a heroine at the Porte St. Martin, I believe, was enlisted into the corps of the Français, to run a-tilt with Mars. This extraordinary arrangement was talked of, and asserted, and contradicted, and believed, and disbelieved, till the noise of it filled all Paris. You will hardly wonder, then, that the appearance of this drama has created much sensation, or that the desire to see it should extend beyond the circle of M. Hugo's young admirers. I have been told that, as soon as this arrangement was made publicly known, the application for boxes became very numerous. The author was permitted to examine the list of all those who had applied, and no boxes were positively promised until he had done so. Before the night that the first representation was fixed, a large party of friends and admirers assembled at the poet's house, and, amongst them, expunged from this list the names of all such persons as were either known or suspected to be hostile to him or his school. Whatever deficiencies this exclusive system produced in the box-book were supplied by his particular partisans. The result on this first night was a brilliant success." And such was the result on many and many a night after. It should be known, that it is the custom in France to allow the author a very large number of admissions for his friends on the first representation of his piece, and they are always admitted into the pit before the profane multitude. Victor Hugo is at the head of a school, says Mrs. Trollope, and he must have many followers. That he did more than avail himself of the privilege always accorded, it will require more than Mrs. Trollope's flippant assertion to induce us to believe That he interfered with box lists is manifestly absurd. As to Madame Dorval, she is an admirable actress in her own peculiar walk domestic tragedy and comedy; the walk of Mrs. Yates upon our stage. Angelo is a domestic tragedy: Madame Dorval's acting in it is excellent. As a proof of her quality, we need only say to the Loudon playgoer, that, in the performances at the Porte St. Martin, she has been wont to divide the applauses with M. Frederic Lemaitre. But neither time nor space permit us to write of V. Hugo's works as they would deserve at present. We have done, too, with Mrs.Trollope's criticisms, and with herself. i VOL XIII. NO. LXXIV. No. LXIX. MICHAEL FARADAY, F.R.S., HON. D.C.L. OXON, ETC. ETC. HERE you have him in his glory-not that his position was in-glorious when he stood uncovered before Melbourne-then decorated with a blue velvet travelling-cap, and lounging with one leg over an arm of the chair of CANNING!— and distinctly gave that illustrious despiser of "humbug" to understand that he had mistaken his lad: no! but here you have him, as he first flashed upon the intelligence of mankind the condensation of the gases, or the identity of the five electricities. Here stands-anno ætatis 42-at the head of one of the noblest of the sciences-honoured as the compeer of Cuvier, Laplace, and Buckland--the son of a poor blacksmith, who was apprenticed at nine years of age to an obscure bookbinder in Blandford Street, and earned his bread by that humble calling until he was twenty-two! These are the spectacles on which, of all that history presents, we dwell with the highest exultation. And yet such are occasionally furnished in the renown of men whose labours do not bring in what Cupid pays to the unfasting Monsieur that trims his hoary whiskers. Faraday's revenue, when he stood before the recumbent premier, amounted, perhaps, to one-tenth of what the national treasury bestows on Tom Young, whose "chemical manipulation" has been exclusively, we believe, developed in the composition of a salad; for which art he is extolled, with just enthusiasm, by his brother savant, Beak Walker, author of The Original. Well, although Young got Broderip to write a sort of defence of his master, and "Justice B- "mirabile dictu! got Hook to print it in the John Bull, the current of public feeling could not be stopped: REGINA spoke out Melbourne apologised — and WILLIAM REX, as in duty bound, followed "Michael's pension, Michael's pension," is all right. The only two persons, besides Us and himself, to whom he is after all under any solid obligations, are not to be looked for in the records of Downing Street or the Pavilion. Ned Magrath, now secretary to the Athenæum, happening five-and-twenty years ago to enter the shop of Ribeau, observed one of the bucks of the paper-bonnet zealously studying a book he ought to have been binding. Electricity.' He approached-it was a volume of the old Britannica, open at He entered into talk with the greasy journeyman, and was astonished to find in him a self-taught chemist of no slender dimensions. He presented him with a set of tickets for Davy's lectures at the Royal Institution; and daily thereafter might the nondescript be seen perched, pen in hand, and his eyes starting out of his head, just over the clock, opposite the chair. At last the course terminated; but Faraday's spirit had received a new impulse, which nothing but dire necessity could have restrained and from that he was saved by the promptitude with which, on his forwarding a modest outline of his history, with the notes he had made of these lectures, to Davy, that great and good man (so abominably caricatured by the ass Paris) rushed to the rescue of kindred genius. Sir Humphry immediately appointed him an assistant in the laboratory; and, after two or three years had passed, he found Faraday qualified to act as his secretary. The steps of his subsequent progress are well-known: he travelled over the Continent with Sir H. and Lady Davy--and he is now what Davy was when he first saw Davy-in all but money. And money, too, now that he has a nest-egg, will accumulate. We should be sorry to bet a dozen of champagne that, ere ten years more elapse, he will not be Sir Michael. Aye, aye," quoth Hill, alias Hull, alias Hobbleday-playing for once The future Baronet is a very good little fellow--a Christian, though, we regret to add, a Sandemanian (whatever that may signify)--a Tory (as might have been inferred from Rat Lamb's hostility)--and, albeit not such a dab in cookery as the purser--or, Sandemanian though he be, so valuable a sand-bag to his wine-merchant as St. Grant - playing a fair fork over a leg of mutton, and devoid of any reluctance to partake an old friend's third bottle. We know Sam things_MAIL_Agreeable than a cigar and a bowl of punch (which he mixes BACCIANALIA MEMORABILIA. BY NIMROD. No. II. RESULTS OF WINE-BIBBING. DEAR YORKE, "There is only one sort of epic," said Lord Byron, in his conversation with an American," that suits the taste of the present day, the epic of common life, half sober, half burlesque." At all events, it appears that the palates of some of your readers were tickled by that sort of epic-urean miscellany I sent you for your November Number, which emboldens me to continue the subject. And why not? There is chaff and cockle in the best of grain; and not merely to investigate the sense, but to study the absurdities of human nature, may be productive of good, even from a pen so humble as mine. To plunge at once, then, in medias res. I ended my last paper with saying that, with your permission, I should offer your readers the result of the effects of wine on the body and on the mind, and partly from my own experience; but here I promised rather more than I am able to perform. From my own personal experience--that is to say, from the experience of the effects of wine on my own body, or "constitution," as it is called-I am at a loss to conjecture whether, had there been no such thing in the world as wine, or any other spirituous liquor, I should have been, physically speaking, better or worse in health than I now am; and for the following reasons,-first, I consider the good and the bad effects of wine to be so nearly equal, that it would be a difficult matter to strike the balance, taking occasional abuses of it into the account; secondly, I have not drunk enough wine to feel any impression from that cause-with the exception of the fever I brought upon myself in Ireland, and to which I alluded in my last-beyond the temporary inconvenience arising from an over-charged system, and, consequently, over-heated blood, the natural consequences of accidental excess. The tremulous hand or the blotched face was never mine. But perhaps few men, who have had wine to drink — although, perhaps, few may have swallowed more, now and then, at one sitting-have drunk less than I have drunk for the last thirty years of my life, seldom exceeding Sir William Temple's allowance, namely, a fourth glass of our strong wines, when alone by myself, or double that quantity of light Bourdeaux, and nothing else. At the period I am alluding to, finding I was getting fond of wine, I stopped short; applying the physical advice of the Roman poet to my own case: "Principiis obsta; sero medicina paratur, Cum mala per longas invaluère moras.' Nevertheless, I can speak from experience of its temporary effects, which I have often felt and particularly in riding after hounds, have often been reminded of the after-night cup, when its stimulus was flown. Time has been when I could have said in the morning, as I threw my leg over my horse, "What man dare, I dare;" but with a two o'clock fox, after too jovial a night, there would arise a something — circa præcordia, as Paley has it about that hour, which appeared to add a bar in height to every gate or stile that came in my way, and magnified ditches into brooks, and brooks into rivers. I believe this to be a very general case with sportsmen-indeed, I know but two exceptions-particularly after a certain age; and hence is one of the advantages of the noble pastime of fox-hunting. He who wishes to enjoy it to perfection, and which he cannot do unless he rides near to the hounds, must not drink much wine; and it is very well known that the most signal of our sportsmen have been, and now are, very temperate at the table. At the long-established Old Club at Melton Mowbray, for example, coffee in the drawing-room is announced in two hours after dinner is concluded, and no man is asked to drink a glass more of wine than he likes to drink. All celebrated practical sportsmen, hunters, and shooters, are shy of wine. I never saw Mr. Osbaldiston drunk, nor Sir Bellingham Graham, nor Mr. |