of the rains. It looked rather discoloured from the same cause: its taste was perfectly sweet, and the stream was little below the surface of its banks. The soldiers were restless, and anxious to be gone; for which there was no apparent cause: but they are fond of enlarging on danger from the Arabs. During the summer season the quantity of water in the river must be greatly diminished, but it never now overflows its banks. Tradition has not preserved the spot where the Israelites crossed; and, what is strange, it is impossible to find out from Christian or Arab in what part Mount Nebo is to be found. The width of the river was about twenty yards, and it appeared very deep. We returned to Jericho, and endeavoured to amuse the evening in the governor's desolate tower; but the resources were very scanty: and as he is seldom honoured by strangers' visits, he makes them pay handsomely when they do come. The rain fell in torrents in the night, and found its way through his excellency's roof, and fell in profusion on our beds; and it was only after one or two experiments on different sites in the chamber, that we could close our eyes without being deluged.

The next day, attended by a few horsemen from the castle, we set out on our return to Jerusalem. It was a comfortless and pitiless journey, leading over a succession of dreary hills, far unlike the route through the fine and romantic wilderness of Ziph. The rain beating heavily in our faces, and swelling every mountain torrent, compelled us to proceed at a slow rate. Poor Ibrahim walked beside the horses the whole way, and looked as if he would rather have been in his native desert. At last we wound up the ascent to Bethany, descended the hills, and crossing the bridge over the Kedron, entered the city again. Father Giuseppe received us with uplifted hands and looks; not quite so interesting as the sight of two or three warm dishes, attended by a good bottle of wine, which were quickly set before us, and made some atonement for penance at Jericho. Ibrahim also got accommodated, and, for the first time in his life, feasted in a monkish cell and seemed so much taken with it, that it was doubtful if he would not have forsaken his cave at Engedi, and turned Catholic, to have tasted such luxury always. The governor was much enraged with the poor fellow for undertaking to guide us on the journey, and threatened to punish him; we begged him off, however, and sent him home to his cavern, well rewarded.

THE CORONATION AT RHEIMS.

KING-CROWNING City of Rheims, rejoice!
Your banners be waved from each steeple ;
Let your bells be rung, and the cannon's voice
Unite with the shouting people,

And the trumpet, the drum, and the cymbal make
Your time-worn walls to their basement shake!

Kings in the Cross and the Gospels right,
Sultans upholding the Crescent;

Let a Moor, and a Turk, and a Christian knight,

From each as a pledge be present;

For when monarchs are crown'd, ye should all combine,
And every creed own his right divine.

Bishops and priests in your mitred array,

By the cardinal legate recruited.
(Finger-posts pointing to heaven the way,
While your feet in the earth are rooted,)
Rebuke other idols, pour oil on your own,
And teach us to worship the god of the throne.

Nobles and chiefs whom your monarchs have made
Their puppets to brighten the pageant,
Boastfully blazen your pomp and parade,
And ennoble the act by the agent;

For your pride to your fellows will better accord
With the meanness that kneels to its sovereign lord.

Frenchmen, who rivet the crown upon one,
That millions may grovel dependent;
Strangers, from far habitations who run
To gaze at a bubble resplendent,
What is the glory that dazzles your eyes,
And what is the deed that ye solemnise?

Charles! thou art crown'd as a sovereign dread,
O'er the realm of France appointed;

Thy brother was such-yet they cut off his head-
The head of the Lord's Anointed!

Learn from his fate that "legitimate" might
Is vain when it wars with a nation's right.

Ye rulers! Dey, sultan, king, emperor, pope,
United in holy alliance,

Who see in this act an additional hope

That the world may be held at defiance, Remember, 'twas this single people of Gaul, When roused by oppression, that humbled ye all. Bishops and priests who have lavish'd your oil, And given the Bourbon your blessing;

Such were your prayers, and your oaths, and your toil, When his Corsican rival caressing;—

The God ye dishonour your mockery loaths,

When ye consecrate kings with such prostitute oaths.

Frenchmen who smote from one monarch his head,
To install him a canonized martyr,

And took back the brother to reign in his stead,
Who broke both his oath and the charter;

This is a Bourbon, a brother :-beware!

And uncrown him at once if his oath he forswear.

Ye chosen of chivalry, noble and great,
Whó grace this august coronation ;

Ye beauties whose splendour confers on the fête

Its brightest and best decoration;

Ye numberless crowds who are hailing your king,
Ye troops whose reply makes the firmament ring-

Like quick-falling stars shall your glories die,
When time is a little older;

The head ye have crown'd in the sod shall lie,
And your own beside it moulder,

And all that is left of this proud array,

Shall be dust and ashes, and bones and clay!

THE JOINT STOCK COMPANIES.

It is difficult while watching those excitements which stir up at times certain classes of the community, often uncontrollable in force, and undefinable in their effects at first, to assign them their due measure of good and evil. They must be judged of in their totality; and yet to try them all by the example of one which may have casually come in our way, whether good or bad of its kind, is manifestly wrong. It is necessary to bring the most impartial feeling to the investigation, and to separate every thing extraneous from the question; for in such outbreakings something good is always found. We must not suffer previous notions to interfere, nor the idea that the abandoning preconceived opinions upon the subject, is for a moment to be considered disgraceful to us, when on being put in competition with sound reason and simple principles they are found erroneous. The great desideratum is to get at the truth; and we must not be afraid of visiting her even at the bottom of her well. Still less must the prejudices of the past be suffered to blind our eyes to future benefits; we must boldly sacrifice them all. That the world can never get beyond infancy in foreknowledge, is a law of nature; things therefore which now appear of small importance, time may change into enterprises "of great pith and moment"—into matters of infinite concern to the industry of the country, and to the accumulation of the means of national prosperity.

The impulses from which national benefits frequently accrue, arising from certain passions in the body politic, like those in the individual body, can seldom be duly regulated at the moment. By and by, however, they subside, and begin to shew that they do not exist in vain. The rage for joint-stock companies has made this apparent in a remarkable manner. Not only the schemes of monied and respectable men have been speedily seconded, but new ones of all sorts formed, many of which have no other object than to entrap the unwary, and supply means for supporting a system of gambling by which enormous sums are gained and lost. As long as attorneys could grasp the costs of a new scheme, it was brought into the market, and then they prowled around for more prey. The shares were bought and sold to the cost of the speculatist and the profit of the wary planner of the system of plunder the bubble of the moment. Those who belonged to the old and blind school of political economy, cried out for the legislature to interfere, that legislature which had just emancipated itself from the trammels of our former financial dotage, and begun a new career upon sound principles and a more enlightened policy. The Lord Chancellor in particular was loud in his reprobation of these companies; but their constitution and the peculiar circumstances attending them, required, if they were to be regulated by the legislature, some one to take them in hand better versed in political economy than his lordship. His lord

* His lordship proposed that two thirds of the money should be lodged as a security at the time of obtaining a legislative enactment for the establishment of a company. But his lordship should have known that such a proceeding, in mining companies in particular, would be highly mischievous. When the sum wanted could be pretty nearly estimated, as in railway and canal companies, &c. &c. much inconvenience might not arise by locking up the capital at once; but in mining a share-holder is called upon for small sums only at a time, and the ultimate outlay

ship's declarations respecting them had, however, one good effect, namely, that they in some measure kept back many daring adventurers from appearing with their bubbles, by the fear of a scrutiny; and they caused persons who wished to be purchasers of shares in new companies, to enquire more closely into their respectability ;-thus far they did good. Messrs. Robinson and Huskisson, however, with more sound discretion, while they lamented the evil arising from the excessive stimulus abroad, preferred leaving things to find their own level; and they accordingly bid fair to do so, without any very fearful consequences to the community. A few speculatists will suffer, and some persons dip pretty largely into their superfluous capital, which has been thereby put into circulation before it otherwise might. The bulk of the public can sustain no injury by its shifting hands a little, and the real and bond-fide companies will be of considerable use to the industry and commerce of the country. The bubbles will explode the spring, the elasticity of which had forced it out of form, will soon return to its proper shape.

If, however, unprincipalled men sought in many cases to swindle the too eagar speculatist, it must be granted that the fear of those who looked on the exacerbation of the speculative spirit was excessive. They were wedded to old things; and, like the Lord Chancellor, had a pious horror for what was out of a jog-trot pace over the old beaten track they were grossly ignorant of the true state of the modern principles of trade and commerce; and when they endeavoured to draw a comparison between the South-Sea bubbles and the bubbles of 1825, they exhibited a deplorable ignorance of facts with which at first they might easily have made themselves acquainted. The character of jointstock companies and the South-Sea adventure differ ab origine. The present speculations are made with surplus unemployed capital, which no period of our history has shown we ever before possessed to a fraction of its present extent. In the South-Sea adventure people of all classes ventured, as in a lottery, their entire fortunes and nieans of subsistence, led by two or three besotted persons. They were destitute of any medium of acquiring a knowledge for themselves of remote points connected with the speculation in which they hazarded their all. In our day, every individual not only possesses channels of correct information, but uses them before he trades, for trading is more the term for the present proceedings as in contradistinction to the South-Sea adventure. The speculators at present have surperfluous money, of which they seek to make a profit. This superfluous cash would else lie idle,

may not amount to more than one-third or one-half of the capital proposed. It is hard, therefore, that the adventurer's money must be kept almost profitless for years, when he may make it return him fifteen to twenty per cent. in trade. In mining, the largest possible sum is always named to secure the undertaking against contingencies. One of the Mexican mining companies, before expending a fourth of the sum allotted for one of its mines, is not only paying all the current expenses, but realizing a large sum from it by the discovery of an accidental vein. Would it not be hard that the remainder of the capital should be laid by unproductive? The care which is shown for the property of speculators in these concerns is misplaced. When have City men, and men of business in general, been incautiousin looking after their gold? They certainly do not need in this respect the protective and sympathizing guardianship of the opponents of free trade principles!

or be locked up in the funds at a very unprofitable rate of interest. The present therefore has the character of a speculation in a superfluous commodity, or at most an adventure of the money the speculatist possesses unemployed. The objectors to them seem never to have objected to foreign loans. Now railways, canals, and mining in England or America, are objects that expose to less risk of ultimate loss than loans to the despots of the Continent. Austria shuffled us out of part of 17,000,000l. which she got as a loan of the nation. Now in the event of war with these powers, where is the interest to come from, when most needed? The money is locked up until a peace, and then a few shillings in the pound are all that in human probability would ever be recovered. So drained are the great States of the Continent after a war, that if they had the inclination, and were not given to cheat and evade, and appoint commissions to sit half a century to examine debts which they feel are just, they have not then the means to pay.* Joint-stock companies for foreign objects (always of course including the idea of their being bona fide what they pretend to be,) employ their capital among States with which we can have little cause to fear a rupture.

But passing by these topics, and the fallacious projects that like weeds have grown up with the crop, it is proper that we proceed to make some enquiry into the principal object of our research. It will be granted that some half dozen of the companies formed in the City, which are headed by and divided among men of respectability and property, will be really carried into effect to the full extent of the proposed means. The present paper is penned merely to show that in all those impulses which chance, unemployed capital, or new adventures in manufactures may give, when sobered down, that they seldom fail to produce beneficial consequences, and with this view to endeavour, as generally and briefly as possible, to examine whether we should gain by the success of schemes too extended for individual capital to undertake, but easy of performance by a union of the means and power of many. Those who are of the old school in trade and politics, may style such an inquiry theoretical. Like his Highness of York, they may stand in the breach the champions of past prejudices, and still obstinately keep their position when all the world has abandoned them. The best reply for such persons is, to point to the effects of candid exposition, liberal action, and sound judgment in our financial affairs, and contrast them with the mean, shuffling and capricious measures of the "good old times" gone by for ever, even in imitation, it is to be fervently hoped.

Let us then beg a question, and suppose half a dozen of these companies to carry their intentions honestly into action. Let us suppose one a railway company at home, (or any thing but Sir Thomas Lethbridge's Utopian canal,) that is of magnitude too great for individual enterprise; and another a mining company abroad; and that these are prosecuted diligently to the object in view, with all the care and frugality, and all the effective force necessary. It will not be denied that, If a railway can be so constructed as to convey goods eight miles, and

*We have already seen in the newspapers that on a decline in the foreign funds, the adventures in the New World have uniformly risen.