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These reports were called "debates in the Senate of Lilliput," and under this disguise were imperfect and meagre; as we have seen, and often imaginary. They are of little value as any true reflection of "the age and body of the time." And it is remarkable that for years most of the intelligence which the British public possessed of the deliberations of their representatives should be of such a character, and derived from a man, who, whatever may have been his abilities or learning, was equally well known for his narrow prejudices, ungovernable temper, and blind party zeal, all unfitting him from giving any fair or undistorted representation of public questions.

So imperfect were the reported proceedings of the British Parliament in the time of Burke, that in one of his earlier speeches, he refers thus to the subject:

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man, of much more importance, oratorical talents of much less importance, than in our time. At present the best way of giving rapid and wide publicity to a statement or an argument is to introduce that statement. or argument into a speech made in Parliament. If a politica! tract were to appear superior to the conduct of the Allies," or to the best numbers of the Freeholder, the circulation of such with the circulation of every remarkable word a tract would be languid indeed compared uttered in the deliberations of the Legislature. The orator, by the help of the short hand writer, has to a great extent superseded the pamphleteer."

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Reporting has been brought to great perfection within the last few years, and now, both in America and England, constitutes a distinct profession. It is well for the interests of society that this is the case. Much that would have been very desirable in settling the truth of history, much that would have added to the stock of posi"All our proceedings have been constantly tive knowledge, has been forever lost for published, according to the discretion and the want of the practice of this art. ability of individuals, with impunity, almost Philips, in his "Curran and his Cotemever since I came into parliament. By prescription, people had obtained something like poraries," alludes to our losses from this a right to this abuse. I do not justify it. The cause during the stormy period of the abuse had now grown so inveterate that to Irish orator. How many noble orations punish it without a previous notice would have died with the occasion which have an appearance of hardship, it not injust-awakened them, and can no more be reice. These publications are frequently erro-covered than the fleeting breath can be neous, as well as irregular, but not always so. What they give as reports and resolutions of recalled back to the mansion from which this House have sometimes been fairly given." it has once passed away! Some of the As may be seen from this statement of best speeches of Mr. Calhoun, which comBurke, in which praise and censure are petent judges pronounce superior, as modcommingled, to report the proceedings of els of compact reasoning, to any found in Parliament, even that great orator could his published works, were never reported, and now live only in the memory of those denominate "an abuse." who heard them. The indifference of Henry Clay to the reports of his speeches, was a matter of notoriety at every period of his life. The utterance of his opinions and feelings was given to the breath of popular applause, or censure, with the same carelessness with which a noble oak resigns its leaves to the autumnal winds. When the reporter brought to him, for correction, a proof of his great speech on the compromise measures of 1850, he refused even to look at it.

As in the age of Johnson, Burke and Pitt, so in that of Swift, Pope and Addison, reporters as a class and reporting as a profession, were alike unknown; and this single fact may suffice to explain much that would be otherwise unaccount able in the history of many eminent men of both these periods. Without birth or fortune, with so little talent for debate, that during the nine years he sat in Parliament, he never but once attempted to speak. Addison rose to the highest political post in the kingdom. Macauley has given the true explanation of this seeming anomaly:

"During the intervals," he says, "which elapsed between the time when the censorship of the press ceased and the time when parliamentary proceedings began to be freely reported, literary talents were, to a public

By whomsoever made, the report of the Methodist Church property trial, when that church was divided by a northern and southern line, was a most remarkable exhibition of the skill of the reporter. The best exemplification, both as respects rapidity and accuracy in reporting, in any work of magnitude, is to be found in

the Congressional Globe. The reporters accomplish within stated periods an amount of labor which would seem almost incredible. Either a natural aptitude, or great practice, has brought them to such perfection that they are able to take down 10,000 words in an hour. Some of them have taken down two hundred and twenty-five words in a minute, and between

twelve and thirteen thousand words in an hour. Now, how voluble soever a speaker may be, he seldom utters more than 7,500 words in that time. Even the late Mr. Choate did not much exceed this rate. Hence the absurdity of the statement, which went the round of the newspapers, that he could not be reported. But, besides, he spoke with much intonation, and this greatly aids the reporter.

The debates of Congress make about 40 columns daily of the Globe, and appear the next day after they have taken place. In such a mass of printed matter, there is, of course, much that is worthless, much that is irrelevant to the subject professed to be discussed. The future historian, who consults it for a knowledge of the questions which have agitated our time, as he wades through one speech after another, will be ready to exclaim, "Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing. He talks more than any man in Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff. You shall seek all the day ere you find them, and when you have found them, they are not worth the search." Still with all their faults, these reports must always remain the most valuable, and, in fact, the only authentic parliamentary history of the present time.

The Gentleman's Magazine contains many curious and interesting contributions to science and literature, and many remarkable events and circumstances have here their appropriate record. We read the obituary notice of the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds, written by Burke, as if the great painter, whose portraits united the dignity of historical painting with the amenity of landscape, had died but yesterday. Other men, less known, have their merits portrayed in graceful eulogy.

"Some Frail memorials which the votive hand
Shall snatch decaying from the grasp of time,
And bid them live on record."
NEW SERIES, VOL. II. No. I.

!

The earliest known copy of "God save the King" is to be found in its pages in 1745-this national anthem having been sung that year in the theatres, when the rebels were occupying Edinburgh! The earliest account of Franklin's experiments in electricity appeared in this magazine for 1750, Franklin being at that time his majesty's postmaster at Philadelphia.

Rogers, Charles Lamb, and others whose names are now so familiar to us, made their first attempts at authorship in the pages of this magazine. The earliest contributions of the two named are in the year 1777.

Selections from this magazine have been made at various periods a very discriminating one being that published in London in 1811, in four volumes. A knowledge of its contents has been further promoted by five index volumes, in. which the subjects are alphabetically arranged, and thus made easily accessible to the student. A list of the plates and cuts contained in the magazine was published in 1821. The Gentleman's Magazine has survived all its earliest competitors for public favor. The London Magazine, published in 1732-the Royal Magazine, in 1759-the European, 1789— Scot's Magazine, 1796-enjoying amid all the revolutions of taste, and the competition of more modern enterprises an extensive circulation, and the prediction contained in some lines prefixed to one of its numbers in 1752 has been fulfilled.

"Why tho' ten thousand authors fall
Does Urban still survive them all?
And why does time in mad career
Still spare his work from year to year?
To live shall be thy happy lot
When all thy rivals are forgot."

Temple Bar.

SUNSHINE AND SHADOW.

In driving or walking along a country road during the spring or early summer time, how pleasing it is to see the way beautifully chequered by varied light and shade, when the sunshine plays between the yet light foliage of the hedgerowtrees which grow on either side!

When there is a longer break than usual from tree to tree we are almost ready to complain of the bright sunlight,

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and long for the sweet alternation again

to recur.

Still worse if the trees thicken into a dense plantation, and we travel on under a canopy of dark foliage, where the intertwining branches and matted fronds of the pine suffer no sheen of glimmering light to glance down on our path.

The unbroken serenity of Egyptian sky tires sooner perhaps than the cold and leaden hue of our own autumnal firmament, though November days in England are proverbial for causing people to make the most of their social and private grievances and bring their years to an untimely end.

During our longest summer days, when we look at the sun still shining between eight and nine o'clock, it almost seems as though he were staying up too late, and now that it was time for the animal creation to go to rest he had better make haste to dip below the horizon and let the night

come on.

Well may Lord Dufferin's cock think it was time to leave off crowing and jump into the sea, when they had sailed into such high latitudes that there was neither break-of-day nor sunrise for him loudly to declare.

"There shall be no night there," tells us plainer almost than any thing else in revelation of the great change to be undergone in man's condition. At present it would be a sad deprivation to be robbed of those dark peaceful hours, when

"Night, sable goddess, from her ebon throne In rayless majesty now stretches forth Her leaden sceptre o'er a slumb'ring world." Many of us may be far too fond of adding the night unto the day, as the muse of Tom Moore advises; but the most rakish of mortals find that a repetition of such a practice does not convene either to their comfort or convenience; for if dame Nature is maltreated, she will invariably, sooner or later, retaliate upon those who slight her prerogative.

I hardly know whether many of us would like to be deprived of our long winter evenings, when, as the day draws to a close so much earlier, we seem to have more time at our own more immediate disposal, and give ourselves up more freely to social communion.

แ "Shades of evening close not o'er us

is a line which very few would like to see literally fulfilled; for when it is getting dusk, many people put up the shutters with considerable alacrity, as though they were rather pleased than otherwise that the more convivial time was approaching.

Many are the kinds and gradations of sunshine and shadow: the light vapors that float around the earth-fog and mist and thunder-cloud; the heavier vapors that distemper the atmosphere of the mind-doubts and fears and brooding melancholy; these serve to hide the sunshine from the world and darken the heart of man. But they are moving all: the mists disperse and the clouds float away, and mother Earth looks more beauteous than ever, again irradiate with light; and who has not seen the child's face look twice as pretty after an April shower of tears, or known an elder spirit on which the beauty of holiness seemed reflected after passing through a dark vale of sorrow?. Varied indeed are the intensities of shadows on the earth: the light volatile film which scarcely has the power to refract a ray of sunshine; those heavy masses of vapor, properly called cumuli, which, resting apparently on the ground, rise like alpine heights half way to the zenith; the dark, purple-hued, tempestladen clouds, which lie brooding on the horizon, while the sultry air and the deep mutter of the distant artillery of heaven tell of the coming storm: all these are constantly throwing their light or dark shadows over the earth and changing its aspect.

Again, there is a deeper gloom when this revolving globe turns the spot of earth we stand upon away from the face of the sun altogether, and night settles down upon us. And then a sister world lo and ourselves, and throw a sudden will occasionally intervene between Apoljealous of his benevolent smile, and would chill over us, as though she were a bit fain induce him to treat us more coldly.

The lights and shadows playing upon the world, in a measure have their counterparts in life's history, and man's days upon the earth are almost as varied as an April sky. Rarely does a day pass over

but that some faint shadows darken our path-bright anticipations are dashed down, sunny hopes are turned into de

sponding forebodings of evil, or joys re-pelled to lay down your rod for a time, vert to grief. And, perhaps as unexpect- while a bright flash of sunlight, darting edly, light breaks in upon us when the day between two heavy clouds, has intensified is dark and dreary: "Heaviness may the beauty of the babbling brook, and the endure for the night, but joy cometh in rocks and woods on either side, and the the morning." We are too apt to note glade of turf seen through some drooping well all the evil that befalls us, and to willows,-so wondrously different has make the most of our daily trials, with- the picture looked in that sudden blaze of out dwelling sufficiently on the many sunshine, after seeing it so long in the lifts we get to help us on our way. sober light of a cloudy sky.

If we live in a valley, and our windows look out upon some mountain height, and a fearsome shadow darkens that conical peak, we are just as sure of its being by and by again lighted up with sunshine, as we are that the day will break on the morrow morn. The mists, we know, will roll away; the cloud that overhangs it now will all dissolve in gentle rain, or pass away and be no more seen; and the trembling light will dart from crag to crag, burnishing the rocks with gold, and giving them all the fresh beauty of a new creation.

So is it with ourselves, in a great measure, if we are only circumspect enough to look calmly at the recurring shadows and sunshine darkening and illuming any portion of our lives.

We are not presuming to doubt that there are peculiar visitations of affliction which almost bar out the light of hope, when in the morning the stricken soul would cry out in the depth of its anguish, "Would God it were evening!" and in the evening, "Would God it were morning!" Now we are speaking of mortal life in its general tenor, when it neither rises to ecstatic heights of sublimated joy, nor grovels in the deepest slough of human misery.

Perhaps you have been a fisherman.: if so, you must have noted many a time, how a sudden gleam athwart the pool has magically glorified the little landscape you were just beginning to put down as a humdrum sort of place; and, instead very of making up your mind-as you were about to do-never to come that way again, you think of asking an artist friend to make an original drawing of the pretty spot for your drawing-room scrap-book. Ór in whipping-up a trout-stream, where the purling waves ripple over many a mineral gem, softly rounded by the gentlest of lapidaries, you have been arrested in your interesting sport and fairly com

Perhaps you have been a watcher in the chamber of sickness, and, after the long hours of darkness and anxiety, have hailed with joy the first gray light of dawn, which, were the heart ever so cast down, always brought a gleam of hope along with it, and seemed to revive you as with a sweet breath of Oriental perfume. When a dull leaden-coloured sky canopies the earth from horizon to horizon, we are quick to notice the narrowest rent in a cloud through which the missing sun may smile upon us once again; and, after a gloomy distrust has darkened our mind for a season, we are just as eager to snatch at straw-like occurrences, which, if they themselves can not buoy us up, give us hope to hold on a little longer till some strong hand is stretched out to save.

'Tis indeed a glorious sight to witness the return of animation to a dying spirit, such as seems all at once to vitalize the prostrate frame, and put a liquid brilliance in the filmy eye; and, though the change be but transitory, and "the still cold hand of death" soon becalms that beauteous form into all the stern stolidity of marble, yet it whispers to us of a life to come. Pollok, one would think, must have witnessed such a scene, to have drawn so delicate a picture:

"The Angel of the Covenant

Was come, and, faithful to his promise, stood
Prepared to walk with her through death's dark
vale;

And now her eyes grew bright, and brighter still, —
With many tears, and closed without a cloud.
Too bright for ours to look upon, suffused
They set, as sets the morning star, which goes
Not down behind the darkened west, nor hides
Obscured among the tempests of the sky,
But melts away into the light of heaven."

Perhaps you are often in a gloomy mood with yourself and all your surroundings, and feel a kind of savage joy in debarring yourself at such times of all agreeable diversion, virtually saying, "I will be miserable, and nobody shall hinder me." And

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yet, by and by, when somebody has given | longed to be a wandering star, to roam you a good-humoured fillip, and the mist from system to system of this vast uniwhich so obfuscated your geniality has verse, and, thinking nought of time and been blown away, you feel half ashamed space, spend the eternity of your being of your misanthropical turn, and are glad in ceaseless discoveries of fresh marks of to do some kindly act of benevolence to His wisdom, might, and goodness, who balance your account with society, and, planned and formed the glorious whole; as it were, bring your good nature up to have, in fact, ascended and descended par. into the mysterious ways of Providence as far as the limited line of man's intellect has permitted us to go: "Probed earth's deep secret cells of mystic store, Scaled the last spheres that bar creation's door, And peered into the dark dread void beyond."

Perhaps a diseased constitution has at times shown you every thing as through a smoked glass, and shorn your sun of happiness of its brightest rays, causing a total eclipse of all your vivacity much oftener than was agreeable. And then, when a thorough clearance has been effected, either by an active course of medicine, or by the longed-for change of air and scenery, what a new man you feel, and how heartily you despise all your former melancholy forebodings, wondering what on earth could have put such strange fancies into your head! Wait a little while, till some of the channels, through which your spleen and melancholy were drawn away, begin again to be choked up, and you find your cheerful spirits oozing away, and a gathering cloud, dark with anticipated ills, brooding over you like the wings of an evil spirit. Perhaps you have been a Philosopher, and have groped for Truth among the mazy abstractions of the metaphysical and psychological schoolmen, and amid dry analyses of thought have waded so deep, that at last you have floundered helplessly into the sea of transcendentalism. If so, you have lived in the murky atmosphere of fallacious speculations, and ought to be thankful for a ray of common sense to bring you back again to the more tangible realities of time, and the more palpable verities of life. Perhaps you have lived in the world of scientific research, have bent over the microscopic lens, and traced one minute organism into another till the infinitesimal declension of organic matter seems brought to its extremest limit; have worked, in the sweat of your brow, in the laboratory of the alchymist, where, if you have not labored in the fond delusion of hitting upon the philosopher's stone, you have at least become better acquainted with various products of mother earth; have looked with inquisitive eye through the long-drawn telescopic tube at distant suns, till you almost

And through all your profound researches into science, and ambitious flights of thought, have you ever had your sky perfectly clear, with no lowering cloud to darken the prospect? Have you ever worked on continuously, for days and weeks and months, without a portentous gloom descending, as it were, to sully your brightest ideas, and smear the fairest pictures of your imagination? Even a Turner has a difficulty in painting a landscape in harmony, without a cloud in the sky. Better do they succeed who, like Rembrandt, delight in deep shadows; for they have no difficulty in finding scenes to their taste, and need not travel far to look at men or things under a cloud.

Find the employment which can be pursued regularly, without let or hindrance from overshadowing cares, and you will not lack disciples eager to follow you in your avocation. But it is not fair to underrate the value of a cool shadow, though we do prefer sunshine in a general way.

How often what has been looked upon as evil, and which seemed to cling to us tenaciously, like a cursed thing, has in the end proved the greatest blessing to us! It is not common for people, after they have been grievously disappointed, or have suffered some heavy loss, to set themselves to work to ascertain any trifling amount of benefit they may have derived from circumstances which they at first thought were all against them. And yet, after any great blow has fallen upon us, much time in general does not elapse before we begin to perceive that we had better not bewail our misfortune too deeply, lest we should discover that after all there was not so much cause for

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