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border, set on flounce-wise: these points are trimmed at the edge with a narrow, full ruche of blue crape; and between each point is a scroll of blue crêpe-lisse, edged by a very slight and delicate pattern in embroidery: the scrolls are gathered full at the top under the points, and depend en fichus. The body is en gerbe, with a pointed zone round the waist. Long white sleeves of crape, are surmounted by those which are short en ballons, of the same color and material as the dress at the termination of the short sleeves is a bow of blue ribbon at the

back part of the arm; and another bow is placed on the left side of the tucker, in which bow is mingled a portion of white ribbon. The white sleeves are terminated at the wrists by English, antique, pointed cuffs of blue sarcenet; and a bracelet of white and gold enamel, with a white agate brooch, encircles the wrist, next the hand. A dress hat is worn with this costume, of white chip, with bows of blue and white ribbons under the brim, and a very beautiful plumage of white feathers, edged and tipt with blue, is tastefully disposed over the crown.

VARIETIES.

"Come, let us stray Where Chance or Fancy leads our roving walk."

CHANGES OF SOCIETY.

THE Circumstances which have most influence on the happiness of mankind, the changes of manners and morals, the transition of communities from poverty to wealth, from knowledge to ignorance, from ferocity to humanity-these are, for the most part, noiseless revolutions. Their progress is rarely indicated by what historians are pleased to call important events. They are not achieved by armies, or enacted by senates. They are sanctioned by no treaties, and recorded in no archives. They are carried on in every school, in every church, behind ten thousand counters, at ten thousand firesides. The upper current of society presents no certain criterion by which we can judge of the direction in which the under current flows.

ORIGINAL ANECDOTE OF CURRAN.

One morning, at an inn in the South of Ireland, a gentleman travelling upon mercantile business, came running down stairs a few minutes before the appearance of the stage coach, in which he had taken a seat for Dublin. Seeing an ugly little fellow leaning against the door post, with dirty face and shabby clothes, he hailed him and ordered him to brush his coat. The

operation proceeding rather slowly, the impatient traveller cursed the lazy valet for an idle, good-for-nothing dog, and threatened him with corporal punishment on the spot, if he did not make haste and finish his job well, before the arrival of the coach. Terror seemed to produce its effect; the fellow brushed the coat, and then the trowsers with great diligence, and was rewarded with sixpence, which he received with a low bow. The gentleman went into the bar, and paid his bill, just as the expected vehicle reached the door. Upon getting inside, guess his astonishment to find his friend, the quondam waiter, seated snugly in one corner, with all the look of a person well used to comfort. After two or three hurried glances, to be sure that his eyes did not deceive him, he commenced a confused apology for his blunder, condemning his own rashness and stupidity-but he was speedily interrupted by the other exclaiming-" Oh, never mind—make no apologies-these are hard times, and it is well to earn a trifle in an honest way. I am much obliged for your handsome fee for so small a job'; my name, sir, is John Philpot Curran -pray what is yours?" The other was thunderstruck by the idea of such an introduction to the most celebrated

POETRY AND PAINTING.

man of his day but the irresistible and rain; but religion, like those wit and drollery of Curran soon over- streaming rays of sunshine, will came his confusion; and the traveller clothe it with light as with a garment, never rejoiced less at the termination and fringe its shadowy skirts with of a long journey, than when he be- gold. held the distant spires of Dublin glitter in the light of a setting sun. This deserves to be recorded among the many comical adventures into which Curran was led by his total inattention to personal appearance.

CHINESE PRISON.

Prisoners who have money to spend, can be accommodated with private apartments, cards, servants, and every luxury. The prisoners' chains and fetters are removed from their bodies, and suspended against the wall, till the hour of going the rounds occurs; after that ceremony is over, the fetters are again placed where they hurt nobody. But those who have not money to bribe the keepers, are in a woful condition. Not only is every alleviation of their sufferings removed, but actual infliction of punishment is added, to extort money to buy "burntofferings" (of paper) to the god of the jail, as the phrase is. For this purpose the prisoners are tied up, or rather hung up, and flogged. At night, they are fettered down to a board, neck, wrists, and ankles, amidst ordure and filth, whilst the rats, unmolested, are permitted to gnaw their limbs !

REMEDY FOR DULNESS.

Lord Dorset used to say of a very goodnatured dull fellow, ""Tis a thousand pities that man is not illnatured, that one might kick him out of company !"

PICTURE OF LIFE.

In youth we seem to be climbing a hill on whose top eternal sunshine appears to rest. How eagerly we pant to attain its summit; but when we have gained it, how different is the prospect on the other side! We sigh as we contemplate the dreary waste before us, and look back with a wistful eye upon the flowery path we have passed, but may never more retrace. Life is like yon portentous cloud, fraught with thunder, storm,

What the monk said of Virgil's Eneid, "that it would make an excellent poem if it were only put into rhyme;" is just as if a Frenchman should say of a beauty, "Oh, what a fine woman that would be, if she was but painted!"

THE THREE TEACHERS.

To my question, how he could, at his age, have mastered so many attainments, his reply was, that with his three teachers, "everything might be learned, common sense alone excepted, the peculiar and rarest gift of Providence. These three teachers were Necessity, Habit, and Time. At his starting in life, Necessity had told him, that if he hoped to live he must labor; Habit had turned the labor into an indulgence; and Time gave every man an hour for everything, unless he chose to yawn it away."Salathiel.

STONE-MASON'S CRITICISM.

Mr. Bowles, the vicar of Bremhill, Wilts, is accustomed occasionally to write epitaphs for the young and aged dead among his own parishioners. An epitaph of his, on an aged father and mother, written in the character of a most exemplary son-the father living to eighty-s -seven years-ran thus :

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My father-my poor mother-both are gone, And o'er your cold remains I place this stone, In memory of your virtues. May it tell How long one parent lived, and both how well," &c.

When this was shown to the stonemason critic, (and Mr. Bowles acknowledges he has heard worse public critics in his time,) he observed, that the lines might do with a little alteration-thus :—

"My father, and my mother too, are dead, And here I put this grave-stone at their head; My father lived to eighty-seven, my mother Not quite so long-and one died after l'other."

The population of Brussels is estimated at 90,000, of which 20,000 are paupers.

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OF THE

ENGLISH MAGAZINES.

THIRD SERIES.] BOSTON, NOVEMBER 15, 1828.

[VOL. 1, No. 4.

THE DURRENSTEIN.

THE valley of the Wachau, or rather the whole tract of the Danube, from Rosenburg to where the river falls into the plain of Vienna, is proverbially one of the most fantastic and beautiful of the south of Europe. A succession of all that makes the romance of landscape, perpetually varies before the eye; stupendous crags, deep and sunless defiles, solemn woods, that look as old as the days of Arminius, and whose paths had often heard the trampling and the shouts of the tribes on their march to shake the empires of the world; wailing whirlpools, and the central mighty stream, the father Danube himself, that unites the cross with the crescent, and pours the waters of the German hills to wash the foot of the seraglio.

But this striking country is not yet plagued with the more than Egyptian plague, of being a regular haunt of summer tourists. The honest citizens of Vienna, almost within sight of the valley, are luckily born without the organ of tourism, and have substituted for it the organ of cooking, fiddling, and the patrician love of a Sunday's drive over the pavement of the Leopoldstat, or the plebeian love of a Sunday's walk in the Prater.

The Italian never travels, but for purposes which have more of philosophy than of the passion for sight seeing. He travels for the general good of mankind, for without him, half the dwellings of continental Europe would be buried by the soot of their own chimnies; the fabric of 16 ATHENEUM, VOL. 1, 3d series.

wooden spoons and plaster images would be lost to mankind; and there would be a mortality among dancing dogs, and fantoccini, from Paris to Petersburgh. The Frenchman never travels at all, and will never travel while he can find all the charms of coffee, écarté, quadrilling, and courtship, within the walls of one city.

Even the English have scarcely found their way to this fine tract. No circulating library has yet shown. its front, placarded with new novels from top to toe. No newspaper establishment contributes scandal to the great, and perplexes the little with politics on the most puzzling scale. No steam-boat throws up its blackening column to distain the blue of the native sky for many a league behind, and no spruce bugler on the top of the brilliantly varnished and high-flying stage coach, shoots along before the startled eye, at the rate of twenty miles an hour "stoppages included," making the precipices ring to the echoes of "I've been roaming."

All is solitude, loftiness, and sacred silence, broken but by a gush of the waters foaming round some rock, or the cry of the kites and falcons as they sweep over the summits of the wilderness of oaks and pines.

Yet the traveller sometimes makes his way into this scene of stateliness; and twenty years ago, I ranged the region during a whole summer, until the doubt with the peasantry lay between my being a magician, a madman, or an agent of Napoleon, fraught

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