in the lottery, a determination to try their chances, and a full reliance on the lucky office' which issued the hand-bill. Hone, in his Every-Day Book, vol. ii., has engraved several specimens of these 'fly-leaves,' now very rare, and only to be seen among the collections of the curious. We add three more examples, selected from a large assemblage, and forming curious specimens of the variety of design occasionally adopted. It is seldom any sentimental or serious subject was attempted, but our first specimen comes in that category. This lottery was drawn on Valentine's Day; Cupid is,

THE LAST LOTTERY IN ENGLAND.

therefore, shewn angling for hearts, each inscribed with their value, £21,000; they float toward him in a stream descending from the temple of Fortune, on a hill in the background; and beneath is inscribed: Great chance! small risk! A whole ticket for only eighteen shillings!-a sixteenth for only two shillings! in the lottery to be drawn on Valentine's Day; on which day, three of £2000 will be drawn in the first five minutes, which the public are sure to get for nothing!!'

A whimsical notion of depicting figures of all kinds by simple dots and lines, having originated abroad, was adopted by the keepers of British lottery-offices. The following is a specimen sent out by a large contractor named Sivewright.

"Though a dab, I'm not scaly-I like a good plaice,

And I hope that good-luck will soon smile in my face;

On the 14th of June, when Prizes in shoals,
Will cheer up the cockles of all sorts of soals.'

The English government at last felt the degradation of obtaining revenues by means of the lottery, and the last act which gave it a legal existence received the royal assent on the 9th of July 1823, and soon after the last' was drawn in England, as described already.

The

Lotteries linger still upon the continent; from Hamburg we occasionally get a prospectus of some chateau and park thus to be disposed of, or some lucky scheme to be drawn; but Rome may be fairly considered as the city where they flourish best and most publicly. At certain times, the Corso is gay with lottery-offices, and busy with adventurers. All persons speculate, and a large number are found among the lower grades of the clergy. The writer was present at the drawing of the lottery which took place in November 1856, in the great square termed Piazza Navona. whole of that immense area was crammed with people, every window crowded, the houses hung with tapestries and coloured cloths, and a showy canopied stage erected at one end of the Piazza, upon which the business of drawing was conducted. As the space was so large, and the mob all eager to know fortune's behests, smaller stages were erected midway on both sides of the square, and the numbers drawn were exhibited in frames erected upon them. Bands of military music were stationed near; the pope's guard, doing duty as mounted police. The last was by no means an unnecessary precaution, for a sham quarrel was got up in the densest part of the crowd for the purpose of plunder, and some mischief done in the turmoil. Of the thousands assembled, many were priests; and all held their numbers in their hands, anxiously hoping for good-fortune. It was a singular sight, and certainly not the most moral, to see people and clergy all eagerly engaged on the Sunday in gambling.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

OCTOBER 19.

Saints Ptolemy, Lucius, and a companion, 166. St Ethbin or Egbin, abbot, end of 6th century. St Frideswide, virgin, and patroness of Oxford, 8th century. St Peter of Alcantara, confessor, 1562.

Born.-Sir Thomas Browne, antiquary and philosopher, 1605, Cheapside, London; James Butler, Duke of Ormond, commander and statesman, 1610, Clerkenwell, London; James Gronovius, scholar and author (Thesaurus Antiquitatum Græcarum), 1645, Deventer; John Adams, distinguished American statesman, 1735, Braintree, Massachusetts; James Henry Leigh Hunt, poet and miscellaneous writer, 1784, Southgate, Middlesex. Died.-King John of England, 1216, Newark Castle; Jacobus Arminius (Jacob Harmensen), celebrated Dutch theologian, 1609; Sir Thomas Browne, antiquary and philosopher, 1682, Norwich; Dean Jonathan Swift, humorous and political writer, 1745, Dublin; Henry Kirke White, youthful poet, 1806, Cambridge; Francis Joseph Talma, great French tragedian, 1826, Paris.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

To many generations of gentle and meditative readers, Sir Thomas Browne has been a choice classic. Southey said, that were his library confined to a dozen English authors, Browne should be one of them. De Quincey describes Donne, Chillingworth, Jeremy Taylor, Milton, South, Barrow, and Sir Thomas Browne, as 'a pleiad or constellation of seven golden stars, such as in their class no literature can match,' and from whose works he would undertake to build up an entire body of philosophy.

Browne was the son of a London merchant, and was born within the sound of Bow Bells in 1605. His father died and left him, in childhood, with a fortune of £6000, out of a great part of which, says Dr Johnson, he was defrauded by one of his guardians, according to the common fate of orphans.' He was educated at Winchester and Oxford, and after practising physic for a while in Oxfordshire, he set out on a long tour through Italy, France, and Holland. About 1634, he returned to London, and in the following year he is supposed to have written his Religio Medici. In 1636, he settled in Norwich, and commenced business as a physician; and in the enjoyment of an extensive and lucrative practice, he passed in that city the remainder of his long life. Of women he wrote very slightingly, saying, that the whole world was made for man, but only the twelfth part of man for woman;' and "that man is the whole world, but woman only the rib or crooked part of man.' Nevertheless, in 1641, he married a Mrs Mileham, of a good Norfolk family, a lady of such symmetrical proportion to her husband, both in the graces of her mind and her body, that they seemed to come together by a kind of natural magnetism,' writes Whitefoot, one of Browne's biographers. Together they lived happily for forty years; she bore him ten children, and lived to be his widow. Charles II., in a visit to Norwich in 1671, knighted Browne. Such, in a few words, is the story of Sir Thomas Browne's life. He died on his seventy-seventh birthday, the 19th of October 1682.

The chief incident in his life was the publication of the Religio Medici-the Religion of a Physician.

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SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

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It was written, he declares, 'with no intention for the press, but for his own exercise and entertainment. For some six years it appears to have been handed about in manuscript, and on the plea of its being surreptitiously and imperfectly printed, he gave a true and full copy,' under his own hand, to the world in 1643. It at once excited the attention of the public, even in that stormy age, as Johnson says, 'by the novelty of paradoxes, the dignity of sentiment, the quick succession of images, the multitude of abstruse allusions, the subtilty of disquisition, and the strength of language.' In the book he speaks much of himself, but in such terms to pique rather than satisfy curiosity. asserts, he understands six languages; that he is no stranger to astronomy; that he has seen many countries; and leaves us to puzzle our heads over the mysterious and solemn announcement, 'that his life has been a miracle of thirty years, which to relate were not history, but a piece of poetry, and would sound like a fable.' So far as concerns the autobiographical portions, the reader of the Religio Medici will do well to bear in mind that he is dealing with a humorist; and Browne's humour is so irresistible, that it oozes through some of his gravest passages. Coleridge describes the Religio Medici as a fine portrait of a handsome man in his best clothes; it is much of what he was at all times; a good deal of what he was only in his best moments. I have never read a book in which I have felt greater similarity to my own make of mind-active in inquiry, and yet with an appetite to believe-in short, an affectionate visionary! It is a most delicious book."'

The success of the Religio Medici, which was translated into Latin, and thence into French, German, Dutch, and Italian, probably tempted Browne into the publication of his second work, in 1646, entitled Pseudoxia Epidemica, 'or inquiries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths, which examined, prove but vulgar

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and common errors.' This curious book treats in a pedantic way of a large number of odd notions, such as, that Jews stink; that the forbidden-fruit an apple; that storks will only live in republics and free states; that the flesh of peacocks corrupteth not; that elephants have no joints; that a pot full of ashes will contain as much water as it would without them; that men weigh heavier dead than alive, and before meat than after; that crystal is nothing but ice strongly congealed, &c. Notwithstanding his zeal to discover old errors, he was a prey to not a few himself. Natural diseases," he writes, are heightened to a great excess by the subtlety of the devil co-operating with the malice of those we term witches, at whose instance he doth those villanies.' Sir Matthew Hale fortified himself by this opinion in condemning two poor women as witches. Further he advises, 'that to those who would attempt to teach animals the art of speech, the dogs and cats, that usually speak unto witches, may afford some encouragement. The motion of the earth he never mentions but with contempt and ridicule, though the opinion was in his time growing popular.

The discovery of some urns in Norfolk, in 1658, induced him to write Hydriotaphia; a discourse on urn-burial, in which, with a strange mixture of ideality and pedantry, he describes the funeral

rites of ancient nations. There is perhaps none of his works,' says Dr Johnson, which better exemplifies his reading or memory. It is scarcely to be imagined how many particulars he has amassed, in a treatise which seems to have been occasionally written.' To Hydriotaphia he added a disquisition on The Garden of Cyrus, or the Quincunxial Lozenge or Net-work Plantations of the Ancients artificially, naturally. Quincunx order is a plantation of trees disposed originally in a square, consisting of five trees, one at each corner, and a fifth in the middle, which disposition, repeated again and again, forms a regular grove, wood, or wilderness. The quincunx, Browne pursues through art and nature with a pertinacity that almost leads his reader to conclude that on that figure the universe was planned.

These were all the writings Sir Thomas Browne published, but after his death a mass of papers was discovered in his study, carefully transcribed, and ready for the press. These miscellanies have been printed, and supply fresh evidence of the versatility and originality of his reading and meditation. Considering the drudgery of his practice as physician, it is surprising that he should have read and written so much; but it is recorded that he was a skilful economist of time, that he could never bear to be a minute idle, and that the hours he could steal from his patients were spent in his study. He was always cheerful, though rarely merry; and, though in his writing garrulous, in speech he was slow and weighty. In his dress he affected plainness, and was averse to all finery; and was a strong advocate for thick and warm garments, as essential to health in the English

climate.

The stability the English language had acquired in the age of Elizabeth was lost under her successors, and Browne, along with Milton and others, poured a multitude of exotic words into his compositions, to the great injury of their effect. He uses commensality, for the state of many living at the same table; paralogical, for an unreasonable doubt; and arthritical analogies, for parts that serve some animals in the place of joints; besides a host of other pedantries to even less purpose; so that his style in some parts is rather a tissue of many tongues than honest English.

DEAN SWIFT.

The life of the celebrated dean of St Patrick's presents a history at once singular and painful. Born and educated in adversity, we find him emerging, after a hard struggle, into prosperity and fame; then disappointed in his canvass for clerical honours, we see him retire from the contest, and devote himself to literature and study; but cursed by a splenetic and morbid disposition, little real enjoyment is seemingly ever derived by him from any source, whilst the cold calculating selfishness which prompted him to trifle with the affections of a loving and self-sacrificing woman, entailed on him the pangs of a secret and agonising remorse. Disease, bodily and mental, comes to complete his miseries, and the last days of the great satirist and politician are characterised by the most melancholy and unqualified idiocy.

'From Marlborough's eyes the streams of dotage flow, And Swift expires a driveller and a show.'

DEAN SWIFT.

Though born and resident in Ireland during the greater part of his life, Swift was thoroughly English both by extraction and disposition. His grandfather, the Rev. Thomas Swift, was vicar of Goodrich, in Herefordshire, four of whose sons, of whom he had ten, besides four daughters, settled in Ireland. One of these, Jonathan, who had been bred to the law, was appointed steward of the King's Inns, Dublin, but died about two years afterwards, leaving his widow in great poverty, with an infant daughter, and also pregnant of a son, who was born on 30th November 1667, and received his father's name.

Young Jonathan received his first education at a school in Kilkenny, and was afterwards sent to Trinity College, Dublin, being indebted for these advantages to his uncle, Godwin Swift, who formed the main support of his mother and her family, but seems to have bestowed his bounty in a niggardly and ungracious manner. While at college, Swift made himself specially distinguished in no way, except idling, and the perpetration of many reckless pranks. In 1688, he passed over to England, and joined there his mother, who had been residing for some time in Leicestershire. She was a relation of the wife of Sir William Temple. Introduced to this celebrated statesman, the young man was appointed private secretary, and took up his abode with Sir William, at the latter's seat of Moor Park, in Surrey. Here a reformation took place in his habits; and having both gained the approbation of his patron and his patron's master, King William, who used frequently to visit at Moor Park, he was enabled in 1692 to proceed to Oxford, where he obtained the degree of M.A. in the same year. Returning to his former employment under Sir William, a disagreement arose, and Swift set off to Ireland, with the hope of pushing his way in the church. He had the mortification of being obliged to solicit his patron for a certificate before he could obtain preferment, but in 1695 was made prebend of Kilroot, in the diocese of Connor, with a revenue of a hundred a year. Life, however, in this remote locality was far too dull for him, and he was, consequently, very happy to adjust his difference with Sir William Temple, and return to his secretaryship at Moor Park. On the death of Sir William, he proceeded to London, and superintended there the publication of his patron's posthumous works.

Having accompanied Lord Berkeley to Ireland in 1699, as his chaplain, Swift was presented by him to the rectory of Agher and the vicarages of Rathbeggan and Laracor, in the diocese of Meath. At the last-named of these livings he took up his residence, and continued there, during nearly the whole of the reign of Queen Anne, to pass the life of a country clergyman, varied by occasional visits to England, with which he kept up a constant correspondence; and employing himself, from time to time, in various literary lucubrations, including the celebrated Tale of a Tub, and the Battle of the Books, published anonymously in 1704, and the Predictions of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., in 1708. He also gave to the world several tracts, in one of which, the Letter on the Sacramental Test, he opposed strenuously the relaxation of the penal laws regarding dissenters. Swift was thoroughly a High Churchman; and though in politics attached,