200 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



[March 6, 1S&5. 



ling amorous follies ■with our most serious discourse, I must 

 tell you, that in love and the mathematicks, people reason 

 much alike. Allow ever so little to a lover, yet presently 

 you must grant him more, nay more and more, -which will 

 at last go a great way. In like manner, grant but a mathe- 

 matician one little principle, he immediately draws a con- 

 sequence from it, to which you must necessarily assent ; 

 and from this consequence another, till he leads you so far 

 (whether you will or no) that you have much ado to believe 

 him. These two sorts of people, lovers and mathematicians, 

 will always take more than you give 'em. You grant, that 

 when two things are like one another in all visible respects, 

 it is possible they may be like one another in those things 

 that are not visible, if you have not some good reason to 

 believe otherwise. Now this way of arguing have I made 

 use of. The moon, says I, is inhabited, because she is like 

 the earth ; and the other planets are inhabited, because 

 they are like the moon : I find the fix'd stars to be like our 

 sun, therefore I attribute to them what is proper to him. 

 You are now gone too far to be able to retreat, therefore 

 you must go forward with a good grace." 

 {To ie continued.) 



(CiCtorial (gossiip. 



In the face of the Imperial expenditure to which we 

 are committed, will no disinterested member of Parliament 

 question the Government as to whether anv mon?y will 

 this year be asked for, for that wretched sham, the 

 " Committee on Solar Physics 1 " 



Judging from the report of the appeal in the case of 

 Watson r. Ellis, on Saturday last, the Lord Chief Justice 

 would seem even to have gone out of his way to encourage 

 the study of astronomy. At all events, he is stated to 

 have exclaimed, " Surely a pedestrian can look up at the 

 stirs without being guilty of negligence 1 If in doing so 

 he is tripped up by something placed on the pavement, 

 which he does not see, where is the negligence 1 " 



Enthusiastic amateurs and students may hence gather 

 that they will be justified in learning the constellations in 

 the most crowded thoroughfares, in sublime disregard of 

 the consequences. Speaking merely for myself, though, if 

 any stellar devotee should walk down St. James's-street 

 with his eyes steadily fixed on Urste Majoris, and should 

 happen to run against me, I am a good deal afraid that 

 the iaipulse to give him a hearty shove would be 

 irresistible. 



In pointing out, on p. 1.33, the evil results which must 

 inevitably accrue from the establishment of a Court of 

 Criminal Appeal, I little thought that such an illustration 

 of the truth of my contention as that afforded by the 

 action of the Home Secretary only last week would so soon 

 occur to justify them. Xo more wicked, brutal, and inde- 

 fensible murder than that of poor Miss Keyse by John 

 Lee, at Babbacombe, has been committed for a long time ; 

 and yet the vulgar, heartless, and revengeful brute who 

 perpetrated it is (thanks to the Eight Honourable Sir 

 William Vernon-Harcourt) still permitted to cumber the 

 earth for an indefinite period. And why 1 Simply because 

 the drop of the gallows stuck, and three successive 

 attempts to carry out the most righteous verdict of the 

 law failed ! Of course, it would have been so very 

 shocking to have finally and effectually throttled this 



ungrateful monster, who was so studiously careful of 

 the feelings of others. The kind-hearted aod benevolent 

 old lady, who tried to rescue him from a career of 

 crime, is, with her poor cloven head and scorched limbs, 

 still and cold in her grave. Don't let us waste any 

 sympathy upon hfr. By all means, let us reserve it 

 for the hardened scoundrel who so awfully mutilated and 

 hacked the life out of her. But let us see where this lands 

 us. A wealthy man, we will say, hereafter commits murder, 

 and is sentenced to be hanged. His friends " get at " the 

 hangman, who, for a "consideration" of £1,000, or even 

 .£100, disorganises his ghastly apparatus, and prevents it 

 from acting ; and some fussy idiot posts up to the Home 

 Secretary ot the day to say that his subordinate has failed to 

 hang the culprit. If that Home Secretary should vinfcr- 

 tunately happen to be a Sir William Harcourt, he mufct, 

 to be consistent, reprieve the gentleman, and add another 

 item of proof to the allegation that Money can do any- 

 thing, when the ordinary course of Justice is permitted 

 to be interfered or tampered with. 



Another and an indefinitely more pleasant occurrence 

 of last week is worth a word of mention here. I refer to 

 the opening of the new premises of the Hampstead 

 Public Library and Literary Institution, which has been 

 in existence more than fifty years : and which numbered 

 Samuel Rogers, Joanna Baillie, Constable, and Linnell 

 among its first shareholders and subscribers. Verily we 

 may exclaim with Borbonius, " Omnia mutantur, nos et 

 mutamrtr in illis," in connection with the popular litera- 

 ture of this period in the lives of the authors of " The 

 Pleasures of Memory " and the " Plays of the Passions," 

 and that of the present day. A morning newspaper then 

 cost sevenpence, to be reduced to fivepence a few years sub- 

 sequently ; and books, magazines (such as they were), and 

 pamphlets were costly in proportion. It was, however, 

 about this date that the Society for the Diffu.'-ion of Useful 

 Knowledge and the Messrs. Chambers, of Edinburgh, 

 appeared, almost simultaneously, as the precursors of the 

 army of modem purveyors of cheap and good literature 

 which is now so abundant. The first number of Chambers's 

 Edinburgh Journal appeared on Feb. 4, 1832 ; the first 

 number of The Penny Magazine on March 31, in the same 

 year ; and the first number of the Penny Cydojmdia 

 during the succeeding ona Marvels as these were (justly) 

 then considered, they suffer terribly by comparison with 

 corresponding works in the present day ; and I can fancy 

 with what astonishment a frequenter of the Hampstead 

 Reading-room of fifty years ago would look upon the 

 profusion of ably-written and beautifully-illustrated series 

 of all sorts and sizes which now crowd the tables then bo 

 much more sparsely covered. 



If it be too much to ask our very numerous correspoa- 

 dents all to write sense, I may, perhaps, plead with them 

 that they might, at all events, take sutEcient pains to write 

 legibly. Some of the communications which reach me are 

 penned in a fashion which prompts me to consign them to 

 the waste-paper basket forthwith. In the case of others, if, 

 by long, painful, and deliberate examination, I succeed in 

 deciphering enough to show me that they really do contain 

 something worth printing, I mark them for insertion, and 

 trust to Providence (and the compositor) for the result. 

 Really, though, the caligraphy of many would-be con- 

 tributors reminds me of that of Horace Greeley ; of 

 whom the story is told that, like many other of his 

 countrymen, following numerous and diverse pursuits, he 

 once started as a writing-master. As a " copy " for his 

 class, he wrote on the black-board, " Virtue is its ovfn 



