society. Five men St. Peter deemed to be madmen. One ate the sand of the sea so greedily that it ran out of his mouth. Verily he was the covetous man of this world. The next madman stood over a pit filled with sulphur and pitch, and strove to inhale the noxious vapour that rose from the burning mass. He was the glutton and the debauchee. A third lay on a burning furnace, and endeavoured to catch the sparks that rose from it, that he might feast on them; for he was rich, and would have fed on gold, though it would have been his death. The next lunatic sat on the pinnacle of the temple, with his mouth open to catch the wind, for he was a hypocrite; whilst the last madman devoured every finger and toe of his own he could get into his mouth, and laughed at others; for he was a calumniator of the good, and devoured his own kind. Passing over the very puzzling description of the game of Sacchi, and its forced application in the appended moral, we feel inclined to select the short legend, which has been versified with much sweetness as the Lay of the Little Bird : "It chanced that an archer caught a nightingale in a snare, and was about to kill the little bird, when God opened the beak of the nightingale, and she spake unto her keeper. 'What will it advantage you to kill me? canst thou satisfy thy hunger from my small body? Let me go, and I will tell thee three maxims, from which, if you observe them straightly, much benefit will accrue to you.' Astonished at the speech of the songstress, the archer granted her request. Hear then, and understand,' rejoined the bird: remember never to attempt that which is impossible-never to lament that which is irrevocable-never to believe that which is incredible.' With these words the nightingale took wing, and rising high in the air, commenced her beautiful song. Her strain ended, she flew towards the archer, and thus twitted him: Silly fellow that thou art, to give me up for three maxims-thou hast lost a treasure; in my body is a pearl bigger than the egg of an ostrich. Silly, silly fellow.' Vexed at the bird's escape, and stung with her reproaches, the archer began to set his nets, and delude the nightingale once more into his power. Come,' said he, come, sweet bird, to my home, and I will show thee every kindness. I will feed thee with mine own hands, and let thee fly abroad and return again at thy pleasure.' 'Nay,' rejoined the bird; 'now know I that thou art a fool, and payest no regard to my counsel. Lament not that which is irrecoverable. canst not take me again. Why spreadest thou thy snare in vain? Believe not that which is incredible. Dost think that my little body could contain a pearl as large as the egg of an ostrich when I am but half that size? A fool thou art, and a fool thou shalt remain, if thou despise the three maxims.' Away flew the bird, and the archer returned in sorrow to his house, and never saw the bird again." : In the version of the poet, the maxims assume this form : "First, then, lest haply in the event it fail, In both the same lesson is read to the covetous : -- "Such was the meed of Avarice:-bitter cost, Thou Pass we on now to the wonders which Pliny believed in without seeing, and Sir John de Mandeville tried to persuade the world he believed in from seeing, "The Anthropophagi, And men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders;" for no creature is so monstrous, no fable so incredible, but that the monkish writers could give it a moral phase, and extract from its crudities and quiddities some moral or religious lesson. These writers seemed never to have doubted the truth, in later days enshrined in the lines of the ballad : "Reason sure will always bring Pliny's dog-headed race, whom Sir John places in the island of Macumeran, and at the same time gives to them a quasi pope for a king, who says three hundred prayers per diem before he either eats or drinks, were naturally regarded by the middle-age writers as symbolical of priestly preachers of faithful hearts and frugal habits; whilst of those other islanders, who "have but one eye, and that in the middest of their front, and eat their flesh and fish raw," the monk says, "These be they that have the eye of prayer." The Astomes, who have no mouths, "are all hairie over the whole bodie, yet clothed with soft cotton and downe, that cometh from the leaves of trees, and live only on aire, and by the smelling of sweet odours, which they draw through their nose-thrills," are the abstemious of this world, who die of the sin of gluttony, even as an Astome by the accidental inhalation of bad odour. Humility is signified by the absence of the head, and the placing of the face in the breast; and a tendency to sin is foreshadowed by a desire and habit of walking on all fours, or pride by short noses and goats' feet. The Mandevillean Islanders, who had flat faces without noses, and two round holes for their eyes, and thought whatsoever they saw to be good, were earth's foolish ones; as those foul men, who have their lips so great, that when they sleep in the sun, they cover all their face therewith, are the just men, the salt of the earth. Aristophanes, among the wonders seen by the clouds, in his comedy of that name, records the Sciapodes, whom Sir John after Pliny describes thus: "There ben in Ethiope such men as have but one foot, and they go so fast that it is a great marvel; and that is a large foot, for the shadow thereof covereth the body from sun or rain, when they lie upon their backs." It may, with some reason, be doubted that Aristophanes and his humble followers would be no little surprised to learn that their Sciapodes, or parasol-footed mortals, were nothing more nor less than the charitable. It is not always the case, that he that runs, even on one foot, can read his own destiny. The pigmies of the East, who measure two cubits in stature, and ride upon goats, and wage fierce and never-ending wars on the cranes, are those mortals who begin well, but cease to do well before they are perfect; whilst their neighbours, with six hands, who despise clothes in favour of long hair, and inhabit rivers, are the hardworking and laborious among men. It is not easy to decide why those who have six fingers and six toes are the unpolluted, and why virtuous men are represented by a race of women with bald heads, and beards flowing to their breast; nor is it very clear that virtue is well represented by a double allowance of eyes. But one curiosity remains the beautiful men of Europe who boast a crane's head, neck, and beak. These, says the author of the Gesta, represent judges, who should have long necks and beaks, that what the heart thinks, may be long before it reach the mouth. We have heard of a man who accounted for the fact of his laughing at a joke when the rest of the company were making sorrowful faces at some solemn story which had succeeded the pleasantry, by his great height preventing the joke from acting on his midriff so soon as on that of his shorter friends; but we never did, as yet, hear of the length of a judge's neck being cited as the cause of his judicious awards, or of measuring equity by the chancellor's beak. Time and space is the only limit which we can discover to this article, so numerous are the fables which we might select from those collections which are before us; but let us pause here. Infantine as these fables are, it is not from their morals that this quality arises, but solely from the credulousness of their machinery, from the preposterous nature of the facts by which these lessons are conveyed. We have doubtless advanced in the structure and materials of didactic fictions, but we have left morals where we found them." This," says a late writer, "is one of the reasons why we recur with so much pleasure to ancient legends and stories. We find the same general notions, which we acknowledge at present, prevailing in them under a somewhat different aspect. This is, no doubt, as far as it goes, highly satisfactory. But have we built thereon, have we added thereto? We think not. The political revolutions of society have made some change of application in this primitive notion; philosophy has corrected some errors, and analyzed ad infinitum. But, after all, we go back to the fable or the proverb, and there find contained in a nut-shell what we have been reading of in volumes. The Mechanics of Engineering; intended for Use in Universities, and in Colleges of Engineers. By WILLIAM WHEWELL, B.D. Fellow of Trinity College, &c. &c. Cambridge: Deightons. 1841. Encyclopædia Britannica. Seventh Edition. Articles, Roof, and Carpentry. 66 THE study of such works as the above, would, we cannot but think, be more profitable just now, than the heaps of publications daily issuing from the press in the form of tempting and pictorially inviting Treatises on the Styles of Gothic;" "Helps to the Acquirement of Architectural Knowledge;" "Enquiries into the Principles of Pointed Architecture," &c. &c. We do not object to such works very far from it; but they are not enough, and it is highly important that those who aspire to directing the progress of architecture, should feel the necessity of a scientific insight into the real principles of construction, in addition to mere taste and antiquarian lore. Among the difficulties which stand in the way of those who build churches in the styles of pointed architecture, no inconsiderable one relates to the roofing. Since it has been ruled, by general consent, that stone vaulting is too expensive, and in consequence of a preference of abundant precedent over æsthetic propriety, that it is by no means a necessary mode of covering buildings of any style, wood and plaster is all that is left us for that purpose, if we are to work from the ancient models. At the dawn of modern Gothic, a tolerably successful attempt was made to roof one of the new churches with a stone vault, the architect being of opinion, no doubt, that that was the only true way of developing the most striking feature in the revived style and it seems that most of his brethren in the same art were much of his opinion, from the almost universal botchment they made in the roofs of their churches; for their performances lead us to suppose that they must have despaired of producing any good effect in wood. Perhaps they thought that people's eyes need not wander in search of any beauties beyond the clerestory; and that all architectural effect might very well end at the wall-plate. Indeed, the poverty of roofs became at last the constant subject of complaint, and the result was, that church builders directed their more especial attention to this weak point. Ancient examples, no doubt, were more carefully examined than ever, but they were found wanting in what was then very generally supposed to be an essential property; they were without a tie-beam. Moreover, it had been decided by the commissioners for building churches, that no grants of money should be made from the funds at their disposal in any cases where a substitute for tie-beams should be proposed. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that tiebeamed imitations of untie-beamed roofs continued in vogue, until within the last year or two, when there were found men bold enough to cover churches with the old open roof of the fifteenth century, apparently with no other principle of construction than what the ancient examples afforded; and thus have the commissioners, at length, been induced to withdraw their prohibition, principally, as we understand, at the suggestion of the Cambridge Camden Society. Whether or not this be any great advance which we have made in the method of constructing the roofs of churches-whether the improvement be a real and substantial one, is, perhaps, more questionable than many persons might suppose. Our masons and carpenters are in no degree inferior to those of the fifteenth century; and if to the massive work of the former, the latter were to apply a roof formed after the fashion of some approved ancient model, and of the same material, their work would bid fair to stand as long, very possibly longer, than the original from which they copied; but, unhappily, the same cause which has banished stone vaulting, has also substituted, in too many cases, fir for oak. Now, these deal imitations of oak roofs, are, in many respects, highly objectionable. The material of which they are formed is not adapted to curves of large dimensions, especially those which appear in the constructive portions of the roof. Let any person observe the fir-tree as it grows in the forest, or as it lies sawn up in a timber-yard, and he will at once perceive how very unsuitable that sort of timber is for forming curves of any considerable magnitude. If he happens to be in the neighbourhood of Leicester, he will find in that town a church which illustrates the above remark. It consists of a chancel, transepts, and nave, without aisles; the walls are of brick, substantial, and well buttressed. The roof is somewhat high pitched, and formed after the fashion of a fifteenth-century roof, without any tie; having hammer-beams at the foot of the principal rafters, and other characteristics of that style of roof. The curved pieces which rest on corbels in the wall, and support the hammer-beams, are in three lengths (!) the portions being carefully fitted into each other, and made to look as much as possible like one entire piece. Now the most obvious form for a member so placed, would be, if of deal, as straight as possible, and of one entire length; but then the appearance of that would have been objectionable. Hence the botchment to make it appear what it really is not, and cannot be. And besides this, the general impression which it gives one, is, that the church has been built for the roof, instead of the roof for the church; and the whole of the interior has the appearance of a mass made up of roof and pews, with a small interval of bare wall between them. It must, one would suppose, be evident to the architects who have such tasks imposed upon them, that they are building upon false principles of construction: but it is not so to others, who consider the open roof the perfection of roofs, and one that cannot be too closely followed. The British Critic (1842) has a long article on the subject, illustrated with wood-cuts of some of the best specimens of that kind of roof, with a descriptive account, together with some judicious remarks upon the peculiarities of each. But the writer appears to have overlooked, or not thought it worth while to notice, the principle upon which these roofs |