Читать книгу: «The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 19, No. 533, February 11, 1832», страница 2

FEATHERS

(For the Mirror.)

Valuable as are feathers, and essential as is that article, a feather-bed, to the domestic comforts of the poor, who can rarely afford to purchase one, it has often struck us, as a singular want of thought and economy in humble cottagers residing on village-greens or commons, upon which much poultry is kept, that they should not collect, (a work easily performed by the youngest children) the numerous soft, short, downy feathers, which may be observed floating about. These in time would amount to a quantity worth consideration, but they are usually left, first to litter the land, and secondly to be destroyed by rain and passengers. This is particularly the case in Norfolk, celebrated as everybody knows as well for its geese as its turkeys, and where, it is asserted, that the former fowls undergo regular pluckings for the sake of their feathers, ere submitted to "the poulterer's knife." But experience, unfortunately, only confirms the old observation, that "the poor are the worst economists in the world," and the least obedient of any people to our Saviour's command: "Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost."

M.L.B.

TO TAKE INK OUT OF PAPER, AND STAINS OUT OF CLOTH, SILKS, &C

Mix one teaspoonful of burnt alum, 1/4 oz. of salt of lemons, 1/4 oz. of oxalic acid, in a bottle, with half-a-pint of cold water; to be used by wetting a piece of calico with it, and rubbing it on the spots.

S. AE.

THE SELECTOR; AND LITERARY NOTICES OF NEW WORKS

LADIES AND DWARFS

One of the oddest of all odd books that ever fell into our hands is Captain Colville Franckland's Narrative of a Visit to the Courts of Russia and Sweden, in 1830 and 1831. It is one of the hop-step-and-a-jump tours that your fashionable folks make for making acquaintances and then making books. The gallant author does not stay long enough in a place to be dull; for he is lively and flippant in every page, and throws a dash of the service into every chapter. He feels that Dr. Granville has left him nothing to say which may not be found in his two great big books; yet the Cholera and the Polish war have supplied him with two topics throughout the whole book; and, dull as these subjects are in themselves, they have enabled our tourist to produce a rambling, rattling, frolicsome work of seven or eight hundred pages. His attentions to the softer sex sparkle every where. At Hamburgh, "we dined at a most excellent table d'hote, but thought the ladies plain and dowdy." "We laughed much at the Holsteiner peasantry, the women being dressed like devils, and men like merry-andrews." Again,—

"One of the most pleasing characteristics of Hamburgh, is the neat little, rosy-faced, fair-haired soubrette, tripping along the Yungferstieg, with a basket under her right arm, covered with a handsome shawl of glowing colours. These enticing damsels look as happy and as coquettish as you can well imagine, and might induce many a traveller to pass a few weeks in Hamburgh who had time to dedicate to the pursuit of the fair nymphs of the Alster.

"But, alas! no good is unaccompanied by evil; hideously deformed dwarfs haunt the streets and promenades of the good town, and the eye of the observer, after having rested with complacency on the round and well-turned form of the smart soubrette, reverts with horror to the miserable Flibbertigibbets which abound in a frightful proportion to the whole population."

At Hamburgh he finds fun in every thing.

"I was a good deal amused to-day by the funeral cortège of some citizen of consequence. The bier was surrounded by men dressed in the old Venetian costume of black, with ruffs, well-powdered wigs, and swords by their sides. I regret to say that I must quit Hamburgh without seeing the Schöne Marianna; but I hear she is now rather passèe, and I must console myself for this mortification by gazing upon the first pair of bright eyes which I shall meet to-morrow on my route to Kiel."

The Russian dwarfs afford our Captain much amusement.

"Madame Divoff, like many other Russian ladies, has a dwarf in her house, who remains constantly with the company. He is less ugly and disagreeable than others of his species. La Princesse Serge Gallitzin has a little fellow of this sort; the Lisianskis have also one in constant attendance. The pretty Mademoiselle Rosetti, two evenings ago, kept caressing the dwarf at Madame Divoff's ball. ('Beauty and the Beast,' said I to her; 'Zemir et Azor.')

"At a very agreeable family party at the Prince Paul Gallitzin's were masks; and a party of male and female dwarfs; these droll little urchins were all very well made and good-looking; they frisked and frolicked about with the children of the house as if they themselves were not (as in reality they were) men and women, but children likewise. One of these poor little mortals, equipped as an officer of hussars, danced a mazurka with great grace and activity, and selected for his partner the Gouvernante, a fine, fat bouncing woman of twenty-five. He likewise, at my request, sang a Russian romance, which he accompanied on the piano-forte: his voice was a very plaintive, but weak barytone. The kindness of the Russian nobles to these unfortunate beings does infinite honour to the national character."

We have only time for another extract or two. At Moscow, he notes:

"I passed the remainder of the evening at the Princess Dolgorouki's; the young ladies were in great agitation on account of the sudden indisposition of their mother, Madame Boulgakow, who had, it seems, caught cold in her return from the monastery of Troitza, sixty wersts from hence, a renowned pilgrimage. She had better have stayed at home, for surely Moscow has sufficient churches in which bigots may pray as long as they please. When will superstition cease to usurp the place of true religion in the human mind? I did not pity the old devotee, but I felt for the young ladies, who seemed to be a good deal flurried and fluttered by this occurrence."

At St. Petersburg:

"June 8-20.—Weather hot and sultry. At two I walked to the Summer Gardens, which I found full of police-officers and soldiers. To-day there is a celebrated promenade, that in which the young fillies range themselves in two rows along the principal alley to be chosen by their future spouse. However, it was as yet too early for this exhibition, and there was nobody here except police-officers, the very sight of whom makes me sick; so off I set, and was caught near the Newski Prospekt in a tremendous thunder-storm, which forced me to take shelter, first under the arch of a porte-cochere, and secondly in the Casan Church, in which I discovered for the first time the bâton of Marshal Davoust, stuck up in a glass-case against one of the piers supporting the dome of the Church. Underneath the bâton, upon a gilded metal-plate, are two inscriptions, the one in Russ, the other in Latin, which state that the bâton is that of Marshal Davoust, taken near Crasnoe, 5th Nov. 1812; so there can be no doubt of the fact."

"I was a good deal amused with a bad painting over the simple unassuming tomb of the immortal Kutusoff, representing the Kremlin, the church of Ivan Blagennoi, and a procession of priests marching out of the former by the Holy Gate towards the latter. Kutusoff's tomb is shaded by banners taken from the Poles, the Prussians, and the French, having at the ends of their staffs, the eagles of the two former, and the horse of the latter."

LE JARDIN DES PLANTES

Mrs. Watts's charming Juvenile Annual, the New Year's Gift, furnishes the following admirable model of a descriptive letter from the French capital.

"The day following the one on which we were at Versailles, we spent in visiting the Garden of Plants; this institution (if I may so call it) is a little on the same plan as our Zoological Garden, and is said to be quite unrivalled in the whole world. It contains curiosities of every age, and from every quarter of the globe. The gardens, which cover more than a hundred acres of ground, are filled with every plant that can be reared in France, either naturally or by artificial means, from the lordly palm to the humble potato.

"One enclosure is filled with every specimen of shrub that is capable of being made to form a fence, from the prickly holly, of forty feet high, to the dwarf-box, scarcely an inch above the ground.

"In another place, we see specimens of all the various modes of training fruit, and other kinds of trees, which the ingenuity of man has been able to accomplish—this is peculiarly interesting. Here, a tree is trained to resemble a large basin, another is made to look like a gigantic umbrella, and a third like a lady's fan.

"In one enclosure are collected together all the various specimens of culinary vegetables that have usually been appropriated to the sustenance of mankind; these, you will readily believe, occupy no small space; and near them, are to be seen specimens of all the varieties of fruit trees of which France and its neighbouring kingdoms can boast.

"In addition to all this, there are extensive green-houses and hot-houses, filled with many thousand of the choicest plants, attached to each of which is its scientific and its common name. Many of them were extremely curious; I tried to remember so many, that I find I confound one with another, and now I can scarcely recollect any, save the useful bread tree, the curious coffee plant, and the tempting sugar cane, all of which are to be seen here to great advantage.

"Attached to this beautiful garden, is a splendid museum, containing all sorts of treasures connected with natural history. Here are to be seen more than two hundred varieties of monkeys only; of birds, there are myriads; and one or two species are shown, that are believed to be the only ones of the kind extant; these, of course, are not alive. Here are also collected hundreds of bird's nests, of all shapes, kinds and sizes, from one almost as large as a hand basin, to one about the size of a green gage plum: most of these contain eggs of such kinds of birds as those to whom the nests belonged; and indeed the ingenuity with which many of these little houses are constructed, surprised me more than any thing I ever before witnessed. The collection of butterflies too is most remarkable, from one the size of a plate, to those of the smallest size.

"In the same building is also to be seen a most extensive assortment of minerals, spars, gems, ores, crystals, medals, etc. etc., which merely to enumerate singly, would more than fill a long letter. We next saw the Museum of Zoology: this contains reptiles and fish, innumerable, and of which I can only say, how wonderful are their varieties! I must not, however, forget to tell you that we saw a part of an elephant's tusk, which when complete is believed to have been at least eight feet in length. Only imagine what must have been the height of the possessor of such a pair of tusks! Here too we saw the skeleton of an enormous whale that was captured on the coast of France; and from the size of its jaw bones, I can readily believe the old story, that the tongue of the whale is as large as a feather bed.

"But the whale's was not the only skeleton which we saw,—here were collected and strung together, the bones of men, women, children, quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, and fish to form perfect specimens.—All this was very remarkable: but I cannot say that I much admired them, though I was much struck by the sight of an Egyptian mummy, embalmed and unwrapped, and supposed to have been in its present state far more than a thousand years. We none of us very much enjoyed the sight of the dead specimens, we therefore gladly left them, in order to pay our respects to their living neighbours, whose houses were not very far off.

"The Garden of Plants contains a very considerable number of wild animals, and who all appear to be living very much at their ease. Indeed they are surrounded with every thing that can be devised to render their captivity as little irksome as possible. They are confined it is true; not in narrow cages, but in wide enclosures; around them grow trees of their own country, and under their feet springs the herbage of which they are most fond. The Polar bear is indulged with a fountain of water, and when the camel is inclined for a nap he reposes on a bed of sand. Of the usefulness of this animal I must not omit to give you an instance, and that is, that so far from eating the bread of idleness, he actually more than earns his living by raising all the water that is used in these extensive grounds, and thus he may be regarded as a general benefactor to all the plants and animals by which he is surrounded. So much for the king's garden as it is sometimes called; to attend all its different branches no less than a hundred and sixty persons are constantly employed, and to keep it up nearly twelve thousand pounds is annually expended. This of course includes the expenses of travellers who are sent abroad by the French Government to collect new treasures to enrich this wonderful place, which may truly be called the museum of the world."