homage, and to offer the tribute which should provide their spiritual superior with palfrey and trappings. No Bishop assisted at the solemnity, to receive into the higher ranks of the Church nobility a dignitary, whose voice in the legislature was as potential as his own. With hasty and maimed rites, the few remaining brethren stepped forward alternately to give their new Abbot the kiss of peace, in token of fraternal affection and spiritual homage. Mass was then hastily performed, but in such precipitation as if it had been hurried over rather to satisfy the scruples of a few youths, who were impatient to set out on a hunting party, than as if it made the most solemn part of a solemn ordination. The officiating priest faltered as he spoke the service, and often looked around, as if he expected to be interrupted in the midst of his office, and the brethren listened as to that which, short as it was, they wished yet more abridged.

The Abbot.

P. 282, 1. 30. Calthrops, or better, caltrops, so called from the old name of the star thistle, are four-pointed iron instruments of which, however thrown, one spike sticks up. They are still occasionally used in warfare, but are more generally called now ་་ crow's feet."

P. 285, 1. 8. Mass, etc. A "hunting-mass" was a recognized form of the ceremonial, shortened on purbose.

SYDNEY SMITH.

Sydney Smith, the wittiest of Englishmen, was born at Woodford in 1771, took orders, and, after some lean years, was richly beneficed. He died in London in 1845. Smith was a sincere frondeur in everything but religion, and the powers that were in his youth being Tory, he was a sincere Liberal. He brought to the service of his cause an incomparable faculty of putting things laughably and forcibly at once.

THE PRODUCTIONS OF CEYLON.

EYLON produces the elephant, the buffalo, tiger, elk, wild hog, rabbit, hare, flying-fox, and musk-rat. Many articles are rendered entirely useless by the smell of musk, which this latter animal communicates in merely running over them. Mr. Percival asserts, and the fact has been confirmed to us by the most respectable authority, that if it even pass over a bottle of wine, however well corked and sealed up, the wine becomes so strongly tainted with musk, that it cannot be used; and a whole cask may be rendered useless in the same manner. Among the great variety of birds, we were struck with Mr. Percival's account of the honey-bird, into whose body the soul of a common informer appears to have migrated. It makes a loud and shrill noise, to attract the notice of anybody whom it may perceive; and thus inducing him to follow the course it points out, leads him to the tree where the bees have concealed their treasure ; after the apiary has been robbed, this feathered scoundrel gleans his reward from the hive. The list of Ceylonese snakes is hideous; and we become reconciled to the crude and cloudy land in which we live, from reflecting, that the indiscriminate

activity of the sun generates what is loathsome, as well as what is lovely; that the asp reposes under the rose; and the scorpion crawls under the fragrant flower, and the luscious fruit.

The usual stories are repeated here of the immense size and voracious appetite of a certain species of serpent. The best history of this kind we ever remember to have read, was of a serpent killed near one of our settlements, in the East Indies; in whose body they found the chaplain of the garrison, all in black, the Rev. Mr. somebody or other, whose name we have forgotten, and who, after having been missing for above a week, was discovered in this very inconvenient situation. The dominions of the King of Candy are partly defended by leeches, which abound in the woods, and from which our soldiers suffered in the most dreadful manner. The Ceylonese, in compensation for their animated plagues, are endowed with two vegetable blessings, the cocoa nut tree and the talipot tree. The latter affords a prodigious leaf, impenetrable to sun or rain, and large enough to shelter ten men. It is a natural umbrella, and is of as eminent service in that country as a great-coat tree would be in this. A leaf of the talipot tree is a tent to the soldier, a parasol to the traveller, and a book to the scholar. The cocoa tree affords bread, milk, oil, wine, spirits, vinegar, yeast, sugar, cloth, paper, huts, and ships.

Articles published in the Edinburgh Review.

P. 286, 1. 6. Bottle of wine. This enormous travellers' tale has been repeated to the present day, and is said to have been not inconvenient to Indian butlers.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "logician, metaphysician, bard," and, it may be added, critic and journalist of the first rank, was born at Ottery St. Mary in 1772, led a wandering life, and died at Highgate in 1834. Coleridge's prose, less unique than his verse, is more uniformly excellent, and has an almost unparalleled range of application to subjects grave and gay, easy and abstruse.

COLERIDGE AS A LITERARY CANVASSER.

So ended my first canvass: from causes that I shall pre

sently mention, I made but one other application in person. This took place at Manchester to a stately and opulent wholesale dealer in cottons. He took my letter of introduction, and, having perused it, measured me from head to foot and again from foot to head, and then asked if I had any bill or invoice of the thing. I presented my prospectus to him. He rapidly skimmed and hummed over the first side, and still more rapidly the second and concluding page; crushed it within his fingers and the palm of his hand; then most deliberately and significantly rubbed and smoothed one part against the other; and lastly putting it into his pocket turned his back on me with an "overrun with these articles !" and so without another syllable retired into his counting-house. And, I can truly say, to my unspeakable amusement.

This, I have said, was my second and last attempt. On returning baffled from the first, in which I had vainly essayed to repeat the miracle of Orpheus with the Brummagem patriot, I dined with the tradesman who had introduced him to me. After

dinner he importuned me to smoke a pipe with him, and two or three other illuminati of the same rank. I objected, both because I was engaged to spend the evening with a minister and his friends, and because I had never smoked except once or twice in my life-time, and then it was herb tobacco mixed with Oronooko. On the assurance, however, that the tobacco was equally mild, and seeing too that it was of a yellow colour;—not forgetting the lamentable difficulty, I have always experienced, in saying, "No," and in abstaining from what the people about me were doing, I took half a pipe, filling the lower half of the bowl with salt. I was soon however compelled to resign it, in consequence of a giddiness and distressful feeling in my eyes, which, as I had drunk but a single glass of ale, must, I knew, have been the effect of the tobacco. Soon after, deeming myself recovered, I sallied forth to my engagement; but the walk and the fresh air brought on all the symptoms again, and, I had scarcely entered the minister's drawing-room, and opened a small pacquet of letters, which he had received from Bristol for me; ere I sank back on the sofa in a sort of swoon rather than sleep. Fortunately I had found just time enough to inform him of the confused state of my feelings, and of the occasion. For here and thus I lay, my face like a wall that is white-washing, deathy pale and with the cold drops of perspiration running down it from my forehead, while one after another there dropped in the different gentlemen, who had been invited to meet, and spend the evening with me, to the number of from fifteen to twenty. As the poison of tobacco acts but for a short time, I at length awoke from insensibility, and looked round on the party, my eyes dazzled by the candles which had been lighted in the interim. By way of relieving my embarrassment one of the gentlemen began the conversation, with "Have you seen a paper to-day, Mr. Coleridge ?" "Sir!" I replied, rubbing my eyes, “I am far from convinced, that a Christian is permitted to read either newspapers or any other works of merely political and temporary interest." This remark, so ludicrously inapposite to, or rather, incongruous with, the purpose, for which I was known to have visited Birmingham, and to assist me in which they were all then met, produced an involuntary

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