and cons,

up

Nor was it amongst the farmer and manufacturing classes alone that Mr. Joyce received pledges of support. Several of the neighbouring county gentry and clergy, who had hung back during Mr. Bokenham's candidature, enrolled themselves on the committee of the new comer; and one of his most active adherents was Mr. Benthall. It was not until after due deliberation, and much weighing of pros that the head - master of Helmingham Grammar School took this step; but he smiled when he had thoroughly made his mind, and muttered something to himself about its being "a shot for Madam in more ways than one.' When he had decided he was by no means underhand in his conduct, but went straight to Mr. Creswell, taking the opportunity of catching him away from home and alone, and told him that the Benthall family had been staunch Liberals for generations; and that, however much he might regret being opposed in politics to a gentleman for whom he entertained such a profound esteem and regard, he could not forswear the family political faith. Mr. Creswell made him a polite reply, and forthwith forgot all about it; and Marian, though she was in the habit of questioning her husband pretty closely at the end of each day as to the progress he had made, looked upon Mr. Benthall's vote as so perfectly secure that she never asked about the matter.

Notwithstanding the favourable reception which he met with everywhere, and the success which seemed invariably to attend him in his canvass, Joyce found it very heavy work. The constant excitement soon began to tell upon him, and the absurdity of the questions sometimes asked, or the pledges occasionally required of him, irritated him so much that he began to inquire of himself whether he was really wise

Öne bright wintry morning he arose at the hotel with the determination to take a day's rest from his labours, and to endea vour to recruit himself by a little quiet and fresh air. He had been up late the previous night at a very large meeting of his supporters, the largest as yet gathered together, which he had addressed with even more than wonted effect. He felt that he was speaking more forcibly than usual; he could not tell why, he did not even know what prompted him; but he felt it. It could not have been the presence of the parliamentary agent, Mr. Fyfe, who had come down from London to see how his young friend was getting on, and who was really very much astonished at his young friend's eloquence. Walter Joyce was speaking of the way in which the opposite party had, when in power, broken the pledges they had given, and laughed to scorn the promises they had made when seeking power, and in dilating upon it he used a personal illustration, comparing the voters to a girl who had been jilted and betrayed by her lover, who had been unexpectly raised to riches. Unconsciously fired by his own experience, he displayed a most forcible and highly-wrought picture of the despair of the girl and the villany of the man, and roused his audience to a perfect storm of enthusiasm. No one who heard him, as he thought, except Jack Byrne, had the least inkling of his story, or of its effect upon his eloquence; but the "hands" were immensely touched and delighted, and the effect was electrical. Walter went home thoroughly knocked up, and the next morning the reaction had set in. He felt it impossible to attend to business, sent messages to Mr. Fyfe and to Byrne, telling them they must get on without him for the day, and, after a slight breakfast, hurried out of the hotel by the back way. There were always plenty of loafers and idlers hanging round all sides of the house, eager to stare at him, to prefer a petition to him, or to point him out to their friends; but this morning he was

and diverse tortures. The like they did in the kingdom of Venezuela, destroying four or five millions, and out of that continent carried to the islands for slaves, at times, in seventeen years a million of people. But why do I longer trace them in their bloody steps?"

Such was the way in which men wrote who had just heard of the Gunpowder Plot, men who, as children, had seen their mothers' cheeks glow and their fathers' eyes sparkle at the glori- | ous news of the rout of the boastful Armada. It was such cruelties that made the Spaniards hateful to all Europe, that corrupted their nation, that made their climax so brief, that rendered England their deadly and dangerous enemy for nearly a century, and, finally, that left them where they are at present-the last laggards in the race of civilisation.

Manningtree, near Harwich, though a mere small, struggling town on the southern bank of the Stour, is, like Pleshy, a Shakesperean place, being mentioned in Henry the Fourth, where Falstaff is compared, by the mad prince, to "a roasted Manningtree ox, with a pudding in its belly." Manningtree is a place especially connected with one of the most miserable and cruel of old superstitions-the belief in witchcraft. It, indeed, went very hard with all poor, soured, half crazed old women for several centuries, and Essex was especially debased by the irrational persecution. The world had had feverish fits of wild burning, as in Geneva in 1575, when, in three months only, five hundred witches were burnt, or, as in Como, in 1524, when one thousand were burnt in one year. That notorious fool or knave, or both, Matthew Hopkins, "the witch finder," in 1645, hurried to execution about one hundred persons in Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk. This man pretended to discover the diabolical marks (generally warts) on the old women, by which the devil had marked them for his own. At last, submitting to his own tests, "hoist by his own petard," unlucky and over-zealous Matthew was himself found to be diabolical, and was hung incontinently. Still the miserable fear and folly continued. Even Hale, wise and excellent judge though he was, burnt two unlucky persons for witchcraft in 1664, and in 1676 seventeen or eighteen persons were burnt at St. Osyth's in Essex. In 1716 Mrs. Hicks and her child (nine years old) were hanged at Huntingdon. The last sufferer in Scotland was at Dornach in 1722.

Harwich, a place declining ever since the French war ended with that thunder-clap at Waterloo, stands on a point of land bordered by the sea on the east, and on the north by the estuaries of the Stour and Orwell. The Romans, wishing to guard the Saxon settlements on the south and east coast from fresh German pirates, established a sort of sea patrol or coastguard, under the command of "the honourable count of the Saxon shore," whose jurisdiction reached from Aldrington in Sussex to Brancaster in Norfolk. The Saxons in their turn continued the same patrol, and this town obtained its name from their camp, "Here-wich" |

(the town of the army). The Romans have left traces here, for there is still a Roman paved road leading to the town, and a camp with ramparts and fosse reaching from the south side of the town to Beacon Hill Field. In 855 King Alfred broke up the Danish piratical fleet at the broad mouth of the Orwell and captured every vessel. After the Norman invasion, and the decay of the older town of Orwell, which stood on a spot now a shoal five miles from the shore, Harwich became a place of importance and a favourite spot of embarkation for Holland and Flanders. In September, 1326, Isabella, queen of Edward the Second, landed at Harwich, with seven hundred and fifty Hainaulters, her son the prince, and her paramour, Roger Mortimer. Here, joined by three bishops, and the Earls of Kent and Norfolk, she marched against her husband and his evil counsellors. A year from that day the weak king was cruelly put to death in the vaulted room at Berkeley. In 1338 Edward the Third sailed from Harwich with five hundred blazoned, gilded, and turreted vessels for his first campaign against France. In the following year eleven French galleys, "willing to wound and yet afraid to strike," hovered menacingly round the mouth of the Orwell, but did not venture within reach of our crossbow bolts and arrows. In 1340, Edward the Third set sail again from Harwich on Midsummer Eve, took half the enemy's ships, and made many prisoners. In due time Henry the Eighth, Queen Elizabeth, and Charles the Second visited the town. William the Third chose Harwich as his point of departure for Holland, and George the First and Second started joyfully from this same Essex town, which modern travellers have malignantly branded as dull.

On September 6th, 1761, the great but heavy Lord Anson arrived at Harwich from Cuxhaven with the Princess Charlotte, of Mecklenburgh Strelitz, the destined bride of the young King George. They had been a week at sea. She remained all the Sunday on board the royal yacht in Harwich Roads, landed late on the Monday, was welcomed by the authorities in the usual respectful and tiresome manner, and then posted on to Colchester, where Mr. Green, a private gentleman, gave her tea, and a native of the place presented her with a box of candied eringo root. Lord Harcourt, the king's representative, describes the Princess as full of good sense, vivacity, and cheerfulness, no regular beauty, but a good figure, with a charming complexion, and very pretty eyes. The Princess entered London by Whitechapel, wearing a fly cap with lace lappets, a diamond spangled stomacher, and a gold brocade suit of clothes with a white ground.

In 1764, four years after the ascent of George the Third, Charles William Frederick, Prince of Brunswick, landed at Harwich, on his way to claim the hand of the young king's sister, the Princess Augusta. The new queen (Charlotte) had a small German jealousy of Brunswick. The prince was a knightly, ugly

commerce and traffic have decreased since the French war ended, and Harwich will some day, unless it looks out sharper, become as Orwell, over whose decay it once triumphed. No one, nevertheless, can yet crow over Harwich, for it still boasts one hundred vessels and a considerable fleet of wherries that ply to Manningtree and Ipswich. In the Harwich docks seventyfour gun ships have been built. The harbour has a fine opening, is deep and generous, and is, and probably always will be, the only safe sheltering roadstead between Yarmouth and the Thames, although Lowestoft is a dangerous rival, and Yarmouth is more convenient for Holland, Germany, and Sweden. Now the garrison and government works are gone, Harwich shows signs of age. Its ruin began in its own greediness as early as 1742, when the townspeople and innkeepers were so rapacious with strangers from Holland and Germany that sloops were started to go direct between London and Holland; it was just the same short-sighted greediness, in the latter case for dock dues, that ruined Bristol irreparably, and made Liverpool.

There was a day when old Burleigh shook his wise head over a chart of our east coast, and said, in his sententious way, "Harwich must be fortified against the Spaniard." Sure enough in 1625 a Spanish fleet did swoop round Harwich, and rather scared the marsh people. In Queen Anne's time the town was fortified against the sailors of Louis Quatorze. The blockhouses have now disappeared, and so have the ancient gates, St. Austin, Barton's or the Watergate, Castle Gate, and St. Helen's Port; but there is Landguard Fort, built by James the First on the Suffolk Point still, with its twenty heavy traversing guns, to protect the passage from the sea.

THE UNIVERSE.

SOME readers may be inclined to think it an act of presumption to attempt to treat so vast a topic as the constitution of the universe in a slight sketch comprised in one short paper. It would be so were the universe a chaos, a heterogeneous medley, a system of independent and uncurbed anarchies. But the universe, on the contrary, is symmetry, order, law. The most recent discoveries of science tend to prove that the universe is one, a unity, made up of like co-ordinate parts, and of similar when not identical materials.

It has been often said that the mind of man is incapable of comprehending the infinite. This may be true in a certain sense, because we may entertain reasonable doubts whether we really and fully understand anything. But for my own part, as far as the visible universe is concerned, I feel much less difficulty in comprehending its infinity than in conceiving that it can possibly be finite.

As to space: Can we by any effort imagine the existence of a boundary, a blank wall, an impassable limit, where there is no further ex

tension of space? Where a winged messenger or angel, sent on the errand of penetrating deeper into space, would have to turn back because there was no more space to penetrate? No; we cannot figure to ourselves such a final limit to the extent of the universe, such a ringfence enclosing all things created. It is far easier both to grant and to understand that, space must be infinitely extensible.

Then again, as to time: We cannot conceive its actual stoppage. The events by which we measure time, the motions of the heavenly bodies might alter, nay, might even cease; the planets might all fall into the sun, suns might coalesce or group together, making new heavens and new earths, still there would be a change, a progress, which is only another mode and manifestation of time. Even supposing (what is impossible to suppose) that no more motion or event took place in the universethat the great All were still, stagnant, and dead-time nevertheless, that is to say eternity, would not cease. Immortal beings would yet possess and enjoy an everlasting Now of life and happiness. Here also we can more readily admit the infinite than conceive the finite.

We have now a clear and comprehensive knowledge of what, to our forefathers, was impenetrable mystery. The early inhabitants of the earth would naturally take it to be a flat surface spread out in all directions. The sun, moon, and stars would be simple luminaries hung in the heavens for their convenience to afford them light. Travel might teach them that this flat surface was considerably larger than they at first suspected; but a moment's reflection must soon convince them that it could not extend in all directions indefinitely. They would witness regularly, every day, the sun rising on one side of the earth and setting on the opposite side; and, moreover, not rising and setting at the same points of the horizon for an observer stationed at one and the same spot. At one season the point of emergence would advance, day by day, towards the north; at another time of the year it would gradually shift towards the south. The sun's setting would present exactly similar circumstances. The same of the risings and settings of the moon. A great number of the stars would be observed to rise and set in the east and the west, like the sun and the moon, with the difference that each star would rise and set always at the same points of the horizon, if observed from the same spot on the earth's surface.

Now, no doubt could be entertained that the heavenly bodies which reappeared daily by rising in the east, were the same bodies which had previously disappeared by setting in the west. They must therefore have passed either beneath the earth or through it, during the interval of time between their setting and their rising. The latter alternative being impossible, it followed, as a necessary consequence, that the earth could not spread, in the direction of the horizon, as far as the stars. There must be a free passage, all round the

earth, allowing the heavenly bodies to make their daily peregrinations. The earth's extent once admitted to be limited, the idea of its roundness would soon come to explain it; and, little by little, the earth came to be acknowledged as a globe suspended in space, and resting on nothing.

After this first grand step, it was remarked that the other heavenly bodies are also globes whose real distances from us are enormously greater than had been supposed. Gradually, the truth was forced on men's minds that the terrestrial sphere, so vast in respect to us, is excessively small compared with most of the stars which spangle the firmament. Instead of being the centre of the universe, for whose benefit all the rest had been created, it is reduced to the rank of a mere planet, one of a numerous family, all regularly revolving round the sun. Moreover, the conditions in which the planets exist and the circumstances noticeable on their surfaces, show that some of them at least may be inhabited, as well as the earth. Furthermore, the stars which twinkle in every part of the firmament, are neither more nor less than suns, of different dimensions, amongst which our sun is certainly not the largest. It is more than probable that each of these suns is accompanied by a system of planets revolving round him. Planets are the most reasonable explanation of the phenomena of variable stars; the most celebrated of which is Algol, or the star ẞ of the constellation Perseus, whose period of variation is extremely regular. For two days and fourteen hours it maintains without diminution its greatest degree of brightness, which is followed by a gradual weakening of its light, and then by an equally gradual increase of the same, the whole of those changes taking place in a little less than seven hours. It is believed that there is no actual difference in the quantity of light emitted by the star itself, but that some opaque body, such as a very large planet, by revolving round the star at a short distance from it, screens its light by passing before it, and so causing a considerable eclipse. This supposition accords with the regularity of the phenomenon, and with the short duration of the partial obscurity relative to the total duration of the period of brightness.

Each fixed star being accompanied by planets, it is a natural inference that some of them may be inhabited, as are some of the planets belonging to our own solar system. The distances of these stars from each other are immense. The dimensions of our solar system are as nothing in comparison; and, in the solar system itself, the earth, which appeared so vast at the outset, is now known to be a mere point, a tiny speck. Spectral analysis has been mentioned more than once in these pages, we therefore do not now repeat what has been stated before. It is enough to say, that it is a recently-discovered mode of investigating the composition of bodies, by examining the light they emit while burning or at very high temperatures. Now, without entering into further detail, it is found

that the heavenly bodies contain substances exactly the same as those which make up the solid crust of the earth. Those bodies may include elementary substances which we have not; we have some whose presence has not yet been ascertained in certain stars; but, when it is found that the sun contains iron in plenty, besides barium, copper, and zinc in small quantities; that Aldebaran (the star marked a in the Bull) has soda, magnesia, hydrogen, lime, iron, bismuth, tellurium, antimony, and mercury; that Sirius, the brilliant Dog Star, likewise confesses to soda, magnesia, hydrogen, and probably iron; and that many others, not only of the stars but of the nebulæ, have been made to avow their possession of similar, if not exactly identical, elements-would it not be the merest quibble to deny that the universe is One in material constitution?

The mass and volume of a thing, being attested by the force it exercises, may be taken as positive qualities; but its magnitude is quite relative. Men are colossi for the emmet, puny dwarfs for the elephant, lilliputian pigmies for the whale. There is a curious but inseparable relation between apparent size and actual distance. By a strange illusion of our senses, the appearance which any object presents depends both upon its actual size and on the space intervening between it and us. If we can neither touch an object nor get at it in any way, its actual distance remains unknown, and we are liable to make the most erroneous estimate of its real dimensions. At first sight the sun and moon appear very small compared with the earth, while the stars might pass for jets of gas, like those used in illuminating public buildings. This illusion gave rise to the once-current opinion that the sun is not bigger than a barrel, and caused the ancient Greeks to be laughed at for asserting him to be as large as the Peloponnesus, the modern Crimea.

But it happens that appreciable size varies inversely as the distance. The further off a thing is, the smaller it appears to our senses; and vice versa. The rule holds good with the smallest perceptible objects as well as with the greatest. The microscope gives us the view of an object which would be seen by a properly constituted eye beholding it from the distance of its object-glass. It gives us a nearer view, a closer insight, of what we wish to inspect, and so magnifies it. And were our faculties not limited, we should doubtless find, upon still closer inspection, that even the elementary atoms of which all bodies are composed have size-even the particles composing air and the very lightest known substance, hydrogen gas.

The relation between distance and magnitude is daily forced upon our notice, although we may be slow to draw from it one inference touching the constitution of the universe, namely, that all is small and all is great. It is true that the adult, as well as the child, may say,

Twinkle, twinkle, little star!
How I wonder what you are,
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky!