the President of the United States. He is an hereditary artist. He had an ancestor who was 'chef de cuisine' of the Vatican, and invented a soup maigre for his Holiness; and another who was cook to the Autocratix of all the Russias. He himself invented a sauce piquante when quite a young man. 'How talents do run in some families! The truth is, that a great cook is as rare a miracle as a great poet. It is well known that CLAUDE LORRAINE could not succeed in pastry, with all his genius!" SANDERSON gives us an excellent sketch of a distinguished French cook, in his picture of VERY'S: Beside the usual officers and attendants, you will see here a little man, grave, distrait, and meditative. Do not disturb him; he is perhaps busy about the projet of some new sauce. He will start off abruptly sometimes, and leave you in the middle of a phrase: it is not incivility; he has just conceived a dish, and is going to execute it, or write it upon his tablets. Never ask for him in the mornings before one: 'Il compose.' He is composing! As an illustration of the dignity of the profession, and the self-complacency of its more eminent members, we subjoin a few 'Orphic Sayings' of the kitchen, which proceed from the great CAREME; "The every-day routine cook is without courage. His life flows away in mediocrity. Delivering myself up entirely to cookery, I promised myself that I would reform an infinity of old usages, although practised by the greatest masters of the art. When I became chief of the kitchen of the Emperor ALEXANDER, I commenced this great reform.' 'I think that a cook can never make too many sacrifices to accelerate the progress of his art. I have not only made great sacrifices in money, but every day have meditated some new thing.' How perfectly French is the style of the following direction: A pheasant should be suspended by the tail, and eaten when he detaches himself from that incumbrance. It was thus that a pheasant hung on Shrove Tuesday was susceptible of being spitted on Easter-day! Think of an artist like this, with such ideas of his profession, serving an exquisite dish to a face that expresses no rapture; to one who shows no flashes of desire, no radiant ecstacy of countenance! It is not enough, therefore, as has been well said, that a table be loaded with dishes; there must be science, to call them by their names, and taste to discriminate their uses. What is sauce for a goose is not always sauce for a gander, at a Parisian restaurant. Think then of the shock which a distinguished' chef de cuisine' must have undergone, on hearing a couple of unhewn Yankee-Doodels' from the Far West (the story is authentic) exclaim to a polite attendant at VERY's, the NAPOLEON of gastronomy: 'D-n -n your eyes! why don't you bring in the dinner?--and take away that broth, and your black bottle? Who the devil wants your vinegar, and your dish-water, and your bibs too? And bring us, if you can, a whole chicken's leg at once, and not at seven different times.' Hunger was better to them than a French cook. They had run all over Paris for a beef-steak, and when they had got it, it was a horse's rump!' Our American' tells us that the best artists will serve you up your grandfather's head in a capital soup. An English wag goes farther, and says that fossil remains would be abundant matériel for a Parisian 'chef.' He would furnish an Icthyosaurus jelly,' a nutricious and palatable preparation, extracted by an elaborate chemical process from the bones of the Icthyosaurus; a Paté de Mastodonte; a pot-pourri, consisting of a judicious mélange of the most recherché fossil remains, both vegetable and animal; Potage Megatherium, a unique article, concocted from the nutritious principle still existing in the osseous relics of that extinct gigantic animal, the Megatherium!'... ALLUSIONS are frequently made in our private correspondence, as well as in communications for our work, to the article on American Poets and Poetry,' in a late number of the Foreign Quarterly Review; and the name of DICKENS OF FOSTER is always associated with its paternity. We have it, however, on the best authority, that neither of them ever wrote a line of it. How much 'excellent abuse' has been wasted upon these gentlemen!... We have spoken elsewhere of the musical but meaningless verse which one encounters so frequently now-a-days. As a contrast to this species of composition,' let us ask the reader's attention to the following beautiful lines of BRYANT, in the present number of GRAHAM's Magazine. Observe that it is not the moon waning to the west -an impression that at first created a little confusion in our mind - but the moon waning to a crescent, of which the poet speaks. How condensed are the thoughts; how choice the language; how felicitous the whole: 'My First Play' is most welcome. We shall always be happy to hear from the writer.' We can assume, without risk, that he need never fear rejection. By the by, the difference between sitting as the spectator of one's own or of another's play, is the difference between 'sitting at one's table as a guest or as a meat,' as LAMB remarked of his friend who was going to the Cannibal Islands. One of the SMITHS tells an amusing story of a play-writer who, in order to imbibe unbiased opinions of his new piece, stationed himself in the gallery of the theatre; a short-sighted expedient, for the people there were raging with disappointment and vexation. The author was a fool; they only wished they had him there; might the devil take them, if they would n't throw him over into the pit!' Alarmed for his personal safety, he steals out of the populous pandemonium, and goes round to the stagedoor. Afraid to face the pity of the actors in the green-room, he wanders amid the scenery at the back of the stage, among a motley assemblage of baronial castles, woods, cascades, and Chinese pagodas; but still the howls and hisses ring in his ears. While standing here, like Orestes tortured by the Furies, two scene-shifters recognize him; but kindly affecting not to know him, one of them says: 'I'll bet you a pot of beer that this play looks up in the last act, after all!' The poor play-wright's dramatic career ended with being pitied by a scene-shifter! WHERE is Professor ESPY, who applied some time since to the Legislature of Pennsylvania to be paid by the State for an experiment of making water by playing with fire? —or in other words, of producing a shower by burning a large tract of woodland somewhere in the interior? The Fourth-of-July is near at hand; and if there be any truth in the Professor's theory, the smokes of the wide resounding ordnance,' tributary to patriotism on that day, will create copious showers soon after, all over the United States. Therefore, watch and remember. THERE was a man named ESTABROOK, arrested and committed to prison in this city some weeks since, for publishing a little folio-journal called The Unexpected Letter,' and obtaining postage upon the same, through the aid of the juvenile carriers. He was soon liberated however, it being evident that he was walking in darkness.' He dropped in upon us soon after his discharge, and 'more in sorrow than in anger' spoke meekly of his unjust incarceration: he then handed us a copy of his handsome' Letter,' and retired. We glanced over it; and among the first pas ... sages that arrested our attention was the following: Life, you know, is tumultuous; at least, I know it. Half-wrecked already! I am an invalid, and seeking through the racestubble around me, sympathy! Forasmuch as my departure to the Great Homestead draweth near, I am panting for those pure vestments of mortality which shall grace its heavenwide balls. Thus far, how hard to discover! All my methods are thread-bare and fruitless. But sympathy is a law of the Universe; plentifully abounding; and without its strengthening influences, this world were an ungladdened waste.' We know not how these yearnings of a clouded spirit may strike the reader, but to us they seem imbued with pathos and deep feeling. IT is a little curious what consolation may be derived from mere contrast. Fancy,' says CARLYLE somewhere, that thou deservest to be hanged, (as is most likely,) and thou wilt feel it happiness only to be shot: fancy that thou deservest to be hanged in a hair-halter, and it will be a luxury to die in hemp. The fraction of life may be increased in value not so much by increasing your numerator as by lessening your denominator.' Respectability, station in life, 'gentility,' each is a matter of simple contrast. You would think little now, it may be, of the 'profession' of a man whose daily task it is to go about picking up soiled rags in the public thoroughfares; yet regard a picture of a chiffonier in the French capital, drawn by the graphic pen of our lamented friend SANDERSON; and observe too the gentleman in a lower walk of life' above whom he stalks in social preeminence. The first moves about, we are told, with a cat-like walk at all hours, with a hook in the end of a stick, stirring up the rubbish of every nook and gutter of the street; picking up bits of rags, which are subsequently cleansed and made into paper. "The beau, by his pains, peruses once again his dicky or cravat of a morning, in the 'Magazin des Modes,' while the politician has his breeches reproduced in the 'Journal des Debats;' and many a fine lady pours out her soul upon a billet-dour that once was a dishclout.' The gratteur is a grade below the chiffonier;' being an artist who scratches the live-long day between the stones of the pavement for old nails from horses' shoes, and other bits of iron; always in hopes of a bit of silver, or even of a bit of gold; and more happy perhaps in this hope, than a hundred others in the possession. He maintains a family like another man; one or two of his sons he brings up to scratch for a living, and the other he sends to college. His rank however is inferior to the chiffonier,' who will not give him his daughter in marriage, and do n't ask him to his soirées! The Key Found' is the felicitous title of an excellent paper in the last 'Columbian,' describing the manner in which a humane keeper of a state's-prison 'found the key' to the heart of a convict who had been pronounced and long considered utterly obdurate and incorrigible The officer was a man who had the sagacity to perceive and the heart to feel that even in the most perverse nature there might be a germ of good still subsisting, which needed only gentle and wise culture to quicken and expand. As apropos to this theme, run your eye, reader, over the annexed eloquent paragraph from the New-Brunswick (New-Jersey) ' Fredonian' newspaper of a recent date: "THERE were nine hundred and seventy-nine persons in Sing-Sing prison last week, of whom seventy-six were females. So it is stated in the newspapers. Such paragraphs are too often read with a 'Well what of it?' air and feeling. But there are some who pause in sad thoughtfulness at such a statement. Every one of those nine hundred wretched persons was once an infant, and smiled in its vague dream of joy as it fed itself asleep on its mother's bosom. Every one of them awakened love in some less or larger circle of related hearts, and was cared for, toiled for, cherished. Perhaps some one might have been found that would have died for it, nay that did die for it. For that the mother perished; or the manly father, pitted unequally against poverty and misfortune, broke the o'erstrained heart-string. Take the sternest, hardest in that multitude, and somewhere in his bosom are wrapped up household memories, souvenirs of love, gleams and glimpses of innocence, and miniature plans and picturings of hope. Seventy-six of these are women. There have been then, to say the least of it, some rudimental elements of that creature who in society performs the office of sister, wife, mother, friend; sheds grace, softness and a beautiful glory over this life, and charms it with sweet amenities and a divine charity. Seventy-six women! - and among them all was there never a feminine love stronger than death, stranger than fiction; no woman's tenderness and tears and inspirations? But they are in Sing-Sing. Ay, there's the rub' to our faith and charity. Sing-Sing is not a boudoir, a lady's chamber, a drawing-room, a parlor, a ball-room. It is a prison; and grace, virtue of any sort or degree, does not abide in prisons, but in good society and free and decorated quarters. Alas! alas! let us hope a little otherwise. There is a charity, not forbidden, which hopeth all things, believeth all things; which like MIDAS' finger turneth what it toucheth to gold; which findeth what it seeketh. And could we be brought to explore even Sing-Sing in the right mind, we might ofttimes discover fragments of nobility and germs of goodness, and find that though all is tarnished, ail is not utterly corroded and destroyed. But we fear our charity runneth not this way with any marked current. In few words, when men commit those sins of which prisons are cognizant, we are done with them. Their probation is over; they are ruined; and however GOD may regard them, by man they are abandoned. They may wish to return to the paths of virtue, but we warn them off; that path is appropriated to better people. O for some HOWARDS and FRYs, in these times of vaunting benevolence, to visit with an enlarged spirit of love and hope the prisoner, the outcast, the rejected of men!' Doubtless there is many a one at this moment groaning in spirit in the Sing-Sing prison, to whose dark heart the key might be found; but who, aware that he is shut out alike from sympathy and from the world, feels that he already knows the utmost which fate can give or take away. Hope has no blandishments in store that can seduce, nor fear a threat that can appal:' 'MAD from life's history, Glad to death's mystery Any where, any where It was the Mohawk, not the Hudson, that was the scene of the Herculean wag JOHNSON'S exploit, as recorded by D.' of Detroit. He laid a wager that he could throw a half-witted blustering fellow over the Mohawk. The verdant person took the bet, and the stake was placed in the holder's hands. A large crowd went to see the performance. JOHNSON with great composure seized the man by the nape of the neck and the slack of his breeches and pitched him about six feet into the river. He came out puffing and blowing, sputtering out, 'You've lost your bet.' 'I'll be d-d if I have!' said JOHNSON. I only want to get the heft of you; and I'll throw you all day, but I'll get you over at last!... OUR readers will find The Advocate Loubet, or the Evening of Saint John,' to be one of the most stirring and dramatic narratives that they have for a long time encountered in our pages. It is no mis-application of an abused and hackneyed word, to term it 'thrilling.' It is translated from the French, by the same correspondent to whom we were indebted for "The Innocence of a Galley-Slave.' It will be concluded in our next. ・・ ... Do you know of a greater bore, reader, than your professed story-teller, who at a dinner or other party spreads an all-embracing ambush to entrap, one after the other, each story in his miscellaneous collection; who waits for neither appropriate time nor place; but who says to himself, with COLERIDGE's ' Auntient Marinere,' whenever he encounters a strange guest: This is the man that must hear me, One of the most accomplished and agreeable table-companions in England has well said, that after all, the pleasantest people at table are those who seldom tell stories. The merest trifle that springs from the occasion is worth a hundred of the best jokes that ever were transplanted.' It is the same upon the stage. The moment when Mr. A., bringing two chairs down to the foot-lights, says to Mr. B., Pray be seated,' and sprawling out his legs, commences with, It is now fifteen years since I first became acquainted with your father, then on foreign service: at the commencement of our friendship an incident occurred ——' and so forth; that moment a buzz of inattention becomes general, and old theatre-goers begin to dislocate their jaws with yawning. IN a discourse upon The Sabbath and its Observances,' delivered recently in this city by the eloquent Dr. NOTT, of Union College, the orator, among other things, remarked: ... "THE laborer needs the rest of the Sabbath. Let him claim it. Let him have it. The friend of the Sabbath is the poor man's friend. The enemy of the Sabbath is the poor man's enemy. Shall the men who have changed the face of our country by their toil, and those who dig our canals and grade our rail-ways; shall those who, in the work-shop change the rough material into ornaments for our use, or those who plough the mighty ocean to furnish the conveniences and luxuries of life; shall these men be denied the day of rest which the CREATOR designed for their comfort and their highest improvement? A seventh part of the laborer's time belongs to GOD. To claim it, therefore, is oppression and sacrilege: nor is there a power on earth, that has any right to deprive him of that rest and those sacred privileges which God has given him. He needs this day for the cultivation of his immortal nature. In this respect he is allied to angels; and his emancipated mind may hereafter shine with a lustre no less resplendent than theirs. He as well as his employers, has an account hereafter to render; and an arrangement therefore to deprive him of his rest and of his highest privileges, is not only oppression; it is treason against the community. It is undermining the foundations of society, opening the flood-gates of iniquity, and exposing the nation to the righteous judgments of Heaven. Every where but in the sanctuary the conflicting passions of men are called into exercise: here, all is hushed. In the presence of GOD there is a perfect equality. All distinctions except those of virtue and vice are unknown; and every assembly sends up a mingled note of praise to the Father of the Universe.' Has Dr. NoTT ever passed any of our 'fashionable churches' (fashionable churches! what a term, yet what more common!) during the morning service? Has he remarked the liveried coachmen and footmen, lounging in listless indolence upon or in the sumptuous carriages of their devout masters and mistresses? Are coachmen and footmen 'past praying for,' or incapable of receiving benefit from religious instruction? Or is the ostentation of their pious employers a matter worthy of more regard? We know what Dr. NOTT's reply to this query would be; but it might prove a knotty question to the parties interested. We have a right to command the services of our servants at all times; why not, we should like to know?' would doubtless be their response. Dr. NoTT is not going to prevent our display of humble piety in high life.' DOES the arrant old bachelor, who sends us A Response to the Ecstacies of Julian' expect us to insert his churlish heterodoxies? Does he take us for one of his forlorn fraternity? Unfortunate man! mistaken individual! His motto depicts a not more unreal vision: Had a horrid dream last night; viz., that I was engaged to be married -some politic arrangement. Introduced to my bride, a simpering young woman, with flaxen hair, in white gloves. Just going to declare off, coute qui coute, when to my inexpressible relief I awoke!' The 'hand-write' puzzles us; and it is barely possible that some young lady has usurped a signature, to' whet the almost blunted purpose' of some non-proposing swain. Is it so? WE are doing a good service, we are quite certain, to readers of taste in the metropolis and elsewhere, by calling public attention to the establishment of Mr. BASHAM, modeller, plaster, cement and scagliola-worker, at number 408 Broadway. This gentleman is an artist of fine taste and practised skill, who gets up architectural ornaments to any design, for the finishing of the interior of buildings. His varieties of mouldings, consols, centre-flowers, rosettes and capitals; his statues for halls and niches; his fountains and garden-ornaments, have long been the admiration of hundreds who daily pass his depository. He excels also in taking busts, whether of the dead or living. We have examined lately a bust from his hand of the late lamented GARDINER, who was killed by the explosion on board the Princeton. It is remarkable for its dignity, freedom and ease; and is pronounced an unexceptionable likeness by the friends of the deceased. RADNOR' misuses personification sadly in his 'Ode.' The twelfth and fifteenth lines exhibit an amusing union of the tenses; and in the close, persons and things are intermingled in all the mazes of metaphorical confusion.' A bad actor, who had been coughed down,' but who was not quite sure that he was not the victim of an epidemic, remarked to a friend, that if he thought the public meant to insult him, he 'd pull it's nose. The public has no nose,' said a little dapper farce-writer at his elbow, whose play had recently been hissed off the stage. How do you know that?' asked the other. Because,' was the reply, I have found by experience that it has no bowels; I therefore infer by parity of anatomy that it has no nose.' If RADNOR' has not made the jewelled sky'' put on bowels of compassion' in his seventh line from the bottom, we are utterly unable to understand his meaning. WE should be glad to be informed who it was that penned the lines commencing thus: VOL. XXIV. 'I OFTEN think each tottering form 12 |