Phigaleia and from the temple of Athene Nike, and with notice of the most recent criticisms of German writers. It may be pointed out that with regard to the well-known and exquisite fragment in relief styled unanimously hitherto a female charioteer, the writer passes over the sex of the figure with the ambiguous word "youthful." In point of fact this figure is certainly male. The beauty of the face and fashion of the hair, together with the flowing drapery, made upon its discoverers as well as upon subsequent students the impression of a type at first sight decisively feminine. The evidence by which a closer examination reverses this impression is as follows: The throat has the masculine characteristic of the " Adam's Apple" strongly marked; the breast is not so much concealed by the stumps of the outstretched arms but that its masculine character must be confessed; the arms preserved upon similar fragments of the same frieze, who are less defaced in this respect, though more in others, are men's and not women's arms; the hair is blown back by the wind in a way to heighten the feminine effect of its dressing, which for the rest is the same as in some extant male sculptures; and lastly, the talaric chiton, clinging to the figure in the shape of an elongated S-curve and flowing full about the heels, is no index of sex, but a costume almost universally characteristic of drivers in chariot-races; a good example for comparison being the bearded youth of the pseudo-archaic amphora from the Cyrenaica (C. 116 in the British Museum Catalogue). These considerations have persuaded Mr. Newton, the distinguished discoverer of the slab, that his own and the received account of it must henceforward be altered in this particular. Japanese Shrines.-The shrines (Japanese) are of exceeding beauty, lying on one side of a splendid avenue of Scotch firs, which border a broad, well-kept gravel walk. Passing through a small gateway of rare design, we come into a large stone courtyard, lined with a long array of colossal stone lanterns, the gift of the vassals of the departed Prince. A second gateway, supported by gilt pillars carved all around with figures of dragons, leads into another court, in which are a bell tower, a great cistern cut out of a single block of stone like a sarcophagus, and a smaller number of lanterns of bronze. These are given by the Go San Ke, the three princely families in which the succession to the office of Shogun was vested. Inside this is a third court, partly covered like a cloister, the approach to which is a doorway of even greater beauty and richness than the last; the ceiling is gilt, and painted with arabesques and with heavenly angels playing on musical instruments, and the panels of the walls are sculptured in high relief with admirable representations of birds and flowers, life-size, life-like, all being colored to imitate nature. Inside this enclosure stands a shrine, before the closed door of which a priest on one side, and a retainer of the house of Tokugawa on the other, sit mounting guard, mute and immovable as though they themselves were part of the carved ornaments. Passing on one side of the shrine, we come to another court, plainer than the last; and at the back of the little temple inside it is a flight of stone steps, at the top of which, protected by a bronze door, stands a single monumental urn of bronze on a stone pedestal. Under this is the grave itself; and it has always struck me that there is no small amount of poetical feeling in this simple ending to so much magnificence; the sermon may have been preached by design, or it may have been by accident, but the lesson is there.-Tales of Old Japan. Landscape Painting.-The extreme refinement of form in natural landscape is a point so little understood by the public, and by the painters of portrait and genre who exercise authority in the artistic profession, that I hardly like to mention it here at all. The impression amongst figure painters that landscape is easy to draw, and the readiness with which, on the authority of figure painters, the world has accepted the doctrine, make it painfully evident that all these good people have never really looked at natural landscape at all nor attempted seriously to copy it. Now landscape is not merely difficult to draw, but it is infinitely difficult; that is to say, that the best designer of the figure now alive upon the earth, whoever that may be, if he really set himself in earnest to draw a mountain as it is, would find, after any quantity of labor and care, that he had only been able to draw it in a manner which is to be called good out of indulgence for the weakness of human faculties, and in a certain restricted sense, and that the natural mountain still remained at quite an infinite and unapproachable distance beyond him. As for the slight sketches of mountains which figure painters are accustomed to put behind their personages by way of background, they bear precisely the same relation to real mountain painting that the figures we landscape painters sketch in our compositions do to real figure painting.-Hamerton. - Death of a Munich Painter. One of the veterans of the Munich School of Art, the painter of battles, Peter von Hess, died at Munich on the 4th of April. He was born in 1792, at Düsseldorff, where his father, R. P. C. Hess, the engraver, was professor. He went through the campaigns of 1813-15 as a soldier under Wrede, and thus became familiar with the details of military life and action which give their chief interest to his martial compositions; but he seldom painted pictures without studying their scenes from nature. In the suite of Otho, king of Greece, he visited the ground on which battles were fought for Greek independence. In 1839 he visited Russia, preparatory to composing his canvases illustrating the war of 1812. Hess's best-known pieces are the "Battle of Leipzig" and the "Entry of King Otho into Athens." Others are in the Palace and Pinakothek of Munich. Some of his sketchy frescos may be seen in the arcades of the Hofgarten at Munich. The German papers report the destruction, by the operations of war, of some valuable paintings formerly belonging to the distinguished artist Bouterwek. Madame Bouterwek had been resident since her husband's death at a small property in Bougival, which was ruined during the siege, while its owner was engaged in hospital work within the city. Among the losses are two Titians, two Murillos, two Paul Potters, and a Hobbema, destined after Madame Bouterwek's death to have been bequeathed to the museum of Berlin. VARIETIES. The Introduction of Coffee.-Coffee-drinking, though a much more modern custom than teadrinking, began in England a little earlier. It was first practised in Arabia about the middle of the fifteenth century, when the story goes that the chief of a company of dervishes noticed that his goats frisked and played all night long whenever in the previous day they had eaten of a shrub grow ing wild in the neighborhood. Finding it difficult to keep his disciples awake during their evening devotions, he prepared a beverage of the leaves or berries of the shrub, and it proved so helpful to the midnight piety of the dervishes that from that time coffee came into use. The coffee-plant being abundant and easily cultivated, the new beverage soon became a favorite all over Arabia, Great opposition was offered to it by many good Moslems, who urged that it was an intoxicating drink quite as bad as the wine forbidden in the Koran, and numerous raids were made upon the coffee-houses; but the very fact of its serving as, in some sort, a substitute for the juice of the vine tended to make it popular. It reached Constantinople about 1554, and was of universal use in all Mahomedan countries before close of the sixteenth century. essential was it deemed to domestic happiness that a Turkish law recognized a man's refusal to supply his wife with coffee as sufficient ground for her claiming a divorce. About the year 1600 it began to be talked of in Christendom as a rare and precious medicine. In 1615 it was brought to Venice, and in 1621 Burton spoke of it in his "Anatomy of Melancholy" as a valuable article which he had heard of but not seen. In 1652, Sir Nicholas Crispe, a Levant merchant, opened in London the first coffee-house in England, the beverage being prepared by a Greek girl brought over for the work. Other coffee-houses in abundance were soon opened. In William III.'s and Queen Anne's days they were the great places of resort for wits, beaux, fops, gallants, wise men, and fools, and as such are amply described in the Spectator and other works of the time. And coffee was not merely an excuse for social intercourse: its first drinkers in England knew how to drink it. Pope says: So "For, lo! the board with cups and spoons is crowned, The berries crackle and the mill goes round; On shining altars of Japan they raise The silver lamp; the fiery spirits blaze; From silver spouts the grateful liquors glide, While China's earth receives the smoking tide. At once they gratify their scent and taste, And frequent cups prolong the rich repast.” The growing demand for coffee, of which more than 30,000,000 lbs. are now annually consumed in Great Britain, caused the plant to be cultivated in other districts as well as Arabia, where it is indigenous and thrives best. At a very early date the Dutch began to grow it in Java and their other East India possessions, and they were unintention ally the causers of its introduction to the New World. In 1690 some seeds were brought from Mocha to the Botanic Garden at Amsterdam, and from the produce of these seeds a single plant was, in 1714, sent as a present to Louis XIV., and by him treasured up in Paris. In 1717 a Frenchman named Déclieux obtained a plant raised from one of its seeds and carried it to Martinique. The ship was weather-bound, and before the Atlantic was crossed the crew were in grievous trouble for want of water. There was water on board, but the captain, anxious above all things to preserve his treasure, doled it out in meagre quantities to the men, while he nourished the coffee-plant without stint. And the plant made a good return for the care bestowed upon it. From its seeds, we are told, have descended all the coffee trees now abounding in the West Indies and Brazil. The Darwinian Theory.-The first part of the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie for the present year contains a remarkable tribute to the influence on the development of scientific thought of Mr. Darwin's writings, in a list of works published since 1858 on the Darwinian Theory. The list is compiled by Dr. J. W. Spengel, fills twelve pages, and is divided into six heads: 1. German translations of Darwin's works. 2. Original works in German on the Darwinian Theory. 3. Works containing incidental references to the Theory. 4. Articles on Darwinism and the Origin of Man, scattered in magazines, etc. 5. Works on the question of the Origin of Man. 6. Most important works on Darwinism in English, French, Dutch and Italian. Dr. Moriz Wagner continues in Ausland for March 31 and April 8, his new contributions to the Darwinian Theory. In these portions of his interesting paper, he brings forward numerous instances of the manner in which recent geological discov. eries have supplied missing links in the connected chain of organic forms. Under this head he refers especially to the Dinotherium, which unites the Pachydermata to the Cetacea, which latter group appeared heretofore to be isolated from all other orders of Mammals; to the connecting links existing in tertiary fossils between the Pachydermata and the Ruminantia, and especially to the Pterodactyl and the Archeopteryx, which he considers to stand between birds and reptiles, the former presenting the character of three parts reptile and one part bird, and the latter three parts bird and one part reptile. Finally Dr. Wagner enters in considerable detail into the discoveries of Finlay, Lindermayer, and others, in the miocene deposits at the foot of Pentelicon and other localities in Greece and the Pyrenees, which produced the Hipparion, an ancestor of our existing genus Equus, and the anthropomorphic apes Mesopithecus pentelicus and Dryopithecus Fontani. In the same magazine for April 24, Dr. Hugo Eisig refers to the great extent to which Darwin's theory of Evolution had been anticipated by Lamarck in his Philosophie Zoologique, published as long since as 1809. "" Opium-Smoking in England.—In intervals between her (Eliza, the original of the woman opium-smoker in Edwin Drood,") talk she scoops out prepared opium from a little gallipot, sticks it on the needle that crosses the broad shallow bowl of her ruler-like pipe, turns the bowl to the orifice in the glass cover of her lamp, humors the pill with the spatula end of another needle to get it to kindle, and then takes a long pull-sometimes sending back the smoke through her nostrils and her ears. "It's very healthy, gentlemen," when we remark upon its not unpleasant odor. "When the cholera was about, nobody took it that lived in a house where they smoked opium." There used to be half a dozen and more of these houses in the East-end, but the two in Bluegate Fields are the only ones now known to the police. The Strangers' Home officials exerted themselves a good deal to put the others down; but lodgers in the Strangers' Home are still, during the day, pretty frequent customers at the two houses in Victoria court. "Craving for drink, gentlemen!" Eliza presently exclaims; "wanting to have a smoke, and not be able to get opium, is a hundred times worse than that. I used to drink about as free as any, didn't I, sir?" appealing, almost proudly, to our dragoman for corroboration of her statement. "But I've broke myself of that; but if you can't get a pipe when you want it, it's like as if you was having electric shocks one after another, or as if you was having a knife scraped along your bare bones." A drachm of opium is the largest amount which Eliza owns to having smoked in a day.-Night Rambles in the East-end. Dethroned Sovereigns. The Indépendance Belge gives the following list of sovereigns still living who have been deprived of their thrones :Prince Gustave Vasa of Sweden, 1809; Count de Chambord, 12th August, 1830: Duke Charles of Brunswick, 17th September, 1830; Count de Paris, 24th February, 1848; Duke Robert de Parme, 1859; Grand Duke Ferdinand of Tuscany, 1860; Duke Francis of Modena, 1860; King François II. of Naples, 13th February, 1861; the widow of King Otho of Greece, 24th October, 1862; Duke Adolf of Nassau, 1866; King George of Hanover, 1866; the Elector of Hesse, 1866; Empress Charlotte of Mexico, 1867; Isabella of Spain, 1869; Emperor Napoleon, 1870. Sydney Smith and "The Edinburgh Review."-"Towards the end of my residence in Edinburgh, Brougham, Jeffrey, and myself" (Sydney Smith), "happened to meet in an eighth or ninth story or flat in Buccleuch Place, the then elevated residence of Mr. Jeffrey. I proposed that we should set up a review; this was acceded to with acclamation. I was appointed editor; and remained long enough in Edinburgh to edit the first number. The motto I proposed was, 'Tenui musam meditamur avena,'-We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal, This was too near the truth to be admitted, and so we took our grave motto from Publius Syrus, of whom none of us had ever read a line. When I left Edinburgh, the Review fell into the stronger hands of Jeffrey and Brougham, and reached the highest point of popularity and success. Now nothing can be more imaginary than nearly the whole of the above account. In the first place, there never was a house eight or nine stories high in Buccleuch Place, or in any of that portion of the new town of Edinburgh. No house at that time exceeded three stories. In the second place, Smith never was appointed editor. He read over the articles, and so far may be said to have edited the first number; but regularly constituted editor he never was,for, with all his other rare and remarkable qualities, there was not a man among us less fitted for such a position. He was a very moderate classic; he had not the smallest knowledge of mathematics or of any science. He could no more have edited, that is, sat in judgment upon Playfair's article on "Mascheroni's Geometry," No. 17, p. 161; or on Delambert's paper on the "Arc of the Meridian," No. 18, p. 373; or on Bentley's "Hindu Astronomy, ," No. 20, p. 455, than he could have written the "Principia." He was an admirable joker; he had the art of placing ordinary things in an infinitely ludicrous point of view. I have seen him at dinner at Foston (his living near York) drive the servants from the room with the tears running down their faces, in peals of inextinguishable laughter; but he was too much of a jack-pudding. On one occasion he was the high-sheriff's chaplain, and had to preach the assize sermon. I remember the bar, who were present in York Minster, being rather startled at hearing him give out as his text, "And a certain lawyer stood up and tempted him!" But I am bound to say the sermon was excellent, and much to the purpose. Whatever faults he may have had, he had too much good sense to be ashamed of his name; he used joking. ly to say, "The Smiths have no right to crests or coat-armor, for they always sealed their letters with their thumbs!"-The Life and Times of Henry Lord Brougham, written by himself. RESIGNATION, To me here sitting by the fire alone, Coleridge's Prejudices.-He was a man of violent prejudices, and had conceived an insuperable aversion for the grande nation, of which he was not slow to boast. "I hate," he would say, "the hollowness of French principles: I hate the republicanism of French politics: I hate the hostility of the French people to revealed religion: I hate the artificiality of French cooking: I hate the acidity of French wines: I hate the flimsiness of the French language: my very organs of speech are so antiGallican that they refuse to pronounce intelligibly their insipid tongue." He would inveigh with equal acrimony against the unreality and immorality of the French character, of both sexes, especially of the women; and, in justification, I suppose, of his unmeasured invective, he told me that he was one day sitting tête-à-tête with Madame de Staël, in London, when her man-servant entered the room and asked her if she would receive Lady Davey. She raised her eyebrows and shrugged her shoulders, and appeared to shudder with nausea, as she turned to him and said, "Ah! ma foi! oh! mon cher ami! ayez pitié de moi! Mais quoi faire? Cette villaine femme. Comme je la deteste! Elle est, vraiment, insupportable!" And then, on her entry, flung her arms around her, kissed her on both cheeks, pressed her to her bosom, and told her that she was more than enchanted to behold her. A Memoir of Charles Mayne Young, Tragedian. |