon, and you receive nothing but skin; all the rest has been scooped out, and its place so ingeniously filled, that the deception cannot be discovered until the moment you are going to eat.

The counterfeit hams of the Chinese are also curious. They are made of a piece of wood cut in the form of a ham, and coated over with a certain kind of earth, which is covered with hogs' skin. The whole is so curiously prepared, that a knife is necessary to detect the fraud.

FOR THE PORT FOLIO-AN AUTHOR'S EVENINGS.

EDITORS of periodical journals, who are obliged to go on "in season and out of season," and are never paid half so well as the mechanics whom they employ, may be compared to grasshoppers. Whilst these insects sing over their cups all summer, they starve in winter; and for a little vain merriment they find a sorrowful reckoning in the end.

BURTON. That laborious collector, Wood, describes the author of the "Anatomie of Melancholy" as "an exact mathematician, a curious calculator of nativities, a general read scholar, a thorough-paced philologist, and one that understood the surveying of lands well. As he was by many accounted a severe student, a devourer of authors, a melancholy and humorous person; so by others, who knew him well, a person of great honesty, plain dealing and charity. I have heard," continues the biographer, some of the ancients of Christ church often say, that his company was very merry, facete and juvenile; and no man in his time did surpass him for his ready and dextrous interlarding his common discourses among them with verses from the poets, or sentences from classic authors; which being then all the fashion in the university, made his company more acceptable."

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MONTAIGNE. The pleasure which we derive from the pe. rusal of this merry Gascon is the more singular, because it is not owing to any happy fictions, nor to any continued interest, learned researches, brilliant eloquence, or even exactness of method, that he charms his readers. His book is nothing but a collection of detached thoughts: he seems to abandon himself to all the extravagancies of his imagination; and in wandering from one subject to another, he loses himself in a labyrinth of tales and reveries, without confusing himself, or seeming to care whether the reader follows him. He never read any thing but some Latin poets, a few voyages, and his own Seneca and Plutarch. He supported himself upon the works of the latter, appropriating all their beauties, and employing them, with a felicity of selection and a degree of ease and frankness peculiar to himself.

The works of Plutarch are an inexhaustible mine of knowledge. Montaigne has extracted the ore, and accompanied it with beautiful reflections, the result of his own experience. He trequently quotes Plutarch, because he was his favourite author: he speaks often of himself, because it was a subject which he had examined thoroughly, in the conviction that the best manner of studying mankind was to become acquainted with his own feelings, affections and thoughts. The only rule which he seems to have prescribed to himself, is never to speak but of those things which possess extraordinary interest. To this we may ascribe the energy and vivacity of his expressions, and the gracefulness and originality of his language. His genius possessed that confidence and amiable frankness, which we find among the children of the well born, whose manners have not been constrained by education and the customs of the world.

The great freedom with which he writes has given an air of negligence to his style; but it is, nevertheless, highly distinguished for its vigour and its variety. Montaigne lived at a period when the wonder excited by important discoveries, the fury of civil wars, and the rancour of polemical disputes, contributed to throw, not only France, but all Europe, into the greatest fermentation: it was favourable to the display of his genius, and, by a singular felicity, he escaped the trammels of party. His philosophy is a labyrinth, in which all the world may wander, and his plan may be comprehended at a single glance.

TACITUS.-The character of Tacitus as an historian, though it is, upon the whole, deservedly high, yet it cannot, in every respect, escape our censure. He possessed powers adequate to the task of speculating upon the affairs of men, as becomes a philosopher. His sensibility catched those delicate shades in the human character, of which ordinary observers lose sight amidst its great outlines. His fancy suggested the precise emotions most likely to arise in a trying situation, led him to adopt that by which such emotions seek vent, and to seize the circumstances, in every object described, which strike the object first, and bring the rest along with them. His judgment discriminated the genuine from the spurious, however artfully embellished, and, in the action even

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