MISCELLANEA.

Lyttelton Times, Volume III, Issue 107, 22 January 1853, Page 10

MISCELLANEA.

Family Likeness.—Uncle Bonaparte believed in destiny. His nephew believes mjetes.'

Reminiscence of Louis Napoleon when in England.—Mr. Jerdan, in the second volume of his autobiography, just issued, has some gossip relative to the present autocrat of France. The first part of the following quotation, relating- to Prince Louis Nupolen, may be taken as an augury of his future fortunes ; the remainder is amusingly illustrative of the parvenu: —"But I have a remarkable anecdote to append to this notice, -which I think eminently characteristic of the individual who is now playing the highest rule in the French nation

—viz., tlie President, Prince Louis Napoleon. During; Ins last residence in London, he was one of a chiefly literary party who spent a charming day with Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, at his villa on the Thames above Fulhanv; and at which Mr. Disraeli, Count D'Orsay, Mr George Btiukes, Mr. Fonhlanque " assisted,', and which was also graced by the presence oF accomplished and distinguished ladies. Among the diversions of the dejeuner, everybody strolling about the grounds and doing what they listed, I had the honour to be taken into a wherry by the Prince, and rowed for half an hour upon the river by him. It must be confessed that he caught crabs, and did not exhibit so much skill as to afford me a presentiment i> that he would so soon, or ever, scull himself into the position of despotic ruler over thirty millions of people ! In short, I was rather glad when I got out of the boat and found myself once move on the lawn, on terra firma. On the return to town the Prince was courteous enough to give me a seat in his open carriage, and we happened to come by the road through Little Chelsea ; our conversation having turned on an idea propounded by Mr. Baukes, that the vessel which brought the remains of Napoleon from St. Helena might produce a prodigious effect if the sails were painted with armorial bearings and other emblems, such as the History of England recorded of the ship of the great Earl of Warwick ! This strange proposition was received with more than the Prince's usual taciturnity ; but, in passing by the quondam abode of the Royal Bourbons, when I incidentally pointed out the house, I found that I had at once awakened extraordinary emotions. He questioned me again and again about every particular I could remember ; and, not content with my first answers, repeated the same inquiries, apparently with an increase of wonder, and interest. It was as if he could not bring himself to believe that the true ancient regal race of France could have dwelt in so humble a tenement; it was, in short, an involuntary tribute of the soul, paid to legitimacy. Proud as he was of his own blood, and ambitious of restoring it, in his own person, to the utmost pinnacle of power, he could not help feelings allied to those of the parvenu ; and I rarely met him on future occasions that he did not, if opportunity served, recur to the subject."

A Romance op Reai. Life.—A correspondent of the Si. Louis Intelligencer, who recently visited the Cincinnati Asylum for the insane,, gives this brief sketch of one of the inmates— '• Here is now confined the young; lady who has so often been seen within the past few years promenading Fourth-street, in the city, dressed up in insane finely, intended for bridal habiliments, fantastically decorated; and inquiring occasionally of passers-by fov the faithless cause of her too fatal sorrow. She had completed a lonely pilgrimage from Europe to unite her fortunes with those of her betrothed, who had preceded her about a twelvemonth or so. After a weary search she found him doing business, and—married. The shock deprived her of her reason. Every passing day is, since, indicated by her disordered fancy as the one upon which her ' Henry1 is coming to fulfil his vows, and she arrays herself to meet him accordingly. Her nightly disappointment yields easily to a brighter hope for the ironow, and thus her beclouded existence is wearing away.

Extorted Confessions. —Some years agp a highway robbery and murder was committed on the road leading from Cassel (o Fulda, and a poor schoolmaster was taken up on suspicion of being the assassin. He was thrown into prison, and after he had been there wearied by solitary confinement, interrupted only by attempts to extort from him an avowal of guilt, suddenly in the dead of midnight there appeared before him a figure like a ghost, in a sheet stained with blood, which with awful threatening commanded him to confess. The horror-stricken man obeyed, and upon the strength of that confession was condemned to death. Before, however, that sentence was executed, the real murderer was discovered, and the life of the innocent man was saved. But it was too late. He left his prison indeed, but it was only to become the inmate of a madhouse. The ghost had been dressed up by the authorities for the occasion, and they no doubt prided themselves upon the success of their stratagem, until the providence of God revealed the truth.— Forsyth's History of Trial by Jury.

Romance in Real Life.—lt will probably be recollected by some of our readers, that in 1843, a tall, gaunt, and extremely repulsive woman was brought up at the Mansion-house, before tlie Lord Mayor-(Alderman Humphrey), charged, upon strong suspicion, of having stolen a child, which was believed to be the child of respectable parents. The facts, as they were then elicited, were briefly these :—The woman, who was of most depraved and filthy habits, •had been seen begging about the metropolis and its suburbs with a child about three years of age, which she, notwithstanding its apparent repugnance, continued, or pretended, to suckle. At length, in a state of utter exhaustion and distress, she applied for admission to the Asylum or Refuge for the Houseless Poor, where she was attended by a kind-hearted benevolent gentleman, Dr. Bowie, the surgeon to the Institution,.who, during the progress of her cure, was struck with the remarkable contrast between the woman and the child, and the evident superiority of form and feature in the latter, and, so great was the dissimilarity, that he at once concluded there could be no close relation betmeeh them, and that she had in all probability .stolen the child. Acting under this conviction, he, with Mr. Edwards, chairman of the Institution, obtained a warrant for the woman's apprehension, and on her recovery she was at once taken before the Lord Mayor. On her examination there she said her name was Mary Thompson, and that she was the widow of a Cornishsmuggler, who commanded a small craft called the " Mary Ann," in which she alleged the child was born in the month of Feb., 1840, while out at sea. She made many conflicting statements, but the one she ultimately adhered to was, that the child was hers by a man named •Holioway, and born before her marriage with Samuel Thompson. The child was taken from her, and on being.placed in a handsomely furnished room at the Mansion-house seemed to be quite, at home with his Lordship's children, and ,on hearing a piano played appeared familiar Avith its .tones, and, approaching the instrument, spread his little fingers over the keys, and repeated "A. B. C.' On being asked what a gold ; ,'chaiD that was shown him was, he readily gave .it its proper name, and said it was a watch guard. He said he had two mothers ; his mo- . ther iii the country was very kind to him, and loved him, but the naughty woman whom he called his straw-yard mother beat him, and ■begged for money, fought, and got drunk. In .his childish prattle with the Lady Mayoress and other ladies, he spoke of his nice new frock -with rows of buttons down the front, that he had when the woman enticed him from his home with offers of plum pudding. He said his name was Henry Saumarez Dupuis, and that the woman, for whom he evinced the greatest abhorrence, often beat him for saying his name "was not Samuel Thompson. He remembered living at Canterbury, and that his good mamma Lad a room like the one he had seen, with a carpet and a piano in it. In mentioning the cruelty of the wretched monster to him, he said he saw her burn all his new clothes in the fire, evidently for the purpose of preventing identification. On Saturday, Mr. Edwards attended Guildhall justice-room with a respectably dressed lad, about thirteen or fourteen years of age, ■with intellectual face, and handsome features, and stated that the lad was the unfortunate child, Henry Saumarez Dupuis; that he had been four or five years with a Mrs. Orton ; and during the last three years and a half he had ''been living with, and educated by, a Mr. Williams, in Scotland, at the expense of a few private individuals, assisted with the contributions received at the time. Dr. Bowie had settled in •Melbourne, Australia, and had lately sent over for this boy to join him, and he was about to start immediately. Alderman Humphrey regretted that the extraordinary exertions made at the time had failed in discovering the lad's ■parents. He, however, hoped he would be successful in his new home, and that he would write and let him know how he got on. On inquiring how much money he had in his pocket to start with, the boy said lie had only Bs., upon which the aldennaii ordered £1 from the poor-box to be added to his little store, and directed that a further sum of £5 should be remitted to Melbourne for his use, through the ordinary channel. With regard to the woman, it may be as ■well to state that on foregoing her claim to the child she was discharged, and has not been seen since, except, on one occasion, when she made a 'iutile attempt to get the child again into her clutches. — Times, Aug. 16.

The Tricks of the Wine Trade.—Mr. Angus B. Reach, in his work " Claret and Olives, from the Garonne to the Rhone," thus speaks trumpet-tongued to the consumers of cheap wine:—" I said that it was good—good for our stomachs—to see no English bunting at Cette. The reason is, that Cette is a great manufacturing place, and that what they manufacture there is neither cotton nor wool, Perigord pies, nor llheims biscuits, but wine. " Ici" will a Cette industrial write with the greatest coolness over liis Port Cochere. " Ici on fabrique dcs vins." All the wines in the world, indeed, are made in Cette. You have only to give an order for Johannisbergli or Tokay—nay, for all I know, for the Falernian of the Romans, or the nectar of the gods— and the Cette manufacturers will promptly supply you. They are great chemists, these gentlemen, and have brought the noble art of adulteration to a perfection which would make our own mere logwood and sloe-juice practitioners pale and wan with envy. But the great trade of the place is .not so'much adulterating as concocting wine. Cette is very well situated for this notable manufacture. The wines of southern Spain are brought by coasters from Barcelona and Valencia. The inferior Bordeaux growths came pouring from the Gavonne by the Canal dv Midi; and the hot and fiery Rhone wines are floated along .the chain of etangs and canals from Beaucaire. With all these raw materials, and of course a chemical laboratory to bout, it would be hard if the clever folks of Cette could not turn out a very good imitation of any wine in demand. They will doctor you up bad/Bordeaux with violet powders and rough cider, colour it with cochineal and turnsole, and outswear creation that it is precious Chateau Margaux vintage of '25. Champagne, of course, they make by hogsheads. Do you wish sweet liqueur wines from Italy and the Levant? The Cette people will mingle old Rhone wines with boiled sweet wines from the neighbourhood of Lunel, and charge you any price per bottle. Do you wish to make new claret old ? A Cette manufacturer will place it in his oven, and after 24 hours' regulated application of heat return it to you nine years in bottle. Port, Sherry, and Madeira, of course, are fabricated in abundance with any sort of bad, cheap wine and brandy, for a stock, and with half the concoctions in a druggist's shop for seasoning. Cette, in fact, is the very capital and emporium of the tricks and rascalities of the wine trade: and it supplies almost all the Brazils, and a great proportion of the northern European nations with their after-dinner drinks. To the grateful Yankees it sends out thousands of tuns of Ay andMoet, besides no end of Johannisberg, Hermitage, and Chateau Margaux, the fine qualities and dainty aroma of which are highly-prized by the transatlantic amateurs. The Dutch flag fluttered plentifully in the harbour, so that I presume Mynheer is a customer to the Cette industrials—or at all events he helps in the distribution of their wares. The old French West Indian colonies also patronise their ingenious counti'ymen of Cette; and Russian magnates get drunk on Chambertin and Romance Conti, made of low Rhone and low Burgundy brewages, eked out by contents of the graduated phial. I fear, however, that we do come in— in the matter of "fine golden sherries, at 225. 9^d. a dozen," or " peculiar old-crusted port at Is. 9d." —for a share of the Cette manufactures ; and it is very probable that after the wine is fabricated upon the shores of the Mediterranean it is still further improved upon the •banks of the Thames.

Newspaper Correspondents.—Few would believe, but those who have had actual experience, the immense number of letters, upon all subjects, that are daily poured into the editor's'box of a London daily or weekly journal. No question is too absurd for newspaper correspondents to ask, and no trouble they can o-ive seems unreasonable in their eyes. They expect an editor to be skilful in the law, and to expound the most complicated questions of le«>-al difficulty : to be learned in medicine and divinity; to kwow all languages, ancient and modern, and all dialects, from the Cherokee to the Kamschatkadale ; to know the most intimate secrets of all trades and professions; to be as expert in mathematics as Euclid, in mechanics as Archimedes, in Astrology as Nostradamus, in astronomy as Laplace or Herschel, in chemistry as Faraday; and to discover a meaning in the pages of a German meta-physiemiK They expect him to bave a memory capacious

enough to remember every event, great or small, that is recorded, in history, or that has happened since the invention of printing; to know how many panes of glass there are in every street in the metropolis; how many mandarins with tails have appeared in China since Confucius; when every great criminal was hung, what he said in his last dying speech and confession, and who bought as relics the pieces of the rope that strangled him ; when every prize-light came off, and who was the conqueror ; the precise age to a day of every actress that either is or ever was upon the stage — what piece a popular actor performed in which he first came out, and what piece he has performed in every night since, and the amount of his salary; the precise words a minister may have said twenty years ago in the passing of a private bill; the number of bricks in the tower of Babel; the specific gravity of the dirt and putridity in the river Thames at high water, and how many fish, from white bait to eels, are annually.caught between Greenwich and Twickenham. Sometimes the correspondence is amusing from the excess of its stupidity, insanity, simplicity, or impudence. Sometimes a jumble of all these qualities increases the piquancy of a letter. Some letters are literary curiosities, worthy of a chapter in the entertaining miscellany of the elder Disraeli.

The Grand Duke of Tuscany has enacted that all young men leading an irregular life, or having contracted habits of rioting and debauchery, shall be subjected to military discipline.

Curiosities of Pakiviament.—An examination of the pages of the new edition of Mr, Dud's Parliamentary Companion reveals many curious facts respecting the composition of the new House of Commons. It might be expected that untitled squires, large landed proprietors, and persons of independent fortune, would form the bulk of the assembly: but so far from this being the case, there are only 154 persons who can be strictly referred to such a category. The number of individuals who possess some sort of title is, however, considerable, and many of these are also persons of fortune: thus the baronets amount to 66, and the sons of peers to 106, while there are only three city knights. The pervading element proceeds from the professional and mercantile classes ; and amongst them the lawyers have secured a lion's share. There is the large number of 101 barristers and 18 attorneys returned. If professional feeling united these, either in favour of or against any question of legal reform, it is manifest that their power would •be irresistable. Of merchants, manufacturers,-and wholesale dealers, there are 99, and to these classes may also be added 20 bankers and 2 brewers; while of occupations more sparingly represented we may ineution I architect, James Bell; 1 builder, William Cubitt; 3 engineers, Messrs. Locke, Stephenson, and Peto; 3 medical men, Messrs. Hume, Brady, and Michel. An exact estimate can scarcely be formed of the railway influence, but 11 magnates of that interest are certainly present iv the persons of Messrs. Glyn, Hudson, Waddington, Laing, M'Gregor, Chaplin, H. Brown, Cobbold, Coffin, Hawkins, Siephenson, and Bicardo. Smaller directors and endless shareholders will be found among all classes in the House. The army is fully represented by 67 of its members, while the navy can only count 13. The Irish Peers present in the Lower House are E-\rl Anuesley, Viscounts Barrington, Galway, Mouck, and Palmerston, and Lord Hotham, who constitute a clear addition to the representative peers sitting in the House of Lords, so that that class has secured mouthpieces in both assemblies. Such an analysis of the new House would be of course delusive if it were not formed tin a trustworthy basis, but the hisjh reputation of Mr. Dod's manual, and the particularity with which the biography of each person is marshalled, precludes the fear of any serious error in the foregoing attempt to classify the House. On no previous occasion since the liei'onn Act has a Parliament met without some popular member being returned for two places, and having to take his choice between them. Mr. Daniel O"Cnnnell, Mr. Charles VUliers, Mr. Cobdeu, and others, have been in this position. But no such occurrence marks the present Parliament. Knaresburough, ho\ve\er. has^ returned a superabundance of members, from the accident of equality on the pall; and death has occasioned three vacancies, in the cases of Messrs. Duucuft, Watson, and Granger. The closest contest has been Youghal (where the

majority was only two votes), while in the large nnnibev" of 167 places, there was no contest whatever. — Times, August 20.

Friendship between an African Cat and Rat.—A young wild cat (kediss, or otta el challa), we" have affords us much amusement; it is now completely tamed, and its equal in beauty will rarely be found. Its prevailing colour is grey, but its feet, head, and whole body are covered over with the most beautiful, leopard like, black spots. Its head is rather smaller and more pointed than those of our common German cats, but its crowning beauty is its large ears, that almost-conceal its whole head, ami are black with a white stripe. Many persons here hold it to be a young tiger (nimir) but its whole habits and structure prove it to be a cat. Tue natives call it fachet, or fagged, and say it is a kind of gins (cat). Its companion and playfellow is a rat with a long silvery tail, which, when enraged, it can like our weasel (which it is much of a size with), stiffen and thicken, carrying it high over its back. The poor creature was brought to us with two broken legs, and we at once gave it to the cat that its pains might be ended ; but the cat, either not recognizing its prey, or being weary of living alone, would not touch it; so the rat, cured by splints, gradually, and tamed by pain, became first favourite of the cat: they became inseparable, ate together, and slept arm in arm, nor did the rat ever attempt to avail itself of its perfect liberty and leave us. It is not as our European rats, ugly or ill-smelling, and from its long, silvery, furred tail, may almost be called handsome.— Werne's African Wanderings.

R. & G. Khodes