April 28. CHRONOLOGY. J. In 1658, during this month, the accomplished colonel Richard Lovelace died in the Gatehouse at Westminster, whither he had been committed for his devotion to the interests and fortunes of the Stuart family. His celebrity is preserved by some elegant poems; one is especially remarkable for natural imagery, and beautiful expression of noble thought :— When love with unconfined wings To whisper at my grates; When flowing cups ran swiftly round Know no such libertie. When, linnet-like, confined I Stone walls do not a prison make, If I have freedom in my love, And in my soule am free, Angels alone, that soare above, Enjoy such libertie NATURALISTS' CALENDAR. Mean Temperature. . . 50. 21. April 29. THE APRIL OF 1826. This month is remarkable for the endurance of great suffering by many thousands of English artisans. In a "Statement to the Right Hon. Robert Peel, by the Hand-loom Weavers of Blackburn," they say— "Our dwellings are totally destitute of every comfort. "Every article of value has disappeared, either to satisfy the cravings of hunger, or to appease the clamour of relentless creditors. "Thousands who were once possessed of an honest independence gained by laborious industry, are now sunk in the lowest depths of poverty. "Were the humane man to visit the dwellings of four-fifths of the weavers, and see the miserable pittance which sixteen hours' hard labour can procure, even of those who are fully employed, divided between the wretched parents and their starving little ones, he would sicken at the sight. "When we look upon our starving wives and children, and have no bread to give them, we should consider ourselves still more degraded than we are, as undeserving the name of Englishmen, were we to withhold our complaint from his majesty's government, or to abstain from speaking in proper terms of what we consider the present unparalleled distress which exists among the weavers; and we implore you, sir, by all the ties which bind the patriot to his country, by that anxiety for the welfare of England which you have frequently evinced, to use that influence which you possess with his majesty's government towards procuring an amelioration of the condition of the most injured and oppressed class of his majesty's subjects." The rev. Joseph Fletcher of Mile-end corroborates these statements by local acquaintance with the districts, and affirms of his own knowledge, that "the recent causes of commercial distress have pro duced unparalleled misery." "In the town of Blackburn and its vicinity, it has reached its highest point of aggravation. At the present crisis, upwards of seven thousand looms are unemployed in Blackburn, and nearly fourteen thousand persons have been compelled to depend on the bounty of the inhabitants; and as, according to the late census, Blackburn contains about twentyone thousand inhabitants, two-thirds of the population are in a state of utter destitution. "The remaining number of the middle and higher classes of society, bears a far less proportion to the population than in any part of the kingdom, while the same disproportion exists amidst a teeming and immense population in the villages and hamlets of the district. "Thus, the accessible sources of relief are diminished, and the means of alleviation are not in the power of those whose very dependence for their own supply rests on the destitute themselves." The pleasure of the very poor man, while he endures the privations of his ordinary condition, is the mere absence of bodily disease; and he patiently awaits the time when his life shall depart, and his body shall be buried at the parish expense, and his family shall walk from his funeral into the workhouse. This is his state in the best of times; but, in a season of general calamity to his class, when the barely sufficient sources of existence fail, his death is no provision for his wife and children; then the poor are rated for the maintenance of the poor; whole parishes became paupers; and the district must necessarily be supported by voluntary contributions throughout the country. The dwelling of the very poor man is always cheerless; but the abode of indigence, reduced to starvation, is a cave of despair. Thousands of families are perishing for lack of food at the moment when this is written. From him who has a little, a little is required-and from him who has much, much is required-that the plague of famine be stayed. The case is beyond the reach of legislation, but clearly within the power of associated benevolence to mitigate. A cry or hunger is gone forth-is the ear deaf, that it cannot hear?—are the hands that have been often effectually stretched forth, shortened that they cannot save? At THE POOR MAN'S HOME. "Home is home, though it is never so homely." Exceptions to this position are taken by ELIA, who, as regards the poor man, deems it a "fallacy," to which "crowded places of cheap entertainment, and the benches of alehouses, if they could speak, would bear mournful testimony." "To them the very poor man resorts for an image of the home, which he cannot find at home. For a starved grate, and a scanty firing, that is not enough to keep alive the natural heat in the fingers of so many shivering children with their mother, he finds in the depth of winter always a blazing hearth, and a hob to warm his pittance of beer by. Instead of the clamours of a wife, made gaunt by famishing, he meets with a cheerful attendance beyond the merits of the trifle which he can afford to spend. He has companions which his home denies him, for the very poor man can ask no visiters. He can look into the goings on of the world, and speak a little to politics. home there are no politics stirring but the domestic. All interests, real or imaginary, all topics that should expand the mind of man, and connect him with a sympathy to general existence, are crushed in the absorbing consideration of food to be obtained for the family. Beyond the price of bread, news is senseless and impertinent. At home there is no larder. Here there is at least a show of plenty; and while he cooks his lean scrap of butcher's meat before the common bars, or munches his humble cold viands, his relishing bread and cheese with an onion, in a corner, where no one reflects upon his poverty, he has sight of the substantial joint providing for the landlord and his family. He takes an interest in the dressing of it; and while he assists in removing the trivet from the fire, he feels that there is such a thing as beef and cabbage, which he was beginning to forget at home. All this while he deserts his wife and children. But what wife, and what children? Prosperous men, who object to this desertion, image to themselves some clean contented family like that which they go home to. look at the countenance of the poor wives who follow and persecute their good man to the door of the public-house, which he is about to enter, when something like shame would restrain him, if stronger misery did not induce him to pass the threshold. That face, ground by But want, in which every cheerful, every con- casual street-talk, between a poor woman and her little girl, a woman of the better sort of poor, in a condition rather above the squalid beings which we have been It is not of toys, of contemplating. nursery books, of summer holidays (fitting that age); of the promised sight, or play; of praised sufficiency at school. It is of mangling and clear starching, of the price of coals, or of potatoes. The questions of the child, that should be the very outpourings of curiosity in idleness, are marked with forecast and melancholy providence. It has come to be a woman, before it was a child. It has learned to go to market; it chaffers. It haggles, it envies, it murmurs; it is knowing, acute, sharpened; it never prattles. Had we not reason to say that the home of the very poor is no home ?”* April 30. CHRONOLOGY. On the 30th of April, 1745, the battle of Fontenoy was fought between the allied armies of England, Holland, and Austria, under the command of the duke of Cumberland, and a superior French count De Saxe. army, under marshal Here the advantage of the day was to the French; the duke of Cumberland left his sick and wounded to the humanity of the victors, and Louis XV. obtained the mastery of the Netherlands. The battle was commenced with the formal politeness of a court minuet. Captain Lord Charles Hay, of the English guards, advanced from the ranks with his hat off; at the same moment, lieutenant count D'Auteroche, of the French guards, advanced also, uncovered, to meet him. Lord Charles bowed :-"Gentleman of the French guards," said he, "fire!" The count bowed to lord Charles. "No my lord," he answered, "we never fire first!" They again bowed; each resumed his place in his own ranks; and after these testimonies of "high consideration," the bloody conflict commenced, and there was a carnage of twelve thousand men on each side. NATURALISTS' CALENDAR. New Monthly Magazine, March, 1826. Also, in calendars, the month of May And there they talk unheard, and walk unseen, The month of May was deemed by the they made several expiations, they prohibited marrying in May. On the first day of May the Roman ladies sacrificed to Bona Dea, the Good Goddess, or the Earth, represented in the Frontispiece to the first volume of the Every-Day Book, with the zodiacal signs of the celestial system, which influences our sphere to produce its fruits in due order. It is in May that "Spring is with us once more pacing the earth in all the primal pomp of her beauty, with flowers and soft airs and the song of birds every where about her, and the blue sky and the bright clouds above. But there is one thing wanting, to give that happy completeness to her advent, which belonged to it in the elder times; and without which it is like a beautiful melody with out words, or a beautiful flower without scent, or a beautiful face without a soul. The voice of man is no longer heard, hailing her approach as she hastens to bless him; and his choral symphonies no longer meet and bless her in return-bless her by letting her behold and hear the happiness that she comes to create. The soft songs of women are no longer blended with her breath as it whispers among the new leaves; their slender feet no longer trace her footsteps in the fields and woods and wayside copses, or dance delighted measures round the flowery offerings that she prompted their lovers to place before thern on the village green. Even the little children themselves, that have an instinct for the spring, and feel it to the very tips of their fingers, are permitted to let May come upon them, without knowing from whence the impulse of happiness that they feel proceeds, or whither it tends. In short, All the earth is gay; Land and sea Give themselves up to jollity, while man, man alone, lets the season come without glorying in it; and when it goes he lets it go without regret; as if all seasons and their change were alike to him; or rather, as if he were the lord of all seasons, and they were to do homage and honour to him, instead of he to them! How is this? Is it that we have sold our birthright for a mess of pottage?'-that we have bartered our being's end and aim' for a purse of gold? Alas! thus it is: 'The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away-a sordid boon! -But be this as it may, we are still able to feel what nature is, though we have in a great measure ceased to know it; though we have chosen to neglect her ordinances, and absent ourselves from her presence, we still retain some instinctive reminiscences of her beauty and her power; and every now and then the sordid walls of those mud hovels which we have built for ourselves, and choose to dwell in, fall down before the magic touch of our involuntary fancies, and give us glimpses into " that imperial palace whence we came," and make us yearn to return thither, though it be but in thought. 'Then sing ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song! And let the young lambs bound We in thought will join your throng, |