Chapter I: Front Matter (1)

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THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE

Of Literature, Art, and Science.

Vol. III. NEW-YORK, JUNE 1, 1851. No. III.

HENRY WILLIAM HERBERT, "FRANK FORESTER."

We doubt whether the wood-engravers of this country have ever produced a finer portrait than the above of the author of "The Brothers," "Cromwell," "Marmaduke Wyvil," "The Roman Traitor," "The Warwick Woodlands," "Field Sports," "Fish and Fishing," &c., &c. It is from one of the most successful daguerreotypes of Brady.

HENRY WILLIAM HERBERT is the eldest son of the late Hon. and Rev. William Herbert, Dean of Manchester, and of the Hon. Letitia Allen. His father was the second son of the second Earl of Carnarvon, who was of the nearest younger branch of the house of Pembroke. He was a member of Parliament in the earlier part of his life, and being a lawyer in Doctors' Commons was largely employed on the part of American shipmasters previous to the war of 1812. At a later period he took orders, became Dean of Manchester, was distinguished as a botanist, and as the author of many eminent works, especially "Attila," an epic poem of great power and learning. He died about three years ago. His mother was the second daughter of Joshua, second Viscount Allen, of Kildare, Ireland,--closely connected with the house of Leinster.

Mr. Herbert was born in London on the seventh of April, 1807; he was educated at home under a private tutor till 1819, and then sent to a private school near Brighton, kept by the Rev. Dr. Hooker, at which he remained one year he was then transferred to Eton, and was at that school from April, 1820, till the summer of 1825, when he left for the university, and entered Caius College, Cambridge, in October. Here he obtained two scholarships and several prizes,--though not a hard-reading man, and spending much of his time in field sports--and he graduated in the winter of 1829-30, with a distinguished reputation for talents and scholarship. In November, 1831, he sailed from Liverpool for New York, and for the last twenty years he has resided nearly all the time in this city and at his place near Newark in New Jersey, called the Cedars.

In 1832, in connection with the late A. D. Patterson, he started _The American Monthly Magazine_, nearly one half the matter of which was composed by him. After the first year Mr. Patterson retired from it, and during twelve months it was conducted by Mr. Herbert alone. On the conclusion of the second year it was sold to Charles F. Hoffman, Mr. Herbert continuing to act as a joint editor. At the commencement of the fourth year Park Benjamin being associated in the editorship, it was contemplated to introduce party politics into the work, and Mr. Herbert in consequence declined further connection with it.

By this time Mr. Herbert had made a brilliant reputation as a scholar and as an author. In the _American Monthly_ he had printed the first chapters of _The Brothers, a Tale of the Fronde_, and the entire novel was published by the Harpers in 1834, and so well received that the whole edition was sold in a few weeks. In 1836 and 1837 he edited _The Magnolia_, the first annual ever printed in America on the system of entire originality both of the literary matter, and of the embellishments, which were all executed by American engravers from American designs. A considerable portion of the matter for both years was furnished by Mr. Herbert. In 1837 the Harpers published his second novel, _Cromwell_, which did not sell so rapidly as _The Brothers_, though generally praised by the reviewers. It 1840 it was reprinted by Colburn in London, and was eminently successful. In 1843 he published in New-York and London his third novel, _Marmaduke Wyvil, or the Maid's Revenge_, a story of the English civil wars, and in 1848 the most splendid of his romances, _The Roman Traitor_, founded on the history of Cataline, a work which must be classed with the most remarkable of those specimens of literary art in which it has been attempted to illustrate classical scenes, characters, and manners.

In romantic fiction, besides the above works, Mr. Herbert has written for the magazines of this country and Great Britain tales and sketches sufficient to make twenty to thirty stout volumes. The subjects of his best performances have been drawn from the middle ages and from southern Europe, and they display besides very eminent capacities for the historical novel, and a familiarity with the institutions of chivalry and with contemporary manners hardly equaled in any writer of the English language.

In 1839 Mr. Herbert commenced in the New-York _Turf Register_ a series of papers, under the signature of "Frank Forester," from which have grown _My Shooting Box, The Warwick Woodlands, Field Sports of the United States and British Provinces_, and _Fish and Fishing in the United States and British Provinces_--works which by the general consent of the sporting world are second to none in their department, in any of the qualities which should distinguish this sort of writing. The principal distinction between these and all other sporting works lies in this, that such works in general treat only of game in the field and flood, and the modes of killing it, while these are in great part natural histories, containing minute and carefully digested accounts of every specie of game, beast, bird, and fish, compiled from Audubon, Wilson, Giraud, Godman, Agassiz, De Kay, and other authorities, besides long disquisitions into their habits, times of migration, breeding, &c., from the personal observation and experience of the author. Any person is at once enabled by them to distinguish between any two even closely allied species, and to adopt the proper nomenclature, with a knowledge of the reason for it. The sporting precepts are admitted, throughout the western country especially, to be superior to all others, as well as the papers relating to the breaking and the kennel and field management of dogs, &c. The same may be said of what he has written of guns and gunnery. Mr. Herbert has hunted, shot, and fished during the last twenty years in every state of the Union, from Maine to Maryland, south of the great lakes, and from below Quebec to the Sault St. Marie northward of them. Not having visited the southern or south western states, the accounts of sporting in those regions are collected from the writings or oral communications of their best sportsmen, and on these points much valuable new information, especially as to the prairie shooting and the sports of the Rocky Mountains, will be contained in the new edition of the _Field Sports_ to appear in the coming autumn.

Besides his contributions to romantic and sporting literature, Mr. Herbert has written largely in criticism, he has done much as a poet, and his capacities in classical scholarship have been illustrated by some of the finest examples of Greek and Latin translation that have appeared in our time. In the aggregate his works would now make scarcely less than fifty octavo volumes.

As we have intimated, the portrait at the beginning of this article is remarkably good. Mr. Herbert is about five feet ten high, of athletic habits, and an untiring and fast walker; fond, of course, of all field sports, especially horsemanship and shooting, and priding himself upon killing as much if not more game than any other gentleman in the country out of New-York.

TRENTON FALLS

In a story called _Edith Linsey_, written by Mr. WILLIS, soon after he left college, occurs the following description of Trenton Falls:

"Trenton Falls is rather a misnomer. I scarcely know what
you would call it, but the wonder of nature which bears the
name is a tremendous torrent, whose bed, for several miles,
is sunk fathoms deep into the earth--a roaring and dashing
stream, so far below the surface of the forest in which it
is lost, that you would think, as you come suddenly upon the
edge of its long precipice, that it was a river in some
inner world (coiled within ours, as we in the outer circle
of the firmament,) and laid open by some Titanic throe that
had cracked clear asunder the crust of this 'shallow earth.'
The idea is rather assisted if you happen to see below you,
on its abysmal shore, a party of adventurous travellers;
for, at that vast depth, and in contrast with the gigantic
trees and rocks, the same number of well-shaped pismires,
dressed in the last fashions, and philandering upon your
parlor floor, would be about of their apparent size and
distinctness.

"They showed me at Eleusis the well by which Proserpine
ascends to the regions of day on her annual visit to the
plains of Thessaly--but with the _genius loci_ at my elbow
in the shape of a Greek girl as lovely as Phryne, my memory
reverted to the bared axle of the earth in the bed of this
American river, and I was persuaded (looking the while at
the _feroniere_ of gold sequins on the Phidian forehead of
my Katinka) that supposing Hades in the centre of the earth,
you are nearer to it by some fathoms at Trenton. I confess I
have had, since my first descent into those depths, an
uncomfortable doubt of the solidity of the globe--how the
deuse it can hold together with such a crack in its bottom!

"It was a night to play Endymion, or do any Tomfoolery that
could be laid to the charge of the moon, for a more
omnipresent and radiant atmosphere of moonlight never
sprinkled the wilderness with silver. It was a night in
which to wish it might never be day again--a night to be
enamored of the stars, and bid God bless them like human
creatures on their bright journey--a night to love in, to
dissolve in--to do every thing but what night is made
for--sleep! Oh heaven! when I think how precious is life in
such moments; how the aroma--the celestial bloom and flower
of the soul--the yearning and fast-perishing enthusiasm of
youth--waste themselves in the solitude of such nights on
the senseless and unanswering air; when I wander alone,
unloving and unloved, beneath influences that could inspire
me with the elevation of a seraph, were I at the ear of a
human creature that could summon forth and measure my
limitless capacity of devotion--when I think this, and feel
this, and so waste my existence in vain yearnings--I could
extinguish the divine spark within me like a lamp on an
unvisited shrine, and thank Heaven for an assimilation to
the animals I walk among! And that is the substance of a
speech I made to Job as a sequitur of a well-meant remark of
his own, that 'it was a pity Edith Linsey was not there.' He
took the clause about the 'animals' to himself, and I made
an apology for the same a year after. We sometimes give our
friends, quite innocently, such terrible knocks in our
rhapsodies!

"Most people talk of the _sublimity_ of Trenton, but I have
haunted it by the week together for its mere loveliness. The
river, in the heart of that fearful chasm, is the most
varied and beautiful assemblage of the thousand forms and
shapes of running water that I know in the world. The soil
and the deep-striking roots of the forest terminate far
above you, looking like a black rim on the inclosing
precipices; the bed of the river and its sky-sustaining
walls are of solid rock, and, with the tremendous descent of
the stream--forming for miles one continuous succession of
falls and rapids--the channel is worn into curves and
cavities which throw the clear waters into forms of
inconceivable brilliancy and variety. It is a sort of half
twilight below, with here and there a long beam of sunshine
reaching down to kiss the lip of an eddy or form a rainbow
over a fall, and the reverberating and changing echoes:--

"Like a ring of bells whose sound the wind still alters,"

maintain a constant and most soothing music, varying at
every step with the varying phase of the current. Cascades
of from twenty to thirty feet, over which the river flies
with a single and hurrying leap (not a drop missing from the
glassy and bending sheet), occur frequently as you ascend;
and it is from these that the place takes its name. But the
falls, though beautiful, are only peculiar from the dazzling
and unequaled rapidity with which the waters come to the
leap. If it were not for the leaf which drops wavering down
into the abysm from trees apparently painted on the sky, and
which is caught away by the flashing current as if the
lightning had suddenly crossed it, you would think the vault
of the steadfast heavens a flying element as soon. The spot
in that long gulf of beauty that I best remember is a smooth
descent of some hundred yards, where the river in full and
undivided volume skims over a plane as polished as a table
of scagliola, looking, in its invisible speed, like one
mirror of gleaming but motionless crystal. Just above, there
is a sudden turn in the glen which sends the water like a
catapult against the opposite angle of the rock, and, in the
action of years, it has worn out a cavern of unknown depth,
into which the whole mass of the river plunges with the
abandonment of a flying fiend into hell, and, reappearing
like the angel that has pursued him, glides swiftly but with
divine serenity on its way. (I am indebted for that last
figure to Job, who travelled with a Milton in his pocket,
and had a natural redolence of 'Paradise Lost' in his
conversation.)

"Much as I detest water in small quantities (to drink), I
have a hydromania in the way of lakes, rivers, and
waterfalls. It is, by much, the _belle_ in the family of the
elements. _Earth_ is never tolerable unless disguised in
green. _Air_ is so thin as only to be visible when she
borrows drapery of water; and _Fire_ is so staringly bright
as to be unpleasant to the eyesight; but water! soft, pure,
graceful water! there is no shape into which you can throw
her that she does not seem lovelier than before. She can
borrow nothing of her sisters. Earth has no jewels in her
lap so brilliant as her own spray pearls and emeralds; Fire
has no rubies like what she steals from the sunset; Air has
no robes like the grace of her fine-woven and ever-changing
drapery of silver. A health (in wine!) to WATER!

"Who is there that did not love some stream in his youth?
Who is there in whose vision of the past there does not
sparkle up, from every picture of childhood, a spring or a
rivulent woven through the darkened and torn woof of first
affections like a thread of unchanged silver? How do you
interpret the instinctive yearning with which you search for
the river-side or the fountain in every scene of nature--the
clinging unaware to the river's course when a truant in the
fields in June--the dull void you find in every landscape of
which it is not the ornament and the centre? For myself, I
hold with the Greek: "Water is the first principle of all
things: we were made from it and we shall be resolved into
it.""

Of subsequent visits to this loveliest of spots, years after, Mr. Willis has given descriptions in letters addressed to General Morris for publication in the _Home Journal_, and we are soon to have from Putnam in a beautiful volume all that he has written on the subject, together with notices of the manner in which he enjoyed himself at Mr. Moore's delightful hotel at the Falls, which is represented as farthest of all summer resorts from the turmoil of the world and nearest of all to the gates of Paradise. We borrow from these letters a few characteristic and tempting paragraphs:

"I was here twenty years ago, but the fairest things slip
easiest out of the memory, and I had half forgotten Trenton.
To tell the truth, I was a little ashamed, to compare the
faded and shabby picture of it in my mind with the reality
before me, and if the waters of the Falls had been, by any
likelihood, the same that flowed over when I was here
before, I should have looked them in the face, I think, with
something of the embarrassment with which one meets,
half-rememberingly, after years of separation, the ladies
one has vowed to love for ever.

"The peculiarity of Trenton Falls, I fancy, consists a good
deal in the space in which you are compelled to see them.
You walk a few steps from the hotel through the wood, and
come to a descending staircase of a hundred steps, the
different bends of which are so over-grown with wild
shrubbery, that you cannot see the ravine till you are
fairly down upon its rocky floor. Your path hence, up to the
first Fall, is along a ledge cut out of the base of the
cliff that overhangs the torrent, and when you go to the
foot of the descending sheet, you find yourself in very
close quarters with a cataract--rocky walls all round
you--and the appreciation of power and magnitude, perhaps,
somewhat heightened by the confinement of the place--as a
man would have a much more realizing sense of a live lion,
shut up with him in a basement parlor, than he would of the
same object, seen from an elevated and distant point of
view.

"The usual walk (through this deep cave open at the top) is
about half a mile in length, and its almost subterranean
river, in that distance, plunges over four precipices in
exceedingly beautiful cascades. On the successive rocky
terraces between the falls, the torrent takes every variety
of rapids and whirlpools, and, perhaps, in all the scenery
of the world, there is no river, which, in the same space,
presents so many of the various shapes and beauties of
running and falling water. The Indian name of the stream
(the Kanata, which means the _amber river_) expresses one of
its peculiarities, and, probably from the depth of shade
cast by the two dark and overhanging walls 'twixt which it
flows, the water is everywhere of a peculiarly rich lustre
and color, and, in the edges of one or two of the cascades,
as yellow as gold. Artists, in drawing this river, fail,
somehow, in giving the impression of _deep-down-itude_ which
is produced by the close approach of the two lofty walls of
rock, capped by the overleaning woods, and with the sky
apparently resting, like a ceiling, upon the leafy
architraves.... If there were truly, as the poets say
figuratively, "worlds _within_ worlds," this would look as
if an earthquake had cracked open the outer globe, and
exposed, through the yawning fissure, one of the rivers of
the globe below--the usual underground level of "down among
the dead men," being, as you walk upon its banks, between
you and the daylight.

"Considering the amount of surprise and pleasure which one
feels in a walk up the ravine at Trenton, it is remarkable
how little one finds to say about it, the day after. Is it
that mere scenery, without history, is enjoyable without
being suggestive, or, amid the tumult of the rushing torrent
at one's feet, is the milk of thought too much agitated for
the cream to rise? I fancied yesterday, as I rested on the
softest rock I could find at the upper end of the ravine,
that I should tumble you out a letter to-day, with ideas
pitching forth like saw-logs over a waterfall; but my memory
has nothing in it to-day but the rocks and rapids it took
in--the talent wrapped in its napkin of delight remaining in
unimproved _statu-quo_-sity. One certainly gets the
impression, while the sight and hearing are so overwhelmed,
that one's mind is famously at work, and that we shall hear
from it to-morrow; but it is Jean Paul, I think, who says
that 'the mill makes the most noise when there is no grist
in the hopper.'

"We have had the full of the moon and a cloudless sky for
the last two or three nights, and of course we have walked
the ravine till the 'small hours,' seeing with wonder the
transforming effects of moonlight and its black shadows on
the falls and precipices. I have no idea (you will be glad
to know) of trying to reproduce these sublimities on
paper--at least not with my travelling stock of verbs and
adjectives. To 'sandwich the moon in a muffin,' one must
have time and a ladder of dictionaries. But one or two
effects struck me which perhaps are worth briefly naming,
and I will throw into the lot a poetical figure, which you
may use in your next song....

"The fourth Fall, (or the one that is flanked by the ruins
of a saw-mill) is, perhaps, a hundred feet across; and its
curve over the upper rock and its break upon the lower one,
form two parallel lines, the water everywhere falling the
same distance with the evenness of an artificial cascade.
The stream not being very full, just now, it came over, in
twenty or thirty places, thicker than elsewhere; and the
effect, from a distance, as the moonlight lay full upon it,
was that of twenty or thirty immovable marble columns
connected by transparent curtains of falling lace, and with
bases in imitation of foam. Now it struck me that this might
suggest a new and fanciful order of architecture, suitable
at least to the structure of green-houses, the glass roofs
of which are curved over and slope to the ground with very
much the contour of a waterfall....

"Subterranean as this foaming river looks by day, it looks
like a river in cloud-land by night. The side of the ravine
which is in shadow, is one undistinguishable mass of black,
with its wavy upper edge in strong relief against the sky,
and, as the foaming stream catches the light from the
opposite and moonlit side, it is outlined distinctly on its
bed of darkness, and seems winding its way between hills of
clouds, half black, half luminous. Below, where all is deep
shadow except the river, you might fancy it a silver mine
laid open to your view amid subterranean darkness by the
wand of an enchanter, or (if you prefer a military trope, my
dear General), a long white plume laid lengthwise between
the ridges of a cocked hat."

NEW PROOF OF THE EARTH'S ROTATION.

"The earth does move, notwithstanding," whispered Galileo, leaving the dungeon of the Inquisition: by which he meant his friends to understand, that if the earth did move, the fact would remain so in spite of his punishment. But a less orthodox assembly than the conclave of Cardinals might have been staggered by the novelty of the new philosophy. According to Laplace, the apparent diurnal phenomena of the heavens would be the same either from the revolution of the sun or the earth; and more than one reason made strongly in favor of the prevalent opinion that the earth, not the sun, was stationary. First, it was most agreeable to the impression of the senses; and next, to disbelieve in the fixity of the solid globe, was not only to eject from its pride of place our little planet, but to disturb the long-cherished sentiment that we ourselves are the centre--the be-all and end-all of the universe. However, the truth will out; and this is its great distinction from error, that while every new discovery adds to its strength, falsehood is weakened and at last driven from the field. That the earth revolves round the sun, and rotates on its polar axis, have long been the settled canons of our system. But the rotation of the earth has been rendered _visible_ by a practical demonstration, which has drawn much attention in Paris and London, and is beginning to excite interest in this country. The inventor is M. Foucault; and the following description has been given of the mode of proof:

"At the centre of the dome of the Pantheon a fine wire is
attached, from which a sphere of metal, four or five inches
in diameter, is suspended so as to hang near the floor of
the building. This apparatus is put in vibration after the
manner of a pendulum. Under and concentrical with it is
placed a circular table, some twenty feet in diameter, the
circumference of which is divided into degrees, minutes,
&c., and the divisions numbered. Now, supposing the earth to
have the diurnal motion imputed to it, and which explains
the phenomena of day and night, the plane in which this
pendulum vibrates will not be affected by this motion, but
the table, over which the pendulum is suspended, will
continually change its position, in virtue of the diurnal
motion, so as to make a complete revolution round its
centre. Since, then, the table thus revolves, and the
pendulum which vibrates over it does not revolve, the
consequence is, that a line traced upon the table by a point
projecting from the bottom of the ball will change its
direction relatively to the table from minute to minute and
from hour to hour, so that if such point were a pencil, and
that paper were spread upon the table, the course formed by
this pencil would form a system of lines radiating from the
centre of the table. The practised eye of a correct
observer, especially if aided by a proper optical
instrument, may actually see the motion which the table has
in common with the earth, under the pendulum between two
successive vibrations. It is, in fact, apparent that the
ball, or rather the point attached to the bottom of the
ball, does not return precisely to the same point of the
circumference of the table after two successive vibrations.
Thus is rendered visible the motion which the table has in
common with the earth."

Crowds are said to flock daily to the Pantheon to witness this interesting experiment. It has been successfully repeated by Professor Ansted at the Russell Institution, in London, in a manner similar to the experiment at the Pantheon at Paris. The wire, which suspended a weight of twenty-eight pounds, was of the size of the middle C-string of a piano. It was thirty feet long, and vibrated over a graduated table fixed to the floor. The rotation of the table, implying that of the earth on which it rested, was visible in about five minutes, and the wonderful spectacle was presented of the rotation of the room round the pendulum. The experiment excited the astonishment of every beholder, and many eminent scientific gentlemen who were present expressed their great delight in witnessing a phenomenon which they considered the most satisfactory they had witnessed in the whole course of their lives.

Although nothing, to minds capable of comprehending it, can add to the force or clearness of the demonstration by which the rotation of the earth has been established, yet even the natural philosopher himself cannot regard the present experiment without feelings of profound interest and satisfaction; and to the great mass, to whom the complicated physical phenomena by which the rotation of the earth has been established are incomprehensible, M. Foucault's very ingenious illustration is invaluable.

A correspondent of the Newark _Daily Advertiser_ appears to have anticipated the experiment of M. Foucault, suspending a fifty-six pound weight by a small wire from the rafters of a barn. But however simple and conclusive the illustration, it should be attempted only by scientific men. Professor Sylvester, writing to the _Times_, of experiments made in London, says:

"The experiments connected with the practical demonstration
of the phenomenon require to be conducted with great care;
and some discredit has been brought upon attempts to
illustrate it in England by persons who have not taken the
necessary precautions to protect the motion from the
excentric deviation to which it is liable, and which may,
and indeed must, have the effect of causing, in some cases,
an apparent failure, and in others a still more unfortunate,
because fallacious, success. I believe, from the character
of the persons connected with the experiments, that the true
phenomenon has been accurately produced and observed in
Paris. I doubt whether as much can be said, with entire
confidence, of any of the experiments hitherto performed
here in London.

"Any want of symmetry in the arrangements for the suspension
of the wire, or in the centering of the weight, exposure to
currents of air, or the tremulous motion occasioned by the
passage of vehicles, may operate to cause a phenomenon to
be brought about curious enough in itself, as a result of
mathematical laws, but quite different from that supposed.
The phenomenon of the progression of the apsides of an oval
orbit, which is here alluded to, is familiar to all students
in mechanics.

"It is perfectly absurd for persons unacquainted with
mechanical and geometrical science to presume to make the
experiment. Indeed, such efforts deserve rather the name of
conjuring than of experiment; but in this, as in many other
matters of life, it is true that "fools rush in where angels
fear to tread." Perhaps the too hasty rush at the
experimental verification of Foucault's law may account for
some persons in England, whose opinions when given with due
deliberation are entitled to respect, having allowed
themselves to express doubts (which I understand, however,
have been since retracted) as to the truth of the law
itself. In Paris there was no difference of opinion among
such men as Lame, Poinsol, Binet, Leonville, Sturm, Chasles,
Bruvues, I believe Arago, Hermite, and many others with whom
I conversed on the subject, except as to the best mode of
making the theory popularly intelligible."

Explanations will be necessary from lecturers and others who give imitations of M. Foucault's ingenuity to render it intelligible to those unacquainted with mathematics, or with the laws of gravity and spherical motion. For instance, it will not be readily understood by every one why the pendulum should vibrate in the same plane, and not partake of the earth's rotation in common with the table; but this could be _shown_ with a bullet suspended by a silkworm's thread. Next, the apparent horizontal revolution of the table round its centre will be incomprehensible to many, as representative of its own and the earth's motion round its axis.

Doubtless we shall soon have public exhibitions of the demonstration in all our cities.

The pendulum is indeed an extraordinary instrument, and has been a useful handmaid to science. We are familiar with it as the time-regulator of our clocks, and the ease with which they may be made to go faster or slower by adjusting its length. But neither this nor the Pantheon elucidation constitutes its sole application. By it the latitude may be approximately ascertained, the density of the earth's strata in different places, and its elliptical eccentricity of figure. The noble Florentine already quoted was its inventor; and it is related of Galileo, while a boy, that he was the first to observe how the height of the vaulted roof of a church might be measured by the times of the vibration of the chandeliers suspended at different altitudes. Were the earth perforated from London to our antipodes, and the air exhausted, a ball dropped through would at the centre acquire a velocity sufficient to carry it to the opposite side, whence it would again descend, and so oscillate forward and backwards from one side of the globe's surface to the other in the manner of a pendulum. Very likely, the Cardinals of the Vatican would deem this heresy, or "flat blasphemy."

THE BUTCHERS' LEAP AT MUNICH.

A correspondent of the London _Athenaeum_, writing from Munich, gives the following account of the festival of the Butchers' Leap in the Fountain: "This strange ceremonial, like the _Schaeffler Tanz_, is said to have its origin in the time of the plague. While the Coopers danced with garlands and music through the streets, the Butchers sprang into the fountain in the market-place, to show their fellow-citizens that its water was no longer to be dreaded as poisoned. Perhaps they were the Sanitary Commissioners of those days; and by bathing themselves in the water and dashing it about on the crowd would teach the true means of putting pestilence to flight.

"Though the Coopers' Dance takes place only once in seven
years, the Butchers' Leap occurs annually, and always on
_Fasching Montag_,--the Monday before Shrove Tuesday. I
believe the ceremony is of great importance to the trade of
the Butchers; as certain privileges granted to them are
annually renewed at this time, and in connection with the
Leap. These two ceremonies--of the Coopers' Dance and the
Butchers' Leap--are now almost the last remains of the
picturesque and quaint customs of old Munich.

"The Butchers commence proceedings by attending High Mass in
St. Peter's Church,--close to the Schrannien Platz, or
market-place, in which the fountain is situated. It is a
desolate-looking church, this St. Peter's, as seen from
without,--old, decaying, and ugly; within, tawdry
and--though not desolate and decaying--ugly. From staringly
white walls frown down on the spectator torture-pictures,
alternating with huge gilt images of sentimental saints in
clumsy drapery. The altars are masses of golden clouds and
golden cherubs.

"Music, as from the orchestra of a theatre rather than from
the choir of a church, greeted us as we entered. The
Butchers were just passing out. We caught glimpses of
scarlet coats; and saw two huge silver flagons, covered with
a very panoply of gold and silver medals, borne aloft by
pompous officials clothed in scarlet. Having watched the
procession--some half-dozen tiny butchers' sons, urchins of
five and six years old, with rosy, round faces and chubby
hands, mounted on stalwart horses and dressed in little
scarlet coats, top-boots, and jaunty green velvet
hats--seven butchers' apprentices, the Leapers of the day,
also dressed in scarlet and mounted on horseback--the
musicians,--the long train of master-butchers and journeymen
in long dark cloaks and with huge nosegays in their
hats--and the scarlet officials bearing the decorated
flagons,--having watched, I say, all these good folk wend
their way in long procession up the narrow street leading
from the church, and seen them cross the market-place in the
direction of the Palace, where they are awaited by the
King,--let us look around, and notice the features of the
market-place:--for it is, in fact, a quaint old bit of the
city, and well worth a glimpse.

"If I love the Ludwig Strasse as the most beautiful portion
of the new Munich, I almost equally love the Schrannien
Platz as about the quaintest part of old Munich. It is long
and narrow as a market-place, but wide as a street. The
houses are old; many of them very handsome, and rich with
ornamental stucco-work,--

'All garlanded with carven imageries
Of fruit and flowers and bunches of knot-grass.'

The roofs are steep, red tiled, and perforated with rows of
little pent-house windows. The fronts of the houses are of
all imaginable pale tints,--stone colors, pinks, greens,
greys, and tawnies. Three of the four corners of the
market-place are adorned with tall pepper-box towers, with
domed roofs and innumerable narrow windows. At one end is
the fountain; and in the centre a heavy, but quaint
shrine,--a column supporting a gilt figure of the Madonna.
The eye wanders down various picturesque streets which open
into the market-place; and on one hand, above steep roofs,
gaze down the two striking red-brick towers of the _Frauen
Kirche_--the cathedral of Munich:--those two red towers
which are seen in all views of this city, and which belong
as much to Munich as the dome of St. Paul's does to the city
of London,--those towers which in the haze of sunset are
frequently transformed into violet-tinted columns, or about
which in autumn and winter mists cling with a strange
dreariness as if they were desolate mountain peaks!

"But the quaintest feature of all in the Schrannien Platz is
a sort of arcade which runs around it. Here, beneath the low
and massy arches, are crowded thick upon each other a host
of small shops. What queer, dark little cells they are,--yet
how picturesque! Here is a dealer in crucifixes,--next to
him a woollen-draper, displaying bright striped woollen
goods for the peasants,--then a general dealer, with heaps
and bundles and tubs and chests containing every thing most
heterogeneous,--and next to him a dealer in pipes. There are
bustle and gloom always beneath these heavy low arches,--but
they present a glorious bit of picturesque life. There are
queer wooden booths, too, along one portion of the
Schrannien Platz where it rather narrows, losing its
character of market-place, and descending to that of an
ordinary street. But the booths do not degenerate in their
picturesque character. The earthenware booths--of which
there are several--are truly delicious. Such rows and piles
of dark green, orange, ruddy chocolate-brown, sea-green,
pale yellow, and deep blue and grey vessels of all forms and
sizes--all quaint, all odd--jugs, flagons, pipkins, queer
pots with huge lids, queer tripods for which I know no
name--things which always seem to me to come out of a
witch's kitchen, but by means of which I suspect that my own
dinner is cooked every day. All these heaps of crockery lie
about the doors, and load the windows of the wooden booths,
and line shelves and shelves within the gloom of the little
shops themselves. When I first came here these old crockery
shops were a more frequent study to me than any thing else
in the old town.

"We ascended a steep, narrow staircase leading out of this
arcade into one of the houses above it, from which we were
to witness the leaping into the fountain. I looked out of
the window on the crowd that began to collect around the
fountain, and noticed the tall roofs and handsome fronts of
the houses opposite, and the crowd of pigeons--scores and
scores of pigeons--assembled just opposite the fountain on
the edge of the steep roof which rose like a red hill-side
behind them. They seemed solemnly met to witness the great
festivities about to be celebrated, and sat in silent
expectation brooding in the sunshine. Then, I wondered what
attraction the icy water could have for the children who
leaned over the fountain's side--dabbling in the water as
though it had been midsummer. The crowd increased and
increased; and seven new white buckets were brought and
placed on a broad plank which extended across one side of
the fountain basin.

"A shout from the crowd announced the arrival of the
Butchers. First of all came the tender Butcher-infants, in
scarlet coats, top-boots, and green velvet hats, borne in
the arms of their fathers through the crowd in order that
they might witness the fun. Then followed the scarlet
officials:--and then came seven of the queerest beasts man
ever set eyes on. What were they, if human? Were they seven
Esquimaux chiefs, or seven African mumbo-jumbos? They were
the heroes of the day--the seven Butcher-apprentices,
clothed in fur caps and garments--covered from shoulder to
heel with hundreds of dangling calves' tails--red, white,
black, dun!

"You may imagine the shouts that greeted them,--the peels of
laughter. Up they sprang on the broad plank,--leaping,
dancing, making their tails fly round like trundled mops.
The crowd roared with laughter. A stately scarlet
official--a butcher (_Altgesell_)--stands beside them on the
plank. Ten times they drink the health of the royal family
and prosperity to the butchers' craft. The _Altgesell_ then
striking many blows on the shoulder of the nearest
apprentice, frees him and all the remaining six from their
indentures. They are henceforth full-grown butchers. Then,
they plunge into the very centre of the fountain with a
tremendous splash. The crowd shout,--the startled pigeons
wheel in wild alarm above the heads and laughter of the
crowd. The seven Tritons dash torrents of water on the
multitude,--who fly shrieking and laughing before the
deluge. The seven buckets are plied with untiring
arms;--lads are enticed within aim by showers of nuts flung
by the 'Leapers,' and then are drenched to the skin. It is a
bewilderment of water, flying calves' tails, pelting nuts,
and shrieking urchins.

"The 'Leapers' then ascend out of their bath,--shake
themselves like shaggy dogs,--have white cloths pinned round
their necks as though they were going to be shaved,--and
have very grand medals hung round their necks suspended by
gaudy ribbons.

"The procession retires across the market-place to its
'_Herberge_,' and the crowd disperses,--but disperses only
to re-assemble in various public-houses for the merriment of
the afternoon and night. That night and the next day are
'the maddest, merriest of all the year.' Music is every
where--dancing every where. It is the end of the Carnival.
Ash Wednesday comes,--and then, all is gloom."

NEGLECT OF THE PRESERVATION OF EGYPTIAN ANTIQUITIES.

A writer in the London _Athenaeum_, writing from Alexandria, endeavors to convince those who profess an interest in Egyptian antiquities, that if their present neglect continues, nothing will remain of the stupendous relics now lying over the land, but a quantity of pulverized fragments. The colossal statue at Memphis, said to belong to the British Museum, for years depended on the precarious protection of an old Arab woman, who was continually expecting and claiming a small salary of five or six pounds per annum as guardian. She received about so much from a variety of consuls, for a time, but the payment was at last discontinued, and, from what was told her, she based her hopes on the learned or the powerful in England. "But the learned and the powerful never, I suppose," says the writer, "heard of her, and she died, leaving the statue in charge of her son, who, in his turn, seems to live in hope. There is little prospect of his getting any thing, however; and very probably, in spite of his unrewarded zeal, the magnificent statue--by far the finest in Egypt--will ere long be burnt for lime. The neighboring pyramid of Dashour is being, as I have already said, worked as a quarry, and I shall be very much surprised if this handy block of stone escape notice." He suggests the formation of a committee, consisting of the principal consuls and residents in Egypt, to watch over the preservation of the monuments of the country, and to be supplied, by governments or by the voluntary contributions of the learned, with the funds necessary to pay guardians and inspectors.

A very valuable museum of Egyptian antiquities we believe is now on the way to the United States; but it embraces no such great works as have been transported to Rome and Paris. Is it not worth while for the New-York merchants to set up in Union or Washington Square, the great statue of Memphis?

Or it would not be altogether inappropriate for the Smithsonian Institution to have it imported into Washington. How much the diffusion of "knowledge" would be promoted by such a movement it is not easy to say: but a figure of this kind on Capitol Hill would have such an effect on our eloquence! and our juvenile poets could go there and in its shade invoke the presence of twenty centuries.

HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT.

Mr. Schoolcraft is of English descent by the paternal side, his great-grandfather having come from England during the wars of Queen Anne, and settled in what is now Schoharie county in New-York, where in old age he taught the first English school in that part of the country, from which circumstance his name was not unnaturally changed by the usage of the people from Calcraft to Schoolcraft. Our author recently attempted in his own person to revive the old family name, but soon abandoned it, and concluded to retain that which was begotten upon his native soil, and by which he has long been so honorably distinguished. He is a son of Colonel Lawrence Schoolcraft, who joined the revolutionary army at seventeen years of age, and participated in the movements under Montgomery and Schuyler, and the memorable defence of Fort Stanwix under Gansevoort. He was born in Guilderland, near Albany, on the twenty-eighth of March, 1793. In a secluded part of the country, where there were few advantages for education, and scarce any persons who thought of literature, he had an ardent love of knowledge, and sat at home with his books and pencils while his equals in age were at cock-fights and horse-races, for which Guilderland was then famous. He is still remembered by some of the octogenarians of the village as the "learned boy." At thirteen he drew subjects in natural history, and landscapes, which attracted the attention of the late Lieutenant-Governor Van Rensselaer, then a frequent visitor of his father, through whose agency he came near being apprenticed to one Ames, the only portrait-painter at that time in Albany; but as it was demanded that he should commence with house-painting the plan was finally abandoned. At fourteen he began to contribute pieces in prose and verse to the newspapers, and for several years after he pursued without aid the study of natural history, English literature, Hebrew, German, and French, and the philosophy of language.

Mr. Schoolcraft's first work was an elaborate treatise, but partially known to the public, entitled Vitreology, which was published in 1817. The design of it was to exhibit the application of chemistry to the arts in the fusion of siliceous and alkaline substances in the production of enamels, glass, etc. He had had opportunities of experimenting largely and freely by his position as conductor for a series of years of the extensive works of the Ontario Company at Geneva in New-York, the Vermont Company at Middlebury and Salisbury in Vermont, and the foundry of crystal glass at Keene in New Hampshire. In 1818, and the following year, he made a geological survey of Missouri and Arkansas to the spurs of the Rocky Mountains, and in the fall of 1819 published in New-York his View of the Lead Mines of Missouri, which is said by Professor Silliman to have been "the only elaborate and detailed account of a mining district in the United States" which had then appeared. It attracted much attention, and procured for the author the friendship of many eminent men. In the same year he printed Transallegania, a poetical _jeu d'esprit_ of which mineralogy is the subject, and which preceded some clever English attempts in the same vein. It was republished in London by Sir Richard Phillips in the next year.

Early in 1820 he published a Journal of a Tour in the Interior of Missouri and Arkansas, extending from Potosi toward the Rocky Mountains. His writings having attracted the notice of the government, he was commissioned by Mr. Calhoun, then Secretary of War, to visit the copper region of Lake Superior, and to accompany General Cass in his expedition to the head waters of the Mississippi. His Narrative Journal of this tour was published in 1821, and was eminently successful, an edition of twelve hundred copies being sold in a few weeks. In the same year he was appointed secretary to the commission for treating with the Indian tribes at Chicago, and on the conclusion of his labors published his sixth work, entitled Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley, in which he described the country between the regions of which he had given an account in his previous works. His reputation was now widely and firmly established as an explorer, and as a man of science and letters. From this time his attention was devoted principally to the Red Race, though he still cultivated natural history, and wrote occasionally for the reviews and magazines.

In 1822 he was appointed by President Monroe agent for Indian Affairs, to reside at St. Mary's, at the foot of Lake Superior. In the years 1825, 1826, and 1827, he attended the important convocations of the north-west tribes at Prairie du Chien, Pont du Lac, and Buttes des Morts. In 1831 he was sent on a special embassy, accompanied by troops, to conciliate the Sioux and Ojibwas, and bring the existing war between them to a close. In 1832 he proceeded in the same capacity to the tribes near the head waters of the Mississippi, and availed himself of the opportunity to trace that river, in small canoes, from the point where Pike stopped in 1807 and Cass in 1820 to its true source in Itasca Lake, upon which he entered on the thirteenth of July, the one hundred and forty-ninth anniversary of the discovery of the mouth of the river by La Salle. His account of this tour was published in New-York in 1834, under the title of An Expedition to Itasca Lake, and attracted much attention in all parts of the country.

From 1827 to 1831 Mr. Schoolcraft was a member of the legislative council of Michigan. In 1828 he organized the Michigan Historical Society, in which he was elected president, on the removal of General Cass to Washington, in 1831. In the fall of the same year he set on foot the Algic Society at Detroit, before which he delivered a course of lectures on the grammatical construction of the Indian languages,[1] and at its first anniversary a poem on The Indian Character. Guided by patriotism and good taste, he took a successful stand in the west against the absurd nomenclature which has elsewhere made such confusion in geography by repeating over and over the names of European places and characters, giving us Romes, Berlins, and Londons in the wilderness, and Hannibals, Scipios, Homers, and Hectors, wherever there was sufficient learning to make its possessors ridiculous. He submitted to the legislature of the territory a system of county and township names based upon the Indian vocabularies with which he was familiar, and happily secured its general adoption.

At Sault Ste. Marie Mr. Schoolcraft became acquainted with Mr. John Johnston, a gentleman from the north of Ireland, who had long resided there, and in the person of his eldest daughter married a descendant of the hereditary chief of Lake Superior, or Lake Algoma, as it is known to the Indians. She had been educated in Europe, and was an accomplished and highly interesting woman. After a residence there of eleven years he removed to Michilimackinac, and assumed the joint agency of the two districts. In 1836 he was appointed by President Jackson a commissioner to treat with the north-west tribes for their lands in the region of the upper lakes, and succeeded in effecting a cession to the United States of some sixteen millions of acres. In the same year he was appointed acting Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern Department, and in 1839 principal disbursing agent for the same district.

In the last mentioned year he published two volumes of Algic Researches, comprising Indian Tales and Legends, and soon after, having passed more than twenty years as a traveller or resident on the frontiers, he removed to the city of New-York, intending to prepare for the press the great mass of his original papers which he had accumulated in this long period. In 1841 he issued proposals for an Indian Cyclopedia, geographical, historical, philological, etc., of which only one number was printed, no publisher appearing willing to undertake so costly and extensive a work of such a description. In 1842 he visited England, France, Germany, Prussia, and Holland. During his absence his wife died, at Dundee, in Canada West, where she was visiting her sister. Soon after his return he made another journey to the west, to examine some of the great mounds, respecting which he has since communicated a paper to the Royal Geographical Society of Denmark, of which he was many years ago elected an honorary member, and soon after published a collection of his poetical writings, under the title of Alhalla, or the Lord of Talladega, a Tale of the Creek War, with some miscellanies, chiefly of early date. In 1844 he commenced in numbers the publication of Oneota, or the Red Race in America, their History, Traditions, Customs, Poetry, Picture Writing, etc., in extracts from Notes, Journals, and other unpublished writings, of which one octavo volume has been completed. In 1845 he delivered an address before a society known as the "Was-ah Ho-de-no-sonne, or New Confederacy of the Iroquois," and published Observations on the Grave Creek Mound in Western Virginia, in the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society; and early in the following year presented in the form of a Report to the legislature of his native state, his Notes on the Iroquois, or Contributions to the Statistics, Aboriginal History, and General Ethnology of Western New-York.