cheaper than broadcloth, not other wise.'

Examined by the congenial Mr. Cayley upon the evils of a convertible currency he is equally decided :

'You recollect perfectly well the distress which was occasioned by the Act of 1819-Yes.

'And you recollect also that the distress was so great, that in the year 1822 several measures were brought forward for the purpose of correcting the distress, and it was alleged that the distress had arisen from the too sudden contraction of the issues of the Bank of England ?—Yes.

'What was the effect of the increased issue again of the convertible paper; was not that the cause of the panic of 1825-Quite so; there was a large issue, in order to relieve the distress, which gave a short-lived prosperity; then that was withdrawn again, and then came the panic of

1825.

'It created a speculation in 1825, and was then withdrawn?—Yes; it was a sort of see-saw.

'Do you recollect the nature of those measures which were brought forward-Yes, very well.

"There were three measures brought forward-Yes. The distress was so great that, as I daresay you recollect, a body of those fine stout fellows, the colliers in Staffordshire, borrowed a waggon and filled it with coals to bring them up to the Prince Regent; they got so far as Worcester; some gentlemen there or at Evesham, I think, stopped them, thinking that it would lead to an outbreak if they reached London; they were coming up in despair, and had loaded the waggon, and dragged it so far on the road to London; the distress was cruel at that time.

'Do you recollect the measures then brought in by Lord Castlereagh, and the grounds which he laid for bringing them in in 1822-It was at that time, I think, that Lord Liverpool stated that the distress arose from having super-abundant

crops.

That was in 1821 -He stated that it was that abundance which led to the distress, and to relieve that distress it was said, that there was as much as £5,000,000 issued by the Bank of England, either in one or

two days; it was then also that the circulation of £1 notes, I think, was extended till the 1st of January 1833, in order to remove the pressure arising from the circulation being contracted by means of the country notes being called in. Then things recovered again, and there was another Act which shortened the time. I think it was on that occasion that the distress was so great that the late Mr. Huskisson said he did not approve of the measure, but he should support it in order to revive the dormant spirit of speculation in the country.

९

Because that speculation had been checked too suddenly ?-Yes.

"Then the whole result of your experience is this, that since you have had a convertible note only there have been continual struggles between prosperity and adversity; that when adversity has got so deep that the Government have been obliged to come forward to relieve it, it has created a false prosperity only to make that adversity return again with greater force ?—That is my experience of the facts.'

Mr. Newmarch and Mr. Mill explained to the Committee the late Mr. Tooke's proposal for the management of the Bank of England, which they acquiesced in. Mr. Tooke, disapproving of the Bank Act, and of tying down the directors by any legislative enactment, suggests that there should be an understanding between the Bank and the Government that, on the average of a certain period, say five years, the Bank should hold about twelve millions of gold; that it should accumulate a large reserve in time of plenty, and with this view should never discount at less than four per cent., and that when a drain set in it should meet it, in the first instance, by letting this reserve run over, not raising the discount unless its own resources seemed unequal to the occasion. By this scheme he hoped to make the fluctuations of discount less violent than they would be if the Bank were inconsiderate of its relation to commerce. The proposal did not receive much consideration from the Committee, who were fully occupied with the Act of 1844, which they canvassed not the less eagerly that the maintenance of it was a foregone conclusion.

To Colonel R

Old

in Spain.

[No date.] 'BEFORE this can reach the best of husbands and the fondest lover, those tender names will be no more of concern to me. The indisposition in which you, to obey the dictates of your honour and duty, left me, has increased upon me; and I am acquainted by my physicians I cannot live a week longer. At this time my spirits fail me; and it is the ardent love I have for you that carries me beyond my strength, and enables me to tell you the most painful thing in the prospect of death is that I must part with you; but let it be a comfort to you that I have no guilt hangs upon me, no unrepented folly that retards me; but I pass away my last hours in reflexion upon the happiness we have lived in together, and in sorrow that it is so soon to have an end. This is a frailty which I hope is so far from being criminal, that methinks there is a kind of piety in being so unwilling to be separated from a state which is the institution of heaven, and in which we have lived according to its laws. As we know no more of the next life but that it will be a happy one to the good, and miserable to the wicked, why may we not please ourselves at least to alleviate the difficulty of resigning this being, in imagining that we shall have a sense of what passes below, and may possibly be employed in guiding the steps of those with whom we walked with innocence when mortal? Why may I not hope to go on in my usual work, and, though unknown to you, be assistant in all the conflicts of your mind? Give me leave to say to you, O best of men! that I cannot figure to myself a greater happiness than in such an employment; to be present at all the adventures to which human life is exposed; to administer slumber to the eye-lids in the agonies of a fever; to cover thy beloved face in the day of battle; to go with thee a guardian angel, incapable of wound or pain, where I have longed to attend thee when a weak, a fearful woman. These, my dear, are the thoughts with which I warm my poor languid heart; but

indeed I am not capable, under my present weakness, of bearing the strong agonies of mind I fall into, when form to myself the grief you must be in upon your first hearing of my departure. I will not dwell upon this, because your kind and generous heart will be but the more afflicted the more the person for whom you lament offers you consolation. My last breath will, if I am myself, expire in a prayer for you. I shall never see thy face again. Farewell for ever!'

Henry IV. His Renewal of the Letters-Patent granted by Richard II. to Geoffrey Chaucer. A.D. 1399.

THE king to all, &c., greeting. It appeareth to us, by inspection of the Rolls of the Chancery-court of Richard, late king of England the Second lately king caused his letters patent after the conquest, that the same to be made to this effect:

"Richard, by the grace of God, &c., greeting. Know ye that we, of our especial favour, and in return for the good service which our beloved esquire, Geoffrey Chaucer, hath bestowed, and will bestow on us in time to come, have granted to the same Geofeach year at our Exchequer, at the frey twenty pounds, to be received terms of Easter and St. Michael, by equal portions, for his whole life.' In witness whereof, we have caused to be made these our letters patent. Ourself witness at Westminster, 28th of February, in the seventeenth year of

our reign.'

'It appeareth also to us, by inspection of the Rolls of the Chancery-court of the same lately king, that he caused his other letters patent to be made to this effect:

"Richard, by the grace of God, &c., greeting. Know ye that, of our especial grace, we have granted to our cask of wine, to be received every year beloved esquire, Geoffrey Chaucer, one during his life, in the port of our city

MSS. in Rolls' House, Chancery Lane, translated from the Latin. This is a curious poetry the annual pension of £20 granted to document concerning the father of English him is said to have been the origin of the office and endowment of poet-laureat.

of London, by the hands of our chief butler for the time being. In witness whereof, &c.

Witness ourself at Westminster, on the 13th day of October, the twenty-second year of our reign."

'We, in consideration that the same Geoffrey hath appeared before us in our Chancery-court personally, and

hath made corporal oath, that the aforesaid letters have been casually lost, have thought proper that the tenour of the record of the same letters be transcribed by these present. In witness, &c.

The king being witness, at Westminster, the 18th day of October 1399.'

Teneriffe, an Astronomer's Experiment; or, Specialities of a Residence above the Clouds. By C. Piazzi Sinyth, F.R.SS. L. & E., F.R.A.S. Illustrated with PhotoStereographs. London Lovell Reeve, 5, Henrietta Street. 1858.

THE ICE-CAVERN.

As soon as the bustle of departure had passed away, my wife and I prepared for a photographical excursion to the ice-cavern, accompanied by a Teneriffe boy who had been left behind by the chief guide to wait on us. We three were the only human beings left on the Peak, and the silence of the desert returned once more. The day was calm, cloudy too; and though so much rain had fallen lately, not a trickling stream, not a drop even of standing water was anywhere to be seen; the pumicestone ashes had swallowed up all.

and see.

While I was still engaged in packing the photographic materials, a rumble was heard, and the poor boy made his appearance with a face of great alarm. He begged me to come The western wall of the sailors' room, only a partition fortunately, had fallen down, and covered the floor-where they had been sleeping the night before, and where he was to sleep that night-with a mass of ruins. It was true the strength of the structure had been unduly tested by the yachtsman, on their first arrival at Alta Vista; for they had tried swinging their hammocks, from pegs driven into mere dry walls. They could not, for a long while, understand anything being VOL. XXVII.

Books.

less tough than the timbers and beams of naval architecture; less still did they fancy, that a man could sleep comfortably, certainly not in shipshape style, if his bed was spread on the ground, or arranged in any other way, than hanging from ring-bolts. Down, however, to the floor they were obliged to come eventually, to avoid the threatened catastrophe, always imminent, and only thus happily staved off, until some hour or so after their departure.

Besides this accident, however, one or two stones, and not small ones, had tumbled out from other parts of the walls, and for no perceptible reason, during the last few days; seeming to hint that our expeditious building was not likely much to outlast the period it had been so nicely calculated for.

The boy soon recovered from his alarm; and next, was only anxious to show how much baggage he could carry up to the ice-cavern. Loading himself with twice the quantity I had set apart as his fair burden, he led the way untiringly up the angular passages of dark broken blocks in the Malpays, until we came in view of the cross,' that acts as the beacon or landmark of this wondrous water supply, in a desolate wilderness of lava.

The cross so called, was only a thin single stick,-there had been once, we were told, a cross bit tied to it, making up a genuine crux,-yet still, mere small stick as it was, it loomed out an effective landmark on those black lava masses. For in a region so purely of nothing but stones,

H

this diminutive staff was proof enough of human agency, and was not to be matched or mistaken for anything else found there, within miles and miles.

Down, therefore, in a hollow formed of loose stones, and then up upon a ridge of other loose stones, we went, making towards the stick. Suddenly amongst the most recent and fissured of all the blocks, where they seemed heaved up, and some of them tossed out and tumbling over-there we came abruptly on the entrance to the icecavern a hole about three to four feet square, concealed until one was close upon it.

An ugly place to look down into; for not as usual with most caverns, was the entrance here on the floor, but in the roof; and that some twenty feet high, above the rocky bed inside. Hence it occurred, that the first evening of our Alta Vista campaign, two men having been sent up immediately after our arrival, for a supply of water, and having reached the locale about sunset-they looked around on the wilderness of lava, then down into the gloomy hole, and became so much alarmed for their safety, as to defer venturing into such savage depths, until the next morning's sun should rise and gladden the

scene.

Even then the task was not very agreeable; for one man had to descend, swinging by a knotted rope, until, having reached the bottom, the casks were lowered to him. He then filled them with water, of which there was quite a large pond full, but not vertically under the opening. After the casks had again been drawn upthen came the tug of war in getting the man out; for when he had at length got his hands and arms upon the rough surface of the top of the roof, there was no support, but the dangling rope, to give a purchase to his feet.

On account of these désagrémens, the ice-cavern was seldom entered before our day, but by those to whom it was necessary, viz., the hardy neveros, or peasants whose trade is to convey ice and snow to the lower country. Ordinary tourists, we were informed, contented themselves with standing over the hole, looking down at the

snow, and proving the fact of water in the gloomy space beyond, by throwing in stones; or, as there are few sizeable ones immediately about, one of their sticks, a large collection of which has accumulated there.

To remedy the inconveniences of descent, our yacht carpenter constructed and fixed so famous a ladder, that a lady was handed down with ease, as well as the photographical machinery for wet collodion plates, and we left the structure behind, as a gift to the neveros.

On alighting at the bottom on a heap of stones, the first noticeable feature, was a ring fence of snow, three feet high, and some seven or eight feet broad, extending nearly round our footing-place; while beyond were large surfaces of water, stretching away into the further recesses of the cavern.

Amongst the multitudinous features of interest in any natural curiosity, no two persons may coincide as to which is the important one to be studied. Hence I could hardly agree with those who had suggested in England, that the wonder to be inquired into here, was, how came there to be perpetual snow inside the cavern, when there was none outside? The rationale of this appeared at the place by no means difficult of solution; and thus. The locale of the ice-cavern, abundantly covered with snow every winter, is nearly within the perpetual snow line; so near, that in its neighbourhood, and on the southern side of the Peak too, we had seen patches of last winter's snow, existing up to the middle of July, though exposed to both radiation and temperature; the former, according to our measures at Alta Vista, amounting at this height to 130°, when the latter was only 47°. Within the ice-cavern, therefore, radiation being cut off by a roof of rock, its contents have only to withstand the temperature of shade; and thence can last so much longer than what lies outside, as to have something unmelted to show through the whole of the year.

A similar result, from a like cause, was seen by Mr. Airy this last summer in Casa Inglesa, on Mount Etna. He had ascended all the bare slope of