softened glimmer of pearly colour, neither grey, [Conducted by songs of birds sound sweet from their very strangeness, and arrests the attention from its intrusion on scenes with which it has never been associated. I like to lie abed early on a spring morning, and hear all the sounds of life outside the window that cheer but do not disturb you, so that you fall into a doze of spring-time thoughts, as you are trying to listen, until you are made broad I am no great believer in the poetry of sheep (uncooked), nor in lamb (without mint-sauce), but in Ramshire the sheep do throw themselves about the landscape as if they were trained to group themselves effectively-as my friend, Me-awake by the fuller chorus of young thrushes diochre, R.A., says. They sprinkle down the dun slopes, they cascade down the sides of the lanes, they come smoking along the dusty roads, they bleat in great multitudes. They are seen melting away in little yellow and brown spots, into the fairy azure of that magical distance through which glimmer pieces of green corn, brown fallows, golden stacks, white veins of chalk, greystone patches, emerald pastures, dun mounds of firs, and dark thickets of almond-scented furze, that, gradually getting thinner and thinner, break pretty employment in the oak coverts that here Your contemplative Jacques, too, can find at last into single specks and dots of bushes which and there strew the surface of Downshire, very variegate the down as with an eruption of mole-aviaries of song in the pleasant May-time, when hills. Add to these variations of surface, some firs in the foreground, like the teeth of a small tooth-comb; some round chalk basins cut by the shepherds to catch water; some grassy mounds of an old Roman camp, rising in triple terrace one above the other; and you have some idea of the higher downs taken in their generalities. To describe them in detail would take a year: for the beauty of their atmospheric changes alone are infinite and wonderful. But can I leave the Down country, with its quivering blue horizon, out of which the eye gradually evolves long funeral processions of firs; little toy farm-houses, so small in the distance that they are no bigger than a giant could carry on the palm of his hand (I mean a small giant, because, of course, a great giant like Brandyborax or Aldeboron has a palm to his hand as big as Salisbury Plain); grey spires, sharp and small as darning-needles; black specks of furze and bramble; and lesser specks, where glossy crows feed, or vibrate their wings-must I, I say, leave the high downs without describing the little stone tea-caddy of a Downshire church, built by that worthy but noseless man whose battered mummy of an effigy still lies, in a patient but ill-used way, on a flat tomb in the chancel ? I like the simple church, with the dial over the porch, erased by time. It is old as the Normans, I should think, that square tower, so massy and low, firm as the rock, so phalanxed and solid in its imperturbable immovability. The sunshine wanders over it, the rain beats it, the wind torments it, but it remains as it has stood for centuries. The green waves of that dead sea around the yew-tree, rise and fall, century after century, but the tree is fixed as the good ship's mast: and daily casts its moving shadow into the chancel to flicker about the latticing of sun and shade, as with the movement of passing wings. There are many country moments when the in the laurels, who seem to be practising in a Hullah class, perpetually put right by the fuller voices of the parent birds; but, best of all, I like to hear on Sunday, in the Downshire church, between the pauses of the psalm and the hushes in the Litany, the response of the vicar's blackbirds coming in as if they had been trained, like little choristers, in God's great open-air cathedral. gurgling out rich soprano passages. There, the even at noonday the nightingale may be heard negro blackbird, with the orange-bill, repeats his musical monotone, and the thrush flings forth his lavish, careless carolling upon the blue spring air. There, the robin, with breast stained ever since that "dreadful murder" of the Children in the Wood, bides his time, when in autumn he shall flaunt it on the Downshire lawns. Let us enter the covert through a fir wood, oozing balmy tears, spots of moving sunlight where, through straight rough-scaled stalks, flicker about on the dry pale leaves of last year, here and there brightened where an angel's visit of clear light from Heaven pours through and irradiates some churlish bramble, for all the world like woman's love hallowing some unworthy object: some Caliban of a husband, some Quilp, some ideal Cymon. the fretful nettles From these delights, I stroll botanising to to be black with bees that edge the outer their white flowers soon skirts of the fox covert, where the waterproof buds of the chesnut are throwing off their mackintoshes, and the beech is unrolling his sharpspiked buds; where the pied hazel is fluttering its green-winged rods, and the banks are strewn with primroses- those daylight stars, them in like nuns, soft gold in the sunlight and soft green where the transparent leaves hood paler in the shadow; where radiant bunches of violets purple the moss that wads the walks and velvets it for little fairy feet. Or, I find amusement in tracking the wood-pigeon to his nest by the piles of split beech-nuts under the selected fir; or, in judging that I could find a squirrel in his hammock up aloft when I see a plateful of nibbled nut-shells under the tall larch, gay with its tender pink blossoms; or, could I pursue the brook that lurks reedily among the trees, I might discover that eccentric angler, the heron, sitting like a wooden-legged midshipman up in a man-ofon his nest, with his two legs hanging through, war's cross-trees. If I had ornithological skill, I would seek out, that feathered attorney, the cuckoo, and turn him out of the hedge-sparrow's estate that he has unlawfully seized; or, I would hunt for rare birds. Then there are broader tracks of the covert, where the grim oaks stretch out their muscular arms defiantly, and tie. themselves in robust knots, where the clean-rinded beech has belts of dark moss and spots of feathery emerald, which look like the green plush stolen from a duck's neck, mixed up with snatches of the living emerald from the eyes of a peacock's fan. Then, there are huge antlered bushes of ash, strong and vigorous, butting the meek dog-rose and the scrubby elder; and here and there among the spiked thorn-bushes whose snow is not yet in the bloom, there are flowers of burning gold, kingcups whose nectar the bee drinks thirstily; and when you turn the corner of a wood walk, there is a stinging buzz of startled flies, and a great black humble-bee flies at you like a bullet; and this gay buzz and sense of life in every square inch of air, is, I think, one of the most joyous and delicious symptoms of warm spring weather, especially when you add to it over and above, a perpetual pulsation of cooing doves, a contest of birds, and a general unfurling and unpacking of the little green fairy dresses that are hereafter to be called leaves, and will eventually club together to form the shroud of poor dead King Summer. Then, you startle a great raven from a tree where he sits complaining of the exorbitant price of mutton at Ramsbury market, and you come out in the open where some moles are making a small parody of that useful but mouldy institution, the Thames Tunnel, and you emerge in a small glade, with a view through oak boughs, barred with sun and shadow, of a great slope of down, miles away, with a long slate roof shining in the sun, a cascade of sheep, and in front a green square of meadow where some cows are on their knees in flowers, that look from here like a gold carpet, woven without seam, perfect from the top throughout. It has been a glorious day in Downshire; the merry wind driving about the cool wavering shadows; the cuckoo echoing in the woods at Colonel Hanger's, where the pheasants cluck and strut, proud of their fat, of their market value, and of the brazen lustre of their fiery and emeraldine plumage no great things at a poulterer's door, but here, in the living sunshine, flashing past us exquisitely. The wind has been blowing the dust along the glaring white roads in smoking simooms, the swallows have been glimmering and crescenting about the water meadows, like so many wild horses, and now I am standing on the dewy lawn of my little country inn-the Three Crows-in the evening, watching the stars light up their little diamond illumination lamps in honour of a young May moon, just at the full. "Now, the moon," says the landlord, coming out with his white yard of clay and a burning Waterloo charge of bird's-eye, to be sociable with his guest, "seems to me like a bit of butter that is beginning to melt on a hot toastess." THE MATCH QUESTION. OUR French scientific friends are seriously turning their thoughts to the tender subject of "Lucifers, or No Lucifers." From the extreme cheapness and the extreme convenience of lucifers, they swarm, like the frogs in Egypt, in every chamber and, what is worse, in every kitchen. They intrude into your house, and into your bedroom, and upon your bed and under it, and into ovens, and into kneading-troughs. They fall into coffee and into soup, and cause many lamentable poisonings, unintentionally; they are so close at hand, and their presence excites so little suspicion, that they afford a ready means to unnatural relatives of getting rid of their encumbrances, to malignant persons of destroying their enemies, and to the of their sweethearts and themselves, intenlovesick and desponding of making an end tionally. And there is no known antidote to the poison. "allumettes chimiques" as they are called, are In the north especially of France, lucifers, or scattered broadcast over the land; they are sold by millions and billions in slight paper boxes to which a piece of sand paper is attached, as if to increase their dangerousness. Tobacco-smokers carry them loose, in their waistcoat-pockets, in their trousers-pockets, in their coat-pockets; they are strewn about, in a way which looks as if it were done purposely rather than carelessly, in passages, on staircases, in outhouses, and stables, amongst straw, sawdust, shavings, leaves. In any third class railway carriage, in any public wheel-conveyance, in any barge or boat in the northern provinces, you have only to ask your neighbour for an allumette to have half a dozen placed at your disposal. The lucifer is a sort of common property to which every one present has a claim, as much as to the loaf of bread lying on the table at which he dines. It is the favourite plaything of children, the indispensable necessary of adults, pervading every place where men either labour or congregate. Need it be stated that fires, both casual and incendiary, are frequent? The only wonder is that houses in France are not annually decimated by the devouring agent-since it is no matches have risen to the distinction of being In short, lucifer longer called an element. one of the greatest plagues of life. Grand Exhibitions of London and Paris showed what extensive proportions their manufacture had attained in the German States-the land of insatiable smokers: and it is increasing. The Naturally, people with a little common sense are uneasy at this state of things. Exhortations to prudence, recommendations, reproaches, and sermonising, have been attended with-the effects that might be expected from them. Phosphoric poisonings, and unexpected and unac countable fires, are of no rarer occurrence thorny questions of physical science; he is fairly than heretofore. It was thought, for a mo- launched on the full stream of the Correlation ment, that a remedy might be found in the em- of Physical Forces. He strikes away; a spark ployment of unusual preparations of phosphorus; falls. It is the transformation of motion into but the cheapness of the old lucifers made heat. His peroration, his coda, his grand windthem victorious. Even if they had not driven ing up of the symphony, is composed of the their rivals out of the market by lowness of production of heat and light by the combustion price, the mere trouble of fetching the new in- of steel in the oxygen of atmospheric air, the vention from unaccustomed shops was sufficient combustion of the organic tissue of the tinder to make thoughtless people indifferent to what favoured by the oxygen of the azotate, the did not fall in with their private convenience, decomposition of the azotate, the disengage. though it might with the public and general ment of oxide of azote, and the formation of security. Thus, the Match Question becomes water, carbonic acid, and carbonate of potash. of growing importance, in its relations both to Who would have thought that a tinder-box consocial economy and to public health. It nearly tained all this? It is evident that, in a scientific rivals the Italian Question in more than one point of view, flint and steel have no reason to particular. envy phosphoric lucifers, while in other respects they are greatly their superiors; the tinderbox poisons nobody, and sets fire to nobody's house. Amongst the dangers attending these little fire-generators, one which is little known, and of which slight, if any, warning has been given, is their liability to spontaneous combustion. No prudent person will keep them in his house, except in incombustible vessels or boxes, such as those made of earthenware, metal, or stone. If this precaution could be insisted upon, it would almost go to the complete suppression of matches tipped with white phosphorus, i. e. that which is white oefore it is coloured artificially. But what have we to replace this popular method of rubbing a light? Therein lies the difficulty. True, we still have red or amorphous phosphorus; but this is not easy to obtain pure. Moreover, it is, perhaps, not quite so innocent as it pretends to be. An opinion has already been expressed that white phosphorus may be regenerated or reproduced; that is to say, that red phosphorus may, with time, resume its original molecular state, and consequently recover all its chemical and organoleptic properties. But, as long as no fact of poisoning or setting fire to houses can be justly laid to the charge of red phosphorus, we may continue to employ it as we have hitherto done, when we can get it. All things considered, therefore, it seems possible that persons who do not like being grilled in their beds to a delicate brown, will have to return, for safety's sake, to the prosaic tinderbox, the primitive flint and steel, which, nevertheless, as Monsieur Bautigny (d'Evreux) observes, is not without its poetry, and might furnish matter for a long natural philosophical canto. The bard of the tinder-box could attune his harp to beds of silex, its different varieties, its formation, its relative age, its extraction; then he could strike the chords of iron ore, mines, smelting-houses, and forges. Coal, its origin, and its excavation, would most suitably be sung in a minor (or a miner) key; while steel would afford occasion for a dashing passage in all the sharps. Tinder opens the door for a pleasant excursion throughout the whole range of vegetable tissues; its immersion in azotate of potash leads the way to a brilliant chemical episode. With the flint and steel in hand and the tinder-box beneath them, the poet cannot strike a light without touching on some of the most At the mention of suppressing lucifer matches, it may be remarked, for the hundredth time, that if we once begin to suppress everything that may possibly prove injurious, we shall have to proscribe almost everything which is subservient to our daily wants; such as knives, coal, wine, spirituous liquors, and kitchen fires, to which may be added the upper stories of dwelling-houses, seeing that people may kill themselves therefrom by jumping out of the window- and also wells, because you may drown yourself therein, purposely or accidentally. But the objection may be refuted in half a word: there are some things which offer more advantages than dangers; others, on the contrary, offer more dangers than advantages. Lucifers are in the latter case; consequently, they ought to be got rid of. How? Our Gallic allies propose to do it by a coup d'état, through the agency of the imperial government. It is clear that so long as "allumettes chimiques" are made by their present makers, and sold at their present prices, no consideration, advice, or prohibition will be in the least available to check their use. Now, in France, there are articles-videlicet, tobacco and gunpowder-of which the government has the exclusive monopoly, deriving from them a considerable revenue. The state alone is allowed to manufacture them, and sells them at its own prices, having no rival or competitor. There can be no snuff-mill erected in the next street, no powder-mill built on the neighbouring heath, to affect either article in the market. Any private enterprise of the kind is contrary to law, and would be put down as instantly and as severely as an establishment for the coining of bad money, or the forging of bank-notes. The French government is, therefore, prayed to include allumettes chimiques amongst its monopolies, to manufacture them exclusively, and to sell them by its own agents, of which it has a complete and organised body dispersed over the whole surface of the empire, in the shape of the Débits de Tabac, or tobacco-shops, which are government appointments, wide-spread objects of patronage, given, in the majority of cases, to the widows of military men. Only the other negligence, may produce such dreadful conseday, a batch of colonels' relicts were promoted quences. to tobacco-shops that brought in from one to two hundred sterling per annum; whilst lone ladies of lower rank were provided for in less productive establishments. If it be thought that the state has plenty to do without entering into this new line of business, there still remains the easy expedient of imposing a new and heavy tax. To save us from falling back on the venerable tinder-box of our forefathers, two French gentlemen, Messieurs Devilliers and Dalemagne, have invented a harmless match, to which they have given the fanciful name of "Allumettes Androgynes," or Androgynous Matches. They have yielded to the public in France their privileges as patentees, but not to the public of It is urged that the evil complained of lies, foreign countries. These matches are tipped at not so much in the use of lucifers, as in their each end with a different composition; you abuse; in the prodigality with which everybody break the match in two, about one-third of employs and wastes them, in consequence of their its length from the end which does not extreme cheapness. Practically, one lucifer, light; you rub the two opposite tips togehalf a dozen lucifers, is of no money value what-ther; and fire is the result. They have the ever. An instantaneous light is a good, a con- advantage of not being inflammable withvenient thing to have-sometimes a thing of out the concourse of the human will; in urgent necessity. There is no reason why it other words, the match does not light unless should not be obtainable by prudent persons, people know how to make use of it, in which who light, perhaps, not more than five or six case it is inflamed instantaneously all by itself, matches a week, while there is great reason why without the aid of any foreign body. It is easily it should not be come-at-able by careless fellows, lighted; you may do it with your hands behind who will burn you a box or more per day, to you. It offers no danger of poisoning; it does light their pipes. If every box cost five shil- not expose the maker to the sad malady of lings, for instance, it is probable that lucifers necrosis or decay of the bone, since the old form would be used with a very different degree of of phosphorus does not enter into its composieconomy to what they are now. They would, at tion. It is prepared very rapidly, by a cold least, be kept out of the way of children. But, process, without employing any combustible, without fixing so high a price, which might which is a great safeguard against fire or explointerfere with the utilitarian use of lucifers, if a sion; and lastly, it is made so cheaply, that any box cost only a shilling, only sixpence, the pru- intelligent workman with a capital of eight or dential result would be obtained; private ten shillings may set up in France as a manueconomy would become the guardian of public facturer of the androgynous match. Unforsafety. tunately, there is a little dispute as to whether red phosphorus is open to the public. The Messrs. Coignet (Brothers) and Company protest to the contrary, asserting that they are the proprietors of a patent for the transformation of white into amorphous phosphorus. Any similar check on the abuse of lucifers must be worked out in England by different means. We do not abuse lucifers so much as the French; still we do abuse them a little. Also, we have more need of lucifers than the French, in aid of our daily household requirements. In France, where very little coal is burnt, but a great deal of turf and wood, a light is obtainable at many hours when it is not so with us, by means of an ordinary brimstone match. On retiring to rest, fires are not put out; but are covered with the ashes, which are allowed to accumulate from week to week. The heat thus retained is generally sufficient to light a fire next morning without further aid except a little blowing, and consequently more than sufficient to ignite a common match tipped with sulphur only. As to the imposition of a new tax: the state, in any case, must have money to oil its machinery and keep it going; the lucifer tax might help to relieve the nation from some more objectionable impost, which it would not be difficult to indicate. What mother would complain of a tax which kept such terrible toys out of her children's hands? What householder would grumble at paying a premium which would be the most efficient of all fire insurances? In any case the subject merits serious consideration. Neither persons nor property ought to remain at the unlimited mercy of a material so dangerous in malevolent hands, and which, by the merest An association of partners, calling themselves La Compagnie Générale, have manufactured matches which have the advantage of containing neither phosphorus nor other poison, but which, till lately, were open to the reproach of missing fire nine times out of ten. At present they are so much improved, that they light nearly as easily as lucifers. There are, therefore, now in existence five sorts of instantaneous lights: common lucifers, or allumettes chimiques; lucifers made red with phosphorus; androgynous matches; matches with a red-phosphorus grater or rubbingplate; and the non-poisonous matches of the General Company. The first are incontestably the best, but they are so dangerous that their use is scarcely to be further tolerated unless they are subjected to some administrative precautionary measure. All the matches tipped with a chemical paste light more or less readily according to the hygrometrical state of the air; many a match which is easily ignited when the weather is dry, is inferior to flint and steel when the atmosphere is loaded with moisture. It is a great pity that the tinder-box is not enforced by the army and navy regulations in barracks and on board ship. As soon as the tinder-box is established as an institution, accidents from fire and intemperance in smoking disappear. Smoking is good, but too much of anything is decidedly bad. OUR EYE-WITNESS AMONG THE BUILDINGS. pile; themselves kept from the glare by that main pile itself, and immensely helping in their turn to overshadow the receding portions of the wings which I have already described." When Sir Benjamin leaned back in his chair after giving this lucid description-which he had illustrated by a diagram drawn with his thumbTHE residence of your Eye-witness is at the nail on the tablecloth-it was observed by the end of a certain row of stuccoed houses in the company that a great change came over the deparish of Marylebone, and in the postal district meanour of Slack. Rising from his chair and N.W. The row is entitled and called Lumbago- smiling faintly, he asked permission to retire terrace; but the house is not in a line with the for a few minutes to his study, from which other houses in Lumbago-terrace. It is situated place he emerged one hour afterwards, bearing at the eastern extremity of that stronghold of in his hand the plan of Lumbago-terrace as it miasma, and projects from the other clammy at present stands; a close imitation of the and exudacious tenements, thus :-Lumbago- thumb-nail diagram of Sir Benjamin Bigg. It terrace is a fine specimen of the architec- was exhibited to the company and applauded to ture of Corinth, as adapted to the necessities the echo by all present, except, indeed, one of our age and habits. It is well known that gentleman, who in the frenzied stupidity of his the great glare and blaze of sunlight, to which soul, or perhaps under the influence of too much in this country we are perpetually subject, and wine, inquired whether a building might not be which dazzles and scorches the inhabitants of our very admirably adapted to the hot climate and island during the greater portion of the year, is perpetual sunlight of Greece, and yet not be perthe only drawback of our climate, and the only fea- fectly suited to the peculiar exigencies of Maryture of it which it is necessary to guard against.lebone? This lunatic was, however, promptly The architect of Lumbago-terrace, deeply initiated in his subject (as is indeed the case with all his fraternity), and being a profound and original thinker, only considering what is sensible and convenient, and not trammelled by conventional rules (in which respect, also, he resembles the other members of his profession), this gentleman, when he "threw up" the great Corinthian façade in the centre of Lumbagoterrace, found that he had only succeeded in darkening the four centre houses of the row, and that the others, unless he could think of some mode of averting so terrible a calamity, stood a fair chance of having the light of heaven admitted into their drawing and dining rooms. This discovery cost the ingenious Mr. Slack many sleepless nights, and his friends observed -though they did not know the cause-that a cloud was upon his sprightly soul. But one day when Slack had entertained a numerous circle of acquaintances and friends at dinner, it happened that towards the conclusion of the meal during which he had been unusually silent-the conversation turned upon a certain Grecian temple which one of the company, Sir Benjamin Bigg, a great authority on bells, had recently visited in his travels, and which he described as being composed of a central block, completely shaded from the Grecian sun by a portico. Aha," said Mr. Slack, "this is like Lumbago-terrace." 66 Nor," continued Sir Benjamin, "is this all. This great block of masonry would have been monotonous had it continued in a straight line, and a portico-however large it may be-will only overshadow a certain portion of the building. Now mark the ingenuity of our great Grecian architect-what does he do? He takes back the line of his wings, buries them in a recess behind the great central mass before spoken of, and then throws forward a couple of massive corner buildings at either end of the put to silence, and was snubbed and discountenanced by the enlightened assembly. Some such principle must have been acted upon in the designing of the different terraces which surround the Regent's Park. The Grecian taste which succeeded the Roman in this country was at its height in the time of that dire Regency, and consequently Grecian pediments, Corinthian capitals, and statues after the antique models, are to be found in the Regent's Park. There is, indeed, one terrace nearly allied to that of Lumbago, in which the genius of the architect seems to have come out, in the invention of a wholly new and original style, such as in the annals of building has never been known before, and concerning which there seems reason to entertain a frisky and joyous hope that it may never be known again. It was our hint to speak in the last number in high terms of the cupola, or dome, which roofs so nobly the cathedral of St. Paul; also, of a small version of this same cupola as it appears on the National Gallery, and on the London University. What words are left to us in which to treat of such a phenomenon as a terrace of dwelling-houses ornamented with little cupola or domes, out of the top of each of which grows that last resource of decorative ingenuity, a spike? This terrace is an exception to the Grecian character of the rest of the Regent's Park, and is hideous enough to make it surprising that it has not been copied elsewhere. That stucco, if it is a necessity, is a very dreary one! It has a chill and cheap appearance. It will peel off in bulgy blisters, and will turn green, and in either of these conditions it presents a gloomy and ruinous appearance, sugges tive at once of insolvency and rheumatism. The Regency was a great period of revival in the history of stucco, and in the park and street named in commemoration of the reign of George the Regent, this peculiar kind of compo is in its |