And gentlemen in England, now a-bed, As in the two previous great battles between the English and French, the success of the former was mainly owing to their bowmen, whose arrows threw the French cavalry into confusion, and who themselves afterwards broke into the enemy's ranks, and did terrible execution with their hatchets and billhooks. The chivalry of France was fearfully thinned, upwards of 7000 knights and gentlemen, and 120 great lords perishing on the field, whilst the loss of the English did not exceed 1600 men. An immense amount of plunder was obtained by the victors, the weakness of whose army, however, prevented them from improving their advantages, and they accordingly continued their march to Calais. From this Henry embarked for England, landed at Dover, and marching in triumph from thence to London, entered that city with a long array of captives, and a pageant of imposing splendour such as had been wholly unprecedented in the case of any previous English monarch. PUNCH AND PUNCH-BOWLS. On the 25th October 1694, Admiral Edward Russell, then commanding the Mediterranean fleet, gave a grand entertainment at Alicant. The tables were laid under the shade of orange-trees, in four garden-walks meeting in a common centre, at a marble fountain, which last, for the occasion, was converted into a Titanic punch-bowl. Four hogsheads of brandy, one pipe of Malaga wine, twenty gallons of lime-juice, twenty-five hundred lemons, thirteen hundredweight of fine white sugar, five pounds' weight of grated nutmegs, three hundred toasted biscuits, and eight hogsheads of water, formed the ingredients of this monsterbrewage. An elegant canopy placed over the potent liquor, prevented waste by evaporation, or dilution by rain; while, in a boat, built expressly for the purpose, a ship-boy rowed round the fountain, to assist in filling cups for the six thousand persons who partook of it. Punch is comparatively a modern beverage, and came to us from India, in the latter part of the seventeenth century. One of the earliest printed notices of it, is in Fryer's Travels, published in 1672, where we are told that punch is an enervating liquor, drunk on the Coromandel Coast, and deriving its name from the Industani word paunch, signifying five; the number of ingredients required to form the mixture. Sailors brought the novel compound from the east, and for some time it seems to have been drunk by them alone. On the first day that Henry Teonge joined the ship Assistance, as naval chaplain, in 1675, he drank part of three bowls of punch, a liquor very strange to him; and we are not surprised, when he further naïvely informs us, that he had considerable difficulty in finding his pillow when he attempted to go to bed. However great a stranger punch was then to him, they soon became intimately acquainted, for it appears from his amusing Diary, that naval officers, in those days, were ready to mix and quaff capacious bowls of punch on the slightest provocation. The Indian potation, making its way from sea to land, met everywhere with a most welcome PUNCH AND PUNCH-BOWLS. reception. In 1680, appeared from the pen of Captain Ratcliff a doggrel poem, entitled Bacchanalia Calestia, which had an immense popularity, though now almost utterly forgotten. In this effusion, Jupiter is represented with the minor deities on Mount Olympus, hearing for the first time of the novel beverage just invented on earth, and determined to try it. Accordingly, all unite to compound a jovial bowl of punch. 'Apollo despatched away one of his lasses, Who filled up a pitcher from th' well of Parnassus. Which, when she was sick, she infused into posset: Mars, a blunt god, though chief of the briskers, The toasted biscuit, though long since disused early period, a favourite addition to many old as an ingredient of punch, formed, from a very English drinks. Vulcan how to contrive him a drinking-cup, says: Rochester, when instructing 'Make it so large, that filled with sack Like ships at sea may swim.' It was from this use of toasted bread or biscuit, that we acquired the word toast as applied, in the first instance, to a beautiful woman, whose health is often drunk; and, latterly, to the act of drinking the health of any person, or to any idea or sentiment, as it is termed. The following anecdote, from the Tatler, tells us how a piece of toasted bread, in a prepared drink, became ideally connected with a lovely woman. It must be premised that, at one time, it was the fashion for ladies, attired in elegant dresses made for the purpose, to bathe publicly in the baths of the city of Bath. 'It happened, on a public day, a celebrated beauty was in the Cross-bath, and one of the crowd of her admirers took a glass of the water in which the fair one stood, and drank her health to the company. There was in the place a gay fellow, half-fuddled, who offered to jump in, and swore though he liked not the liquor, he would have the toast. He was opposed in this resolution; yet this whim gave foundation to the present honour which is done to the lady we mention in our liquor, who has ever since been called a toast.' The five ingredients-spirit, water, sugar, lemon, and spice-from which punch derived its name, were in time reduced to four: 'Whene'er a bowl of punch we make Or, as another minor poet thus describes the 'materials:' 'Whilst I sat pensive in my elbow-chair, Four nymphs appeared, O how divinely fair! To form that grateful contrast, famed sour-sweet, During the whole of the last century, punch ruled with sovereign sway. Besides its peculiar attractions, it had a kind of political prestige, as being the favourite beverage of the dominant Whig party; the Tories, at first, regarding it with prejudicial eyes as a foreign interloper coming in about the same time as an alien usurper. The statesmen, generals, and admirals of King William, whether Dutch or English, revelled in 'punch.' The wits and essayists of Anne's Augustan age praised it as the choicest of liquors-need we speak of Johnson, Reynolds, Garrick, Fox, Sheridan, as punch-drinkers! The punch-bowl was an indispensable vessel in every house above the humblest class. And there were many kindly recollections connected with it, it being very frequently given as a present. No young married couple ever thought of buying a punch-bowl; it was always presented to them by a near relative. And the complete change in the feelings of society, as respects drinking-usages, is prominently shewn PUNCH AND PUNCH-BOWLS. by the fact, that a punch-bowl was in the last century considered to be a very suitable present from a merchant or banker to a trusty clerk or book-keeper, or from a ship-owner to a sea-captain. Bowls were made and painted with inscriptions and devices for testimonial purposes; the first successful whaling-voyage from Liverpool is commemorated by a punch-bowl, given by the merchants to the fortunate captain. This bowl, on which the ship is depicted in full sail, is now in the collection of Mr Joseph Mayer, the eminent archæologist. There is no error in saying, that the punch-bowl was frequently one of the most cherished of household effects. In dissenters' families, from its being used as a baptismal-font, it acquired a kind of semi-sacred character; and the head of a household naturally felt a solemn, benignant pride in dispensing hospitality from the vessel in which his father, himself, and his children had been christened. Nor did the high-churchman less esteem the bowl. Punch, as the clergy admitted, was a thoroughly orthodox liquor; for though excess in wine was reprobated by the Scriptures, there was not, from the first chapter of Genesis to the last in Revelation, one word said against punch! Songs, innumerable, proclaimed the virtues of punch, and extolled it as a panacea for all diseases. Dr Short, a physician of great ability and repute, writing in 1750, says that 'punch is an admirable liquor-the best liquor in the world-the universe cannot afford a better liquor for students.' But doctors differ, and Dr Cheyne, with much better judgment, asserted that there was not one salutary ingredient in it, except the water. Alluding to its Indian origin, he termed it a 'heathenish liquor,' and stigmatised it as being 'nearest arsenic, in its deleterious and poisonous qualities. It was, no doubt, the unhealthy qualities of punch, the horrible headaches it inflicted, that drove it completely out of use. Besides, it was a terror to tidy housewives; the nastiest, sloppiest sluster,' as an old lady once told the writer, ever placed on a dining-room table. For a continual filling of glasses from flowing bowls, with continually increasing unsteadiness of hands, soon made a swimming table and a drenched carpet. Punchstains, too, were in some materials ineradicable in black cloth particularly so, leaving small holes, as if the cloth had been burned by a strong acid. In Scotland, the jolly topers of its western metropolis, the city of Glasgow, long enjoyed an undisputed pre-eminence in the manufacture of punch. The leading ingredients, rum and lemons, were compounded with sugar and cold water, after a peculiarly artistic fashion, which was supposed to be only known to the initiated. This farfamed liquor came into disrepute, on the occasion of the visitation of the cholera to Scotland, about 1833. Being proscribed by the medical faculty, it lost its hold on public favour, a position which it has never since regained. Advanced ideas on the question of temperance have, doubtless, also had their influence in rendering obsolete, in a great measure, this beverage, regarding which some jovial spirits of the old school, reverting sorrowfully to their youthful days, will inform you that gout has considerably increased in the west since the abandonment of punch for claret and champagne. As may readily be supposed, many of the old tavern-signs displayed a punch-bowl. Addison, in the Spectator, notices a sign near Charing Cross, representing a punch-bowl curiously garnished, with a couple of angels hovering over, and squeezing lemons into it. The most popular tavern of the last century that exbibited a punch-bowl on its sign, was the 'Spiller's Head,' in Clare Market. Spiller was a fellow of infinite jest; he started in life as a landscape painter, but taking to the stage, became a very popular actor, and was the original 'Mat of the Mint' history of the sign is curious. Spiller, as may be learned from one of his benefit-tickets, engraved by Hogarth, was not unac quainted with the inside of a debtor's prison. During his PUNCH AND PUNCH-BOWLS. Spiller, struck down by apoplexy on the stage, 'View here the wag, who did his mirth impart, At a The 'Spiller's Head' was a favourite haunt of the wits and artists of the Hogarthian era. later period, when Clare Market was voted low, and "Old Slaughters' became the artists' house of resort, they were waited on there by a witty waiter, whom they named Suck, from his habit of slily drinking out of the bowls of punch, as he carried them upstairs to the This company. practice, however disgusting it would be considered now, was then looked upon as A PUNCH-BOWL SIGN: THE SPILLER'S HEAD.' fast confinement, he so charmed one of the turnkeys with his wit, that the man, on Spiller's liberation, resigned office, and took a tavern, so that he might oftener enjoy the laughter-provok ing comedian's company. As many notabilities flocked to the house for the same purpose, the original sign was considered scarcely suitable; and so, as Akerby informs us, by the concurrent desire of an elegant company, who were assembled there over a bowl of arrack punch one evening, and by the generous offer of Mr Laguerre, who was one of the company, and as excellent a master in the science of painting as music, the sign was changed from the Bull and Butcher' to Spiller's Head,' and painted by the said Mr Laguerre gratis, in a manner and with a pencil that equals the proudest performances of those who have acquired the greatest wealth and reputation in the art of painting.' The accompanying illustration, representing Spiller with a punch-bowl before him, is taken from an engraved copy of the sign in question. But ere this could be painted and set up, a mere trifling indiscretion, and forgiven in consideration of the waiter's wit and birth, he being, according to his own account, an illegiti mate son of the renowned Spiller. THE CHURCH BUILT BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE MEDMENHAM CLUB. On the 25th of October 1761, the six musical bells of West Wycombe chimed their first merry peal, to announce the completion of the tower which forms part of one of the most extraordinary churches in the kingdom. The old church was entirely demolished, with the exception of a portion of the tower and chancel, which were again united by the new nave, and made to suit its peculiar and original design. The only door into it is through the tower at the west end; and such is the effect of its general appearance, that if a stranger were brought into it blindfolded through the grave-yard, he could scarcely believe himself in a place of Christian worship. It is a large oblong room, sixty feet in length, and forty in width; the ceiling is flat, and painted in mosaic pattern, with a festooned border on the side-walls, where they join the ceil ing. The windows, which are large and numerous, are the common sashes of the period, each with a The chancel, which is very small, can scarcely be seen from the nave, for the entrance is so blocked up on both sides by the manorial-pews, or rather galleries, that the passage between is exceedingly narrow. When entered, it has a rich and gorgeous appearance. The ceiling is brilliantly painted with a representation of the Last Supper; the windows are filled with stained glass; the altarrails are of massive oak, elaborately carved; the communion-table inlaid with mosaic-work; and the floor paved with fine polished marble. Yet the whole has a secular appearance. The tower, which has large unsightly windows, is surmounted by a low spire, on which is placed a large hollow ball forming a room, with a seat round it that will hold twelve persons. But as it is entered by a ladder outside the spire, few persons have the nerve to make themselves acquainted with its interior. On the north wall, outside the church, which is dedicated to St Lawrence, there is a representation of him suffering martyrdom on a gridiron, with this inscription: Though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.' And on the south side, there is a sun-dial, with this text: 'Keep thy tongue from evil-speaking, lying, and slandering. Near the east end of the church is erected a large hexagonal mausoleum, without a roof. This singular building contains niches and recesses for sepulchral urns and monuments, and stands, together with the church, on a very high hill apart from the village. When seen at a distance, it is impossible to describe the odd appearance which the whole pile presents-the ball above the tower looking as if flying in the air. These remarkable structures were built by the gay and eccentric Sir Francis Dashwood, about the time he became Lord le Despencer. He was the originator and president of the notorious Medmenham Club, or Monks of St Francis, as they named themselves, assuming the garb, but not the austerities, of that order. About half-way down the hill is an excavation, a quarter of a mile long, and running under the church, which is also said to have been his lordship's work, but more probably he only adapted it to his fancy. It is entered by a massive door, formed in an artificial ruin, and consists of a series of lofty caves, connected by a passage, which is in some places divided into two or three parts by huge pillars of chalk, left to support the roof. Near the middle of the excavation, there is a small pool, which is now crossed by steppingstones, but formerly, it is said, it could only be passed in a boat. The excavation terminates in a large, lofty, circular cavern, with a vaulted roof, in which is a hook for suspending a lamp or chandelier. Here, according to local tradition, the Medmenham Club occasionally held its meetings. And certainly, if its president wished to be near his home, this spot would be convenient, being only half a mile distant. So also, if the club desired special secrecy, no place could be more suitable, seeing that when the door at the entrance was barred from within, and the pool, which the monks called the Styx, was crossed in their boat, their doings in this cavern would be as secure from interruption from the rest of the world, as if they were actually being enacted in the infernal regions themselves. But it is probable, notwithstanding all that has been said on the subject, that nothing was really practised either here, or at Medmenham, their usual place of meeting, more profane or immoral than what was openly practised in most of the convivial societies of that period. This was strenuously maintained in his old age by the last surviving member of the society. And doubtless it was only the mystery and eccentricities with which they chose to invest their proceedings, that gave rise to so many foolish tales and conjectures respecting their doings. As to the assertions and insinuations against them by the author of Chrysal, they are unworthy of credit, since his description of their place of meeting shews that he had no personal knowledge of the subject. Medmenham Abbey is not, as he states, in an island, but beautifully situated on the north bank of the Thames ; and the room in which the club met remains just as described by Langley in 1797, and is now frequently used by picnic-parties. The rest of the building, though occupied by cottagers, has been so slightly altered externally, that the whole has realised the appearance predicted by Langley seventy years ago. The additional ruined tower, cloister, and other corresponding parts, as he says, were made with so much taste and propriety, that, now they have become clothed with ivy and mosses, they can scarcely be distinguished from the ancient remains; and the whole building has now assumed such a natural and picturesque appearance, that more than one eminent artist has chosen it for the subject of his pencil, probably regarding the whole as the interesting remains of an ancient monastery. OCTOBER 26. St Evaristus, pope and martyr, 112. Saints Lucian and Marcian, martyrs, 250. Born.-Charles François Dupuis, astronomer, 1742, Trie-Chateau, near Chaumont; George James Danton, revolutionary leader, 1759, Arcis-sur-Aube. Died.-Abulfeda, Mohammedan historian, 1331, Syria; Samuel Puffendorf, distinguished jurist, 1694, Berlin; Sir Godfrey Kneller, portrait-painter, 1723; Dr Philip Doddridge, eminent divine and author, 1751, Lisbon. DANTON. DANTON. Danton, more than any man whom the French Revolution threw to the surface, realises the popular idea of a revolutionist. In person he was almost gigantic-tall and muscular. His head was large, and covered with stiff black hair, and his eyebrows bushy. His features were bold and irregular, and were by some called ugly; but when lit up by the fire of his intellect, their coarseness disappeared in harmony. His voice was powerful-in the outbursts of his oratory, terrible-and was likened to thunder and a lion's roar. Courage, audacity, and power were manifest in his bearing, and his career did not belie his appearance. He was born in 1759 at Arcis-sur-Aube, of wellto-do farming-people, and was educated for a lawyer. He went to Paris to finish his studies, and there commenced practice as a barrister. He sought the acquaintance of Mirabeau, Camille Desmoulins, Robespierre, Marat, and others, notable for their devotion to revolutionary ideas. He lived economically, and spent his days in the assembly and his nights at the clubs. He ventured to speak, and the discerning were not slow to perceive that in the orator a great power had arisen. Danton attached himself to the Girondists, and, says Lamartine, Madame Roland flattered him, but with fear and repugnance, as a woman would pat a lion.' Daily he grew in popularity, and with Marat led the formidable club of Cordeliers. The court sought his influence by bribes, and in the pride of his strength he exclaimed: 'I shall save the king or kill him!' The revolution, however, was greater than Danton. He who would live in it was forced to run with it or be trampled in its path. After the flight of Louis to Varennes, he advocated his dethronement, and declared in the assembly that hesitation in pronouncing the throne vacant, would be the signal for general insurrection. When Prussia, in 1792, invaded France in vindication of royalty, and spread terror on every side, Danton, by his brave words, gave courage to the nation. Legislators!' said he, 'it is not the alarm-cannon that you hear: it is the pas-de-charge against our enemies. To conquer them, to hurl them back, what do we require? Il nous faut de l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace: To dare, and again to dare, and without end to dare!' In a few weeks, fourteen republican armies were in the field, repelling the allied forces with a vigour and success which set Europe aghast. For the king's death Danton voted, but, like the Abbé Sièyes, assigned no reason. In his defiant style, he said: The coalesced kings threaten us; we hurl at their feet, as gage of battle, the head of a king.' Under the Revolution, Danton was first a minister of justice, and then president of the Committee of Public Safety-a body of six men, who were intrusted with absolute executive power, and who therefore bear the infamy of the Reign of Terror. In the course of events, Robespierre and Danton came face to face as rivals for the leadership Danton was of Paris, and in Paris, of France. luxurious, reckless, generous, and frank; on the other hand, Robespierre was ascetic, cold, severe, cautious, and uncompromising. In Robespierre's presence, Danton's power seemed to desert him, as |