of The Irish Magazine, having been originally a gunsmith, was expert in the use of tools, and being much annoyed by the helpless statue, he tried, one dark night, to file off the monarch's head. But the inner frame of iron foiled, as the Dublin wits said, the literary filer's foul attempt.

In 1805, the 4th of November falling upon a Sunday, the usual riotous demonstration around the statue was postponed till the following day. On the Saturday night, however, the watchman on College Green was accosted by a man, seemingly a painter, who stated that he had been sent by the city authorities to decorate the statue for the approaching festivities of the Monday; adding that the apprehended violence of the disaffected portion of the populace rendered it advisable to have the work done by night. The unsuspecting watchman assisted the painter in mounting the statue, and the latter plied his brush most industriously for some time. Then descending, he coolly requested the watchman to keep an eye to his painting utensils, while he went to his master's house for some more colours, necessary to complete the work. The night, how ever, passed away without the return of the painter, and at daybreak, on Sunday morning, the statue was found to be completely covered with an unctuous black pigment, composed of grease and tar, most difficult to remove; while the bucket that had contained the mixture was suspended by a halter fixed round the insulted monarch's neck. This act caused the greatest excitement among the Orange societies; but most fortunately for himself and friends, the adventurous artist was never discovered.

The annual custom of decorating the statue, so provocative of religious and political rancour, and the fertile source of innumerable riots, not unattended with loss of life, was put down by the enlightened judgment of the authorities, combined with the strong arm of the law, in 1822; and the miserable monument suffered less rough usage, until its crowning catastrophe happened in 1836. One midnight, in the April of that year, the statue blew up, with a terrific explosion, smashing and extinguishing the lamps for a considerable distance. The body was blown in one direction, the broken legs and arms in another, and the wretched horse, that had suffered so many previous injuries, was shattered to pieces. An offered reward of £200 failed to discover the perpetrators of this deed.

The statue was repaired and replaced in its old position. Like an old warrior, who had seen long service and suffered many wounds, it gradually acquired a certain degree of respect, even from its enemies. The late Daniel O'Connell, during his year of mayoralty, caused it to be bronzed, thereby greatly improving its appearance: and ever since it has remained an ornament, instead of a disgrace, to the capital of Ireland.

THE CHEVALIER DE LA BARRE.

The case of Thomas Aikenhead, a youth hanged in Scotland in 1695, at the instigation of the clergy, for the imaginary crime of blasphemy, finds an exact parallel in a later age in France. A youth of nineteen, named the Chevalier de la Barre, was decapitated and then burned at Abbeville, on the

FIRST STEAMER ON THE THAMES.

1st of July 1765, for mutilating a figure of Christ, which stood on the bridge of that town, this offence being regarded as sacrilege, for which a decree of Louis XIV. had assigned a capital punishment. Even when the local judgment on this unfortunate young man was brought for review before the parliament of Paris, there was a majority of fifteen to ten for confirming the sentence; so strongly did superstition still hold the minds of the upper classes in France. Does it not in some measure explain the spirit under which Voltaire, Diderot, and others were then writing?

It is to be admitted of the first of these writers, amidst all that is to be reprobated in his conduct, that he stood forth as the friend of humanity on several remarkable occasions. His energy in obtaining the vindication of the Calas family will always redound to his praise. He published an account of the case of the Chevalier de la Barre, from which it appears that his persecutors gave him at the last for a confessor and assistant a Dominican monk, the friend of his aunt, an abbess in whose convent he had often supped. When the good man wept, the chevalier consoled him. At their last dinner, the Dominican being unable to eat, the chevalier said to him: 'Pray, take a little nourishment; you have as much need of it as I to bear the spectacle which I am to give.' The scaffold, on which five Parisian executioners were gathered, was mounted by the victim with a calm courage; he did not change colour, and he uttered no complaint, beyond the remark: 'I did not believe they could have taken the life of a young man for so small a matter.'

THE FIRST STEAMER ON THE THAMES.

The London newspapers in 1801 contained the following very simple announcement, in reference to an event which took place on the 1st of July, and which was destined to be the precursor of achievements highly important to the wellbeing of society: 'An experiment took place on the river Thames, for the purpose of working a barge or any other heavy craft against tide by means of a steam-engine on a very simple construction. The moment the engine was set to work, the barge was brought about, answering her helm quickly; and she made way against a strong current, at

the rate of two miles and a half an hour.'

The historians of steam-navigation seem to have lost sight of this incident. But in truth it was only a small episode in a series, the more important items of which had already appeared in Scotland. Mr Patrick Miller, banker, Edinburgh, made literally the first experiments in steam-navigation in this hemisphere. [There were some similarly obscure experiments at an earlier date in America.] Mr Miller's own plan at the first was to have a double boat, with a wheel in the centre, to be driven by man's labour. Annexed is a copy of a contemporary drawing of his vessel, which was ninety feet long, and cost £3000. It proved a failure by reason of the insupportable labour required to drive the wheel. His sons' tutor, Mr James Taylor, then suggested the application of the steam-engine as all that was necessary for a triumph over wind and tide, and he was induced, with the practical help of a mechanician named Symington, recommended by Taylor, to get

DOUBLE BOAT.

The little steam-engine used in this interesting vessel is preserved in the Andersonian Museum at Glasgow.

Encouraged by this happy trial and the applause of his friends, Mr Miller bought one of the boats used upon the Forth and Clyde Canal, and employed the Carron Iron Company to make a steam-engine on a plan devised and superintended by Symington. On the 26th of December 1789, the steamer thus prepared, tugged a heavy load on the above-named canal, at the speed of seven miles an hour. For some reason or other, nothing further was done for many years; the boat was dismantled and laid up. From this time we hear no more of Mr Miller; he turned his attention to other pursuits, chiefly of an agricultural nature. Mr Taylor, without his patron, could do nothing. In 1801, Lord Dundas, who was largely interested in the success of the canal, employed Symington to make experiments for working the canal trade by steampower instead of horse-power. A steamer was built, called the Charlotte Dundas-the first ever constructed expressly for steam-navigation, its predecessors having been mere make-shifts. A steam-engine was made suitable for it; and early in 1802, the boat drew a load of no less than seventy tons at a rate of three miles and a quarter per hour, against a strong gale. An unexpected obstacle dashed the hopes of the experimenters; some one asserted that the surf or wave occasioned by the motion of the steamer would damage the banks of the canal; the assertion was believed, and the company declined. any further experiments. What took place after another interval of discouragement and inaction will be related in another place

JULY 2.

KLOPSTOCK.

The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin. Saints Processus and Martinian, martyrs, 1st century. St Monegondes, recluse at Tours, 570. St Oudoceus, bishop of Llandaff, 6th century. St Otho, bishop of Bamberg, confessor, 1139

Visitation of the Virgin Mary.

In the Romish church, the visit paid by the Virgin Mary to her cousin Elizabeth (St Luke i. 39, 40) is celebrated by a festival on this day, instituted by Pope Urban VI. in 1383; which festival continues to be set down in the calendar of the reformed Anglican Church.

Born.-Christian II., king of Denmark, 1480; Archbishop Cranmer, 1489, Aslacton, Notts; Frederick Theophilus Klopstock, German poet, 1724, Quedlinburg, Saxony; Henry, third Marquis of Lansdowne, statesman, 1780.

Died.-Henry L., emperor of Germany (the Fowler), 936; Michel Nostradamus (predictions), 1566, Salon; Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1778, Ermenonville; Dionysius Diderot, philosophical writer, 1784, Paris; Dr Hahnemann, originator of homoeopathy, 1843, Paris; Sir Robert Peel, statesman, 1850, London; William Berry (works on heraldry), 1851, Brixton.

KLOPSTOCK.

The German poet Klopstock enjoyed a great celebrity in his own day, not less on account of his Odes, many of which are excellent, than for that upon which the fabric of his fame was first built. more ambitious sacred poem, called The Messiah, This celebrated epic was written in hexameters, a species of verse little employed by his predecessors, but not uncongenial to German rhythm. Klopstock formed himself on Milton and Young, and is but he soars rather with the wing of the owl than styled in his own country the Milton of Germany: the wing of the eagle. His ode To Young, as the composition of a stranger, will be interesting to English readers, and serves very well as a clue to his genius.

TO YOUNG-1752.

Die, aged prophet: lo, thy crown of palms
Has long been springing, and the tear of joy
Quivers on angel-lids

Astart to welcome thee.

Why linger? Hast thou not already built
Above the clouds thy lasting monument?
Over thy night-thoughts, too,
The pale free-thinkers watch,
And feel there's prophecy amid the song,
When of the dead-awakening trump it speaks,
Of coming final doom,

And the wise will of heaven.
Die: thou hast taught me that the name of death
Is to the just a glorious sound of joy :

But be my teacher still, Become my genius there.

The language of this ode approaches to a style which in English is termed bathos. As a proof of the wide-spread fame which Klopstock acquired in his own country, we briefly subjoin the account of his funeral, in the words of Mr Taylor's Historical Survey of German Poetry: Klopstock died in 1803, and was buried with great solemnity on the 22d

of March, eight days after his decease. The cities of Hamburg and Altona concurred to vote him a public mourning; and the residents of Denmark, France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia joined in the funeral-procession. Thirty-six carriages brought the senate and magistracy, all the bells tolling; a military procession contributed to the order and dignity of the scene; vast bands of music, aided by the voices of the theatre, performed appropriate symphonies, or accompanied passages of the poet's works. The coffin having been placed over the grave, the preacher, Meyer, lifted the lid, and deposited in it a copy of The Messiah; laurels were then heaped on it; and the death of Martha, from the fourteenth book, was recited with chaunt. The ceremony concluded with the dead mass of Mozart.'

THE PROPHECIES OF NOSTRADAMUS.

Princes, and other great people, besides many learned men, three centuries ago, paid studious attention to a set of mystic prophecies in French quatrains, which had proceeded from a Provençal physician, named Nostradamus, and were believed to foreshadow great historical events. These pre

PROPHECIES OF NOSTRADAMUS.

dictions had been published in a series of little books, containing each a hundred, and they were afterwards collected into one volume. Our copy of Nostradamus is one published in London in 1672, with English translations and notes, by a refugee French physician, named Theophilus de Garencieres, who had himself a somewhat remarkable history. Wood informs us that he died of a broken heart, in consequence of the ill-usage he received from a certain knight. He himself, though a doctor of Oxford, and member of the Royal College of Physicians of London, appears to have been a devout believer in the mystic enunciations which he endeavoured to represent in English. He had, indeed, imbibed this reverence for the prophet in his earliest years, for, strange to say, the brochures containing these predictions were the primers used about 1618 in the schools of France, and through them he had learned to read. The frontispiece of the English translation represents Garencieres as a thin elderly man with a sensitive, nervousbilious countenance, seated, in a black gown with wig and bands, at a table, with a book and writing materials before him, and also a carafe bottle containing what appears as figures of the sun and crescent moon.

Michael Nostradamus (the name was a real one) | saw the light at St Remy, on the 14th of December 1503, and died, as our prefatory list informs us, on the 2d of July 1566. He studied mathematics, philosophy, and physic, and appears to have gained reputation as a medical man before becoming noted as a mystogogue. He was twice married, and had several children; he latterly was settled at Salon, a town between Marseille and Avignon. It was with the view of improving his medical gifts that he studied astrology, and thus was led to foretell events. His first efforts in this line took the humble form of almanac-making. His almanacs became popular; so much so, that imitations of them

appeared, which, being thought his, and containing nothing but folly, brought him discredit, and caused the poet Jodelle to salute him with a satirical couplet:

'Nostra damus cum falsa damus, nam fallere nostra est,

Et cum falsa damus, nil nisi Nostra damus.' That is: We give our own things when we give false things, for it is our peculiarity to deceive, and when we give false things, we are only giving our own things.' His reputation was confirmed by the publication, in 1555, of some of his prophecies which attracted so much regard, that Henry I