entire disappearance of the substances engulfed, that a chasm opened and closed again. Yet in adopting this latter hypothesis, we must suppose that the upper part of the chasm, to the depth of one hundred fathoms, remained open after the shock. According to the observations made at Lisbon, in 1837, by Mr. Sharpe, the destroying effects of this earthquake were confined to the tertiary strata, and were most violent on the blue clay, on which the lower part of the city is constructed. Not a building, he says, on the secondary limestone or the basalt was injured.

The great area over which this Lisbon earthquake extended, is very remarkable. The movement was most violent in Spain, Portugal, and the north of Africa; but nearly the whole of Europe, and even the West Indies, felt the shock on the same day. A seaport called St. Ubes, about twenty miles south of Lisbon, was engulfed. At Algiers and Fez, in Africa, the agitation of the earth was equally violent; and at the distance of eight leagues from Morocco, a village with the inhabitants, to the number of about eight or ten thousand persons, together with all their cattle, were swallowed up. Soon after, the earth closed again over them.

The shock was felt at sea, on the deck of a ship to the west of Lisbon and produced very much the same sensation as on dry land. Off St. Lucar, the captain of the ship Nancy felt his vessel so violently shaken, that he thought she had struck the ground, but, on heaving the lead, found a great depth of water. Captain Clark, from Denia, in latitude 36° 24' N., between nine and ten in the morning, had his ship shaken and strained as if she had struck upon a rock. Another ship, forty leagues west of St. Vincent, experienced so violent a concussion, that the men were thrown a foot and a half perpendicularly up from the deck. In Antigua and Barbadoes, as also in Norway, Sweden, Germany, Holland, Corsica, Switzerland, and Italy, tremors and slight oscillations of the ground were felt. The agitation of lakes, rivers, and springs in Great Britain was remarkable. At Loch Lomond,

in Scotland, for example, the water, without the least apparent cause, rose against its banks, and then subsided below its usual level. The greatest perpendicular height of this swell was two feet four inches. It is said that the movement of this earthquake was undulatory, and that it travelled at the rate of twenty miles a minute. A great wave swept over the coast of Spain, and is said to have been sixty feet high at Cadiz. At Tangier, in Africa, it rose and fell eighteen times on the coast; at Funchal, in Madeira, it rose full fifteen feet perpendicular above high-water mark, although the tide, which ebbs and flows there seven feet, was then at half-ebb. Besides entering the city and committing great havoc, it overflowed other seaports in the island. At Kinsale, in Ireland, a body of water rushed into the harbour, whirled round several vessels, and poured into the market-place.

It was before stated that the sea first retired at Lisbon; and this retreat of the ocean from the shore at the commencement of an earthquake, and its subsequent return in a violent wave, is a common occurrence. In order to account for the phenomenon, Michell imagined a subsidence at the bottom of the sea from the giving way of the roof of some cavity, in consequence of a vacuum produced by the condensation of steam. Such condensation, he observes, might be the first effect of the introduction of a large body of water into fissures and cavities already filled with steam, before there had been sufficient time for the heat of the incandescent lava to turn so large a supply of water into steam, which, being soon accomplished, causes a greater explosion.

Lyell.

THE BROWNS.

The Browns have become illustrious by the pen of Thackeray and the pencil of Doyle, within the memory of the young gentlemen who are now matriculating a the universities. Notwithstanding the well-merited but

late fame which has fallen upon them, any one at all acquainted with the family must feel that much has yet to be written and said before the British nation will be properly sensible of how much of its greatness it owes to the Browns. For centuries, in their quiet, dogged, home-spun way, they have been subduing the earth in most English counties, and leaving their mark in American forests and Australian uplands. Wherever the fleets and armies of England have won renown, there stalwart sons of the Browns have done yeomen's work. With the yew-bow and cloth-yard shaft at Cressy and Agincourt-with the brown bill and pike under the brave Lord Willoughby-with culverin and demi-culverin against Spaniards and Dutchmen-with hand-grenade and sabre, and musket and bayonet under Rodney and St. Vincent, Wolfe and Moore, Nelson and Wellington, they have carried their lives in their hands; getting hard knocks and hard work in plenty, which was on the whole what they looked for, and the best thing for them and little praise or pudding, which indeed they, and most of us, are better without. Talbots and Stanleys, St. Maurs and such-like folk, have led armies and made laws time out of mind; but those noble families would be somewhat astounded-if the accounts ever came to be fairly taken-to find how small their work for England has been by the side of the Browns. "Tom Brown's School-days."

WAT TYLER.

The government of England under Richard the Second wanted money; accordingly, a certain tax, called the Poll Tax, which had originated in the last reign, was ordered to be levied on the people. This was a tax on every person in the kingdom, male and female, above the age of fourteen, of three groats, or three fourpenny pieces a year. Clergymen were charged more, and only beggars were exempted.

The people of Essex rose against the poll-tax, and, being severely handled by the government officers, killed some of them. At this very time, one of the tax collectors going his round from house to house, at Dartford, in Kent, came to the cottage of one Wat, a tiler by trade, and claimed the tax upon his daughter. Her mother, who was at home, declared that she was under the age of fourteen; upon that the collector behaved in a savage way, and brutally insulted Wat Tyler's daughter. The daughter screamed, the mother screamed; Wat the Tiler, who was at work not far off, ran to the spot and enraged at the treatment which his daughter had suffered, struck the collector dead at a blow. Instantly the people of the town uprose as one man. They made Wat Tyler their leader, and joined with the people of Essex, who were in arms under a priest called Jack Straw; they took out of Maidstone prison another priest, called John Ball, and gathering in numbers as they went along, advanced in a great confused army of poor men, to Blackheath. It is said, that they wanted to abolish all property, and to declare all men equal. I do not think this very likely, because they stopped the travellers upon the road, and made them swear to be true to King Richard and the people. Nor were they at all disposed to injure those who had done them no harm merely because they were of high station; for the King's mother, who had to pass through their camps at Blackheath, on her way to her young son, lying for safety in the Tower of London, had merely to kiss a few dirty-faced roughbearded men, who were noisily fond of royalty, in order to get away.

The following day the whole mass marched on to London Bridge. There was a drawbridge in the middle, which William Walworth, the Mayor, caused to be raised, to prevent their coming into the City; but they soon terrified the citizens into lowering it again, and spread themselves with great uproar over the streets. They broke open the prisons, they burnt the papers in Lambeth Palace, they destroyed

the Duke of Lancaster's Palace, the Savoy in the Strand said to be the most beautiful and splendid in England-they set fire to the books and documents in the Temple, and made a great riot. Many of these outrages were committed in drunkenness, since those citizens who had well-filled cellars were only too glad to throw them open to save the rest of their property; but even the drunken rioters were very careful to steal nothing. They were so angry with one man, who was seen to take a silver cup at the Savoy Palace and put it in his breast, that they drowned him in the river, cup and all. The young king had been taken out to treat with them before they committed these excesses, but he and the people about him were so frightened by the riotous shouts, that they got back to the Tower in the best way they could. This made the insurgents bolder, so they went on rioting away, striking off the heads of those who did not at a moment's notice declare for King Richard and the people- and killing as many of the unpopular persons whom they supposed to be their enemies, as they could by any means lay hold of. In this manner they passed one very violent day, and then proclamation was made that the King would meet them at Mile-end, and grant their requests. The rioters went to Mile-end, to the number of sixty thousand, and there the King met them. To him the rioters peaceably proposed four conditions:-First, that neither they nor their children, nor any coming after them, should be made slaves any more. Secondly, that the rent of land should be fixed at a certain price in money, instead of being paid. in service. Thirdly, that they should have liberty to buy and sell in all markets and public places like other free men. Fourthly, that they should be pardoned for past offences. Heaven knows, there was nothing very unreasonable in these proposals. The young king deceitfully pretended to think so, and kept thirty clerks up all night writing out a Charter accordingly. Now, Wat Tyler himself wanted more than this. He wanted the entire abolition of the Forest Laws. He was not at Mile-end with the