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neighbourhood. Arriving there, they happened to mention what they had seen to the master of the house, who thereupon recommended them to go back to the place, and offered himself to accompany them. The three accordingly started for the spot where they had seen the articles in question; and having arrived there, one of them stooped down to lift them, but happening at the same time to look into the adjoining ditch, saw there the body of a man lying on his face. It was Sir Edmundbury Godfrey, with a sword run through his body, his face bruised, and a livid mark round the neck, as if he had been strangled. He was conveyed at once to the White House, and information sent to the authorities. A jury was impannelled, to inquire into the cause of his death; but no definite conclusion could be come to beyond the evidence furnished by two surgeons, that his death must have been occasioned by strangulation, and his body then pierced with the sword, which had been left sticking in the wound. The ditch was dry, and there were no marks of blood in it, and his shoes were perfectly clean, as if, after being assassinated, he had been carried and deposited in the place where he was found. A large sum of money and a diamond-ring were found in his pockets, but his pocket-book, in which, as a magistrate, he used to take notes of examinations, was missing. Spots of white wax, an article which he never used himself, and which was only employed by persons of distinction, and by priests, were scattered over his clothes; and from this circumstance people were led to conclude that the Roman Catholics were the authors of his death. The whole affair was an inscrutable mystery, but popular impulse seizing hold of the circumstance that Oates had made his deposition before him, and also that no robbery had been committed, attributed at once his murder to the vengeance of the papists.

London was now in a blaze. Here, it was maintained, was a thorough confirmation of what Oates and his companions had asserted of the bloody designs of the Catholics. Stories soon came pouring in to increase and spread the clamour, and among others, informations were sworn to by persons, who pretended to have seen Sir Edmundbury trepanned into an apartment near Somerset House, then strangled, and his body conveyed away in a sedanchair, and thence conveyed by a man on horseback to the ditch at Primrose Hill. Though the most glaring contradictions appeared in these narratives, they were eagerly caught up and accepted as gospel by an excited and furious people. To doubt the reality of the Popish Plot was regarded as tantamount to a participation in it. Oates, and informers of a similar type, were caressed and encouraged more than ever, and it will be readily believed, that they did not suffer public enthusiasm to languish from a lack of a proper supply of nutriment. It was a time when, as Hume remarks, reason could no more be heard than a whisper in the midst of the most violent hurricane.'

From White House, the corpse of Godfrey was carried home to his own residence, where for two days it lay in state, and was visited by vast multitudes. The funeral was attended by an immense procession, at the head of which walked seventytwo clergymen of the Church of England, in full canonicals, whilst the minister who preached a sermon on the occasion, was supported on each

REAUMUR AND HIS THERMOMETER.

side by a stalwart brother-divine, lest he should be killed by the papists! If the murder was really the work of a fanatic Roman Catholic, it was a most ill-judged procedure for the tranquillity of his fellow-religionists, as numbers of them, priests as well as laymen, were ruthlessly immolated to the popular fury. The mere fact of their being Catholics, and being charged as participators in the Popish Plot, was sufficient to insure their condemnation with any jury. The real cause of Godfrey's death has never been discovered, and to this day it remains one of those mysterious occurrences of which no satisfactory explanation can be given. An undoubted fact, it stands out in melancholy prominence amid the tissue of absurdities and falsehoods which compose the substance of the Popish Plot.

OCTOBER 18.

St Luke the Evangelist. St Justin, martyr, in France, 4th century. St Julian Sabas, hermit. St Monan, martyr, 7th century.

ST LUKE.

little is recorded in Scripture; but from a passage Of the companion and biographer of St Paul, in the Epistle to the Colossians, we infer that he had been bred to the profession of a physician. In addition to this vocation, he is stated by ecclesiastical writers to have practised that of a painter, and some ancient pictures of the Virgin, still extant, are ascribed to his pencil. In consequence uncertain foundations, St Luke has been regarded of this belief, which, however, rests on very as the patron of painters and the fine arts. He is commonly represented in a seated position, writing or painting, whilst behind him appears the head of associated with him, to quote the words of an an ox, frequently winged. This symbol has been ancient writer, because he devised about the presthode of Jesus Christ,' the ox or calf being the sign of a sacrifice, and St Luke entering more largely, than the other Evangelists, into the history of the life and sufferings of our Saviour.

Born.-Pope Pius II. (Eneas Silvius), 1405, Corsignano; Justus Lipsius, miscellaneous writer, 1547, Isch, Brabant; Matthew Henry, eminent divine and commentator, 1662, Broad Oak, Flintshire; François de Savoie, Prince Eugene, celebrated imperial general, 1663, Paris; Richard Nash (Beau Nash), celebrated master of the ceremonies at Bath, 1674, Swansea; Peter Frederik Suhm, Danish archeologist, 1728, Copenhagen; Jean Jacques Regis Cambacères, eminent lawyer and statesman, 1753, Montpellier; Thomas Phillips, portrait-painter, 1770, Dudley, Warwickshire.

Died.-John Ziska, Hussite commander, 1424; Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, 1744; Réné Antoine de Réaumur, practical philosopher and naturalist, 1757.

REAUMUR AND HIS THERMOMETER. Réné Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur is an instance, among many, of those persons who, having devoted the greater part of their lives to scientific investigations, become known to posterity for only one, and that often a very subordinate achievement. Réaumur is now remembered almost exclusively

REAUMUR AND HIS THERMOMETER.

OCTOBER 18.

THE LAST LOTTERY IN ENGLAND.

by his thermometer: that is to say, his mode of graduating thermometers a very small thing in itself. Yet in his day he occupied no mean place among French savans. From 1708, when he read his first paper before the Academy of Sciences, till his death on October 18, 1757, he was incessantly engaged in investigations of one kind or other. Geometrical speculations; the strength of cordage ; the development of the shells of testaceous animals; the colouring-matter of turquoise-gems; the manufacture of iron, steel, and porcelain; artificial incubation; the imitating of the famous purple dye of the ancients; the graduation of thermometers; the reproduction of the claws of lobsters and crabs; the instincts and habits of insects-all, in turn, engaged the attention of this acute and industrious man, and all furnished him with means for increasing the sum-total of human knowledge.

Scientific men, each in his own department, fully appreciate the value of Réaumur's labours; but to the world at large, as we have said, the thermometric scale is the only thing by which he is remembered. Almost precisely the same may be said of Fahrenheit. Had not the English persisted in using the graduation proposed by the last-named individual, his name would never have become a 'household word' among us; and had not Réaumur's scale been extensively adopted on the continent, his more elaborate investigations, buried in learned volumes, would have failed to immortalise his

name.

SO

Till the early part of the last century, the scales for measuring degrees of temperature were arbitrary, that scientific men found it difficult to understand and record each other's experiments; but Fahrenheit, in 1724, had the merit of devising a definite standard of comparison. He divided the interval between freezing water and boiling water into 180 equal parts or degrees, and placed the former at 32 degrees above the zero or point of intense cold, so that the point of boiling-water was denoted by 212°. It is supposed that the extreme cold observed in Iceland in 1709 furnished Fahrenheit with the minimum, or zero which he adopted in his thermometers; but such a limit to the degree of cold would be quite inadmissible now, when much lower temperatures are known to exist. Réaumur, experimenting in the same field a few years after Fahrenheit, adopted also the temperature of freezing water as his zero, and marked off 80 equal parts or degrees between that point and the temperature of boiling-water. Celsius, a Swede, invented, about the year 1780, a third mode of graduation, called the Centigrade; in which he took the freezing of water as the zero point, and divided the interval between that and the point of ebullition into 100 parts or degrees. All three scales are now employed -a circumstance which has proved productive of an infinite amount of confusion and error. Thus, 212° F. is equal to 80° R., or 100° C.; 60° F. is equal to 124° R., or 17° C.; and so on. Like the names of the constellations, it is difficult to make changes in any received system when it has become once established; and thus we shall continue to hear of Réaumur on the continent, and of Fahrenheit in England.

82

THE LAST LOTTERY IN ENGLAND. On the 18th of October 1826, the last 'State Lottery' was drawn in England. The ceremony took place in Cooper's Hall, Basinghall Street; and although the public attraction to this last of a long series of legalised swindles was excessive, and sufficient to inconveniently crowd the hall, the lottery-office keepers could not dispose of the whole of the tickets, although all means, ordinary and extraordinary, had been resorted to, as an inducement to the public to 'try their luck' for the last time.

This abolition of lotteries deprived the government of a revenue equal to £250,000 or £300,000 per annum ; but it was wisely felt that the inducement to gambling held out by them was a great moral evil, helping to impoverish many, and diverting attention from the more legitimate industrial modes of money-making. No one, therefore, mourned over the decease of the lottery but the lotteryoffice keepers, then a large body of men, who rented expensive offices in all parts of England.

The lottery originated among ourselves during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when 'a very rich lottery-general of money, plate, and certain sorts of merchandise' was set forth by her majesty's order,

1567 A.D.

The greatest prize was estimated at £5000, of which £3000 was to be paid in cash, £700 in plate, and the remainder in 'good tapestry meet for hangings, and other covertures, and certain sorts of good linen cloth.' All the prizes were to be seen at the house of Mr Dericke, the queen's goldsmith, in Cheapside; and a wood-cut was appended to the original proclamation, in which a tempting display of gold and silver plate is profusely delineated. The lots, amounting in number to 400,000, appear to have been somewhat tardily disposed of, and the drawing did not take place until January 1568-69. On the 11th of that month, it began in a building erected for the purpose, at the west door of St Paul's Cathedral, and continued, day and night, until the 6th of the following May. The price of the lots was 10s. each, and they were occasionally subdivided into halves and quarters; and these were again subdivided for convenience of poorer classes.' The objects ostensibly propounded as an excuse to the government for founding this lottery, were the repair of the harbours and fortifications of the kingdom, and other public works. Great pains were taken to 'provoke the people' to adventure their money; and her majesty sent forth a second most persuasive and argumentative proclamation, in which all the advantages of the scheme were more clearly set forth; so that any scruple, suspition, doubt, fault, or misliking' that might occur, specially of those that be inclined to suspitions, should be removed, so that all persons have 'their reasonable contentation and satisfaction.' That adventurers had 'certain doubts' still, is apparent from a proclamation issued as a supplement to this from the lord mayor; in which he says, 'though the wiser sort may find cause to satisfy themselves therein, yet to the satisfaction of the scrupler sort he deigns to more fully explain the scheme. In spite of all this, 'the wiser sort' did not rapidly buy shares, and the 'scrupler sort' held tight their purses, so that her majesty sent a somewhat

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OCTOBER 18.

fretful mandate to the mayor of London, and the justices of Kent, Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire, because, contrary to her highness' expectation,' there were many lots untaken, either of their negligence, or by some sinister disswasions of some not well-disposed persons.' She appoints one John Johnson, gentleman, to look after her interests in the matter, and to procure the people as much as maybe to lay in their monies into the lots,' and orders that he 'bring report of the former doings of the principal men of every parish, and in whom any default is, that this matter hath not been so well advanced as it was looked for;' so that 'there shall not one parish escape, but they shall bring in some money into the lots.' This characteristic specimen of royal dragooning for national gambling in opposition to general desire, is a very striking commencement for a history of lottery-fraud.

THE LAST LOTTERY IN ENGLAND.

number; because, he says, it is the number of the beast.' Guildhall was a scene of great excitement during the time of the drawing of the prizes there, and, it is a fact, that poor medical practitioners used constantly to attend, to be ready to let blood in cases when the sudden proclaiming of the fate of tickets had an overpowering effect.

On the foregoing page, we have copied a very curious representation of a lottery, originally designed for a fan-mount.

Lotteries were not confined to money-prizes, but embraced all kinds of articles. Plate and jewels were favourites; books were far from uncommon; but the strangest was a lottery for deer in Sion Park. Henry Fielding, the novelist, ridiculed the public madness in a farce produced at Drury Lane Theatre in 1731, the scene being laid in a lotteryoffice, and the action of the drama descriptive of In the year following, a lottery for marvellous the wiles of office-keepers, and the credulity of rich and beautiful armour,' was conducted for three their victims. A whimsical pamphlet was also days at the same place. In 1612, King James I., published about the same time, purporting to be a 'in special favor for the plantation of the English prospectus of 'a lottery for ladies; by which they colonies in Virginia, granted a lottery to be held were to obtain, as chief prize, a husband and coachat the west end of St Paul's; wherof one Thomas and-six, for five pounds; such being the price of Sharplys, a tailor of London, had the chief prize, each share. Husbands of inferior grade, in purse which was 4000 crowns in fair plate.' In 1619, and person, were put forth as second, third, or another lottery was held ostensibly for the same fourth rate prizes, and a lottery for wives was soon purpose. Charles I. projected one in 1630, to advertised on a similar plan. This was legitimate defray the expenses of conveying water to London, satire, as so large a variety of lotteries were started, after the fashion of the New River. During the and in spite of reason or ridicule, continued to be Commonwealth, one was held in Grocer's Hall by patronised by a gullible public. Sometimes they the committee for lands in Ireland. It was not, were turned to purposes of public utility. Thus in however, until some years after the Restoration 1736, an act was passed for building a bridge at that lotteries became popular. They were then Westminster by lottery, consisting of 125,000 tickets started under pretence of aiding the poor adherents at £5 each. London Bridge at that time was the only of the crown, who had suffered in the civil wars. means of communication, by permanent roadway Gifts of plate were supposed to be made by the between the City and Southwark. This lottery crown, and thus disposed of 'on the behalf of the was so far successful, that parliament sanctioned truly loyal indigent officers.' Like other things, others in succession until Westminster Bridge was this speedily became a patent monopoly, was farmed completed. In 1774, the brothers Adam, builders by various speculators, and the lotteries were of the Adelphi Terrace and surrounding streets in drawn in the theatres. Booksellers adopted this the Strand, disposed of these and other premises in mode to get rid of unsaleable stock at a fancy value, a lottery containing 110 prizes; the first-drawn and all kinds of sharping were resorted to. The ticket entitling the holder to a prize of the value of Royal Oak Lottery' was that which came forth £5000; the last-drawn, to one of £25,000. with greatest éclat, and was continued to the end of the century; it met, however, with animadversion from the sensible part of the community, and formed frequently, as well as the patentees who managed it, a subject for the satirists of the day. In 1699, a lottery was proposed with a capital prize of a thousand pounds, which sum was to be won at the risk of one penny; for that was to be the price of each share, and only one share to win.

The rage for speculation which characterised the people of England, in the early part of the last century, and which culminated in the South-sea bubble, was favourable to all kinds of lottery speculations; hence there were 'great goes' in whole tickets, and little goes' in their subdivisions; speculators were protected by insurance offices; even fortune-tellers were consulted about 'lucky numbers.' Thus a writer in the Spectator informs us, 'I know a well-meaning man that is very well pleased to risk his good-fortune upon the number 1711, because it is the year of our Lord.-I have been told of a certain zealous dissenter, who, being a great enemy to popery, and believing that bad men are the most fortunate in this world, will lay two to one on the number 666 against any other

Lotteries, at the close of the last century, had become established by successive acts of parliament; and, being considered as means for increasing the revenue by chancellors of our exchequer, they were conducted upon a regular businessfooting by contractors in town and country. All persons dabbled in chances, and shares were subdivided, that no pocket might be spared. Poor persons were kept poor by the rage for speculation, in hopes of being richer. Idle hope was not the only demoralisation produced by lotteries; robbery and suicide came therewith. The most absurd chances were paraded as traps to catch the thoughtless, and all that ingenuity could suggest in the way of advertisement and puffing, was resorted to by lottery-office keepers. About 1815, they began to disseminate hand-bills, with poetic, or rather rhyming, appeals to the public; and about 1820, enlisted the services of wood-engravers, to make their advertisements more attractive. The subjects chosen were generally of a humorous kind, and were frequently very cleverly treated by Cruikshank and the best men of the day. They appealed, for the most part, to minds of small calibre, by depicting people of all grades expressing confidence

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in the lottery, a determination to try their chances, and a full reliance on the lucky office' which issued the hand-bill. Hone, in his Every-Day Book, vol. ii., has engraved several specimens of these 'fly-leaves,' now very rare, and only to be seen among the collections of the curious. We add three more examples, selected from a large assemblage, and forming curious specimens of the variety of design occasionally adopted. It is seldom any sentimental or serious subject was attempted, but our first specimen comes in that category. This lottery was drawn on Valentine's Day; Cupid is,

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"Though a dab, I'm not scaly-I like a good plaice,

And I hope that good-luck will soon smile in my face;

On the 14th of June, when Prizes in shoals,
Will cheer up the cockles of all sorts of soals.'

The English government at last felt the degradation of obtaining revenues by means of the lottery, and the last act which gave it a legal existence received the royal assent on the 9th of July 1823, and soon after the last' was drawn in England, as described already.

Hamburg we occasionally get a prospectus of some Lotteries linger still upon the continent; from chateau and park thus to be disposed of, or some lucky scheme to be drawn; but Rome may be fairly considered as the city where they flourish best and most publicly. At certain times, the Corso is gay with lottery-offices, and busy with adventurers. All persons speculate, and a large clergy. The writer was present at the drawing of number are found among the lower grades of the the lottery which took place in November 1856, in the great square termed Piazza Navona. The

whole of that immense area was crammed with people, every window crowded, the houses hung with tapestries and coloured cloths, and a showy canopied stage erected at one end of the Piazza, upon which the business of drawing was conducted. As the space was so large, and the mob all eager to know fortune's behests, smaller stages were erected midway on both sides of the square, and the numbers drawn were exhibited in frames erected upon them. Bands of military music were stationed near; the pope's guard, doing duty as mounted police. The last was by no means an unnecessary precaution, for a sham quarrel was got up in the densest part of the crowd for the purpose of plunder, and some mischief done in the turmoil. Of the thousands assembled, many were priests; and all held their numbers in their hands, anxiously hoping for good-fortune. It was a singular sight, and certainly not the most moral, to see people and clergy all eagerly engaged on the Sunday in gambling.

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