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upon the towers of the cathedral, upon the roofs of the pavilions of the Tuileries, or upon the green hills of Issy, or of Choisyle-Roi, descending, with their villages, their parks, and their meadows, toward the course of the Seine.

The small tower stood with its back to the large one. It had also two little towers upon each of its flanks. It was equally square, and divided into four stories. No interior communication existed between these two contiguous edifices; each had its separate staircase; an open platform crowned this tower in place of a roof, as on the donjon. The first story inclosed an antechamber, an eating-hall, and a library of old books collected by the ancient priors of the Temple, or serving as a depot for the refuse of the libraries of the Comte d'Artois; the second, third, and fourth stories offered to the eye the same disposition of apartments, the same nakedness of wall, and the same dilapidation of furniture. The winds whistled there, the rain fell across the broken panes, the swallow flew in there at pleasure; no beds, sofas, or hangings were there. One or two couches for the assistant jailers, some broken straw-bottom chairs, and earthen vessels in an abandoned kitchen, formed the whole of the furniture. Two low-arched doors, whose freestone moldings represented a bundle of pillars, surmounted by broken escutcheons of the Temple, led to the vestibule of these two towers.

Large alleys paved with flagstones surrounded the building; these were separated by barriers of planks. The garden was overgrown with vegetation-thick with coarse herbs, and choked by heaps of stones and gravel, the relics of demolished buildings. A high and dull wall, like that of a cloister, made the place still more gloomy. This wall had only one outlet, at the extremity of a long alley on the Vieille Ru du Temple.

Such were the exterior aspect and interior disposition of this abode, when the owners of the Tuileries, Versailles, and Fontainebleau arrived at nightfall. These deserted halls no longer expected tenants since the Templars had left them, to go to the funeral pile of Jacques de Molay. These pyramidal towers, empty, cold, and mute for so many ages, more resembled the chambers of a pyramid in the sepulcher of a Pharaoh of the West than a residence.

CHARLES LAMB.

CHARLES LAMB, an English poet, critic, and humorist, born in the Crown Office Row, in the Temple, London, Feb. 10, 1775; died at Edmonton, a suburb of London, Dec. 27, 1834. He was educated at Christ's Hospital, Coleridge being one of his school-fellows. At the age of fourteen he was employed as a clerk in the South Sea House; and three years later he received an appointment in the accountant's office of the East India Company, a position which he held for more than thirty years, until 1825, when he was suffered to retire with a life annuity of £450.

Lamb commenced his literary career by putting forth, in conjunction with Coleridge and Lloyd, a volume of poems (1797); the next year he wrote "Rosamond Gray," a prose tale, and still later "John Woodville," a drama. In 1808 he published "Specimens of English Dramatic Poets," who flourished nearly contemporary with Shakspeare. But by far the most notable of his writings are the "Essays of Elia," begun in 1820, and continued until 1833. Lamb's cheerful philosophy of life, his genuine and spontaneous humor, and the easy grace of his style, are as grateful to readers of to-day as to those of two generations ago. He twice attempted dramatic composition, but without success. With his sister Mary Lamb (1765-1847) he wrote "Tales from the Plays of Shakspeare" (1807), intended for youthful readers, with whom it has ever since been a favorite work.

A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST-PIG.

MANKIND, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' Holiday. The manuscript goes on to say that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the elder

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brother), was accidentally discovered in the manner following. The swineherd Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son, Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian makeshift of a building, you may think it), what was of much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in number, perished. China pigs have been esteemed a luxury all over the East from the remotest periods that we read of. Bo-bo was in the utmost consternation, as you may think, not so much for the sake of the tenement, which his father and he could easily build up again with a few dry branches and the labor of an hour or two, at any time, as for the loss of the pigs. While he was thinking what he should say to his father, and wringing his hands over the smoking remnants of one of those untimely sufferers, an odor assailed his nostrils unlike any scent which he had before experienced. What could it proceed from? not from the burnt cottage, he had smelt that smell before; indeed this was by no means the first accident of the kind which had occurred through the negligence of this unlucky young firebrand. Much less did it resemble that of any known herb, weed, or flower. A premonitory moistening at the same time overflowed his nether lip. He knew not what to think. He next stooped down to feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burnt his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his booby fashion to his mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorched skin had come away with his fingers, and for the first time in his life (in the world's life indeed, for before him no man had known it) he tasted crackling! Again he felt and fumbled at the pig. It did not burn him so much now, still he licked his fingers from a sort of habit. The truth at length broke into his slow understanding that it was the pig that smelt so, and the pig that tasted so delicious; and surrendering himself up to the new-born pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole handfuls of the scorched skin with the flesh next it, and was cramming it down his throat in his beastly fashion, when his sire entered amid the smoking rafters, armed with retributory cudgel, and finding how affairs stood, began to rain blows upon

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