forth a yet more formidable race-a race which was long the terror of every native power, and which yielded only after many desperate and doubtful struggles to the fortune and genius of England. It was under the reign of Aurungzebe that this wild clan of plunderers first descended from the mountains; and soon after his death, every corner of his wide empire learned to tremble at the mighty name of the Mahrattas. Many fertile viceroyalties were entirely subdued by them. Their dominions stretched across the peninsula from sea to sea. Their captains reigned at Poonah, at Gualior, and Guzerat, in Berar, and in Tanjore.1

MRS. JAMESON.2

THE CHARACTER OF MIRANDA.3

(FROM "CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN," PUBLISHED IN 1832.)

THE character of Miranda resolves itself into the very elements of womanhood. She is beautiful, modest, and tender, and she is these only; they comprise her whole being, external and internal. She is so perfectly unsophisticated, so delicately refined, that she is all but ethereal. Let us imagine any other woman placed beside Miranda,—even one of Shakespeare's own loveliest and sweetest creations, there is not one of them that could sustain the comparison for a moment; not one that would not appear somewhat coarse or artificial when brought into immediate contact with this pure child of nature, this "Eve of an enchanted Paradise."

When, then, has Shakespeare done ?-"O wondrous skill and sweet wit of the man!"-he has removed Miranda far from all comparison with her own sex; he has placed her between the demi-demon of earth and the delicate spirit of air. The next step is into the ideal and supernatural; and the only being who approaches Miranda, with whom she can be contrasted, is Ariel. Beside the subtle essence of this ethereal

(1) "Such prose as this affects us like poetry. The pictures and suggestions might possibly have been gathered together by any other historian; but the artful succession, the perfect sequence, could only have been formed by a fine writer."— Lewes, Fortnightly Review.

(2) Mrs. Jameson's graceful and discriminative manner of treating every subject that she touched is fairly represented in the above extract.

(3) See Shakspere's "Tempest," passim.

sprite, this creature of elemental light and air, that " ran upon the winds, rode the curl'd clouds, and in the colours of the rainbow lived," Miranda herself appears a palpable reality, a woman "breathing thoughtful breath," a woman, walking the earth in her mortal loveliness, with a heart as frail-strung, as passion-touched, as ever fluttered in a female bosom.

I have said that Miranda possesses merely the elementary attributes of womanhood, but each of these stand in her with a distinct and peculiar grace. She resembles nothing upon earth; but do we therefore compare her, in our own minds, with any of those fabled beings with which the fancy of ancient poets peopled the forest depths, the fountain or the ocean ?— oread or dryad fleet, sea-maid or naiad of the stream? We cannot think of them together. Miranda is a consistent, natural, human being. Our impression of her nymph-like beauty, her peerless grace and purity of soul, has a distinct and individual character. Not only is she exquisitely lovely, being what she is, but we are made to feel that she could not possibly be otherwise than as she is pourtrayed. She has never beheld one of her own sex; she has never caught from society one imitated or artificial grace. The impulses which have come to her, in her enchanted solitude, are of heaven and nature, not of the world and its vanities. She has sprung up into beauty beneath the eye of her father, the princely magician; her companions have been the rocks and woods, the many-shaped, manytinted clouds, and the silent stars; her playmates the ocean billows, that stooped their foamy crests and ran rippling to kiss her feet. Ariel and his attendant sprites hovered over her head, ministered duteous to her every wish, and presented before her pageants of beauty and grandeur. The very air, made vocal by her father's art, floated in music around her. If we can pre-suppose such a situation with all its circumstances, do we not behold in the character of Miranda not only the credible but the natural, the necessary results of such a situation? She retains her woman's heart, for that is unalterable and inalienable, as a part of her being; but her deportment, her looks, her language, her thoughts-all these, from the supernatural and poetical circumstances around her, assume a cast of the pure ideal; and to us, who are in the secret of her human and pitying nature, nothing can be more charming and consistent than the effect which she produces upon others, who, never having beheld anything resembling her, approach her as a wonder," as something celestial.

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Contrasted with the impression of her refined and dignified

beauty, and its effect on all beholders, is Miranda's own soft simplicity, her virgin innocence, her total ignorance of the conventional forms and language of society. It is most natural that, in a being thus constituted, the first tears should spring from compassion, "suffering with those that she saw suffer; and that her first sigh should be offered to a love at once fearless and submissive, delicate and fond. She has no taught scruples of honour like Juliet; no coy concealments like Viola; no assumed dignity standing in its own defence. Her bashfulness is less a quality than an instinct; it is like the self-folding of a flower, spontaneous and unconscious. I suppose there is nothing of the kind in poetry equal to the scene between Ferdinand and Miranda. In Ferdinand, who is a noble creature, we have all the chivalrous magnanimity with which man, in a high state of civilisation, disguises his real superiority, and does humble homage to the being of whose destiny he disposes; while Miranda, the mere child of nature, is struck with wonder at her own new emotions. Only conscious of her own weakness as a woman, and ignorant of those usages of society which teach us to dissemble the real passion, and assume (and sometimes abuse) an unreal and transient power, she is equally ready to place her life, her love, her service, beneath his feet.

MRS. SOMERVILLE.'

THE CAUSE OF COLOURS.

(FROM "THE CONNECTION OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES,"
PUBLISHED IN 1834.)

We know of no substance that is either perfectly opaque or perfectly transparent. Even gold may be beaten so thin as to

(1) Mrs. Somerville is not more distinguished by her actual knowledge, than by her admirable manner of setting it forth for the benefit of others. The above passage is only an average specimen of a style which-and this is the great test-perfectly accomplishes its end. Scientific writers seem often to consider themselves independent of the claims of style-forgetting that style, in the proper sense, embraces not only fitness of word and phrase, but also treatment-the presentation of the subject in the best possible manner, so as to impress it adequately on the reader or hearer. Things may be independent of words; but certainly the exposition of things is not. Sir John Herschell, Mrs. Somerville, Lyell, Carpenter, Lewes, Hugh Miller, Tyndall, Huxley, and Ansted, show that grace and power of style are not incompatible with scientific accuracy.

be pervious to light. On the contrary, the clearest crystal, the purest air or water, stops or absorbs its rays when transmitted, and gradually extinguishes them as they penetrate to greater depths. On this account objects cannot be seen at the bottom of very deep water, and many more stars are visible to the naked eye from the tops of mountains than from the valleys. The quantity of light that is incident on any transparent substance is always greater than the sum of the reflected and refracted rays. A small quantity is irregularly reflected in all directions by the imperfections of the polish by which we are enabled to see the surface; but a much greater portion is absorbed by the body. Bodies that reflect all the rays appear white, those that absorb them all seem black; but most substances, after decomposing the white light which falls upon them, reflect some colours and absorb the rest. A violet reflects the violet rays alone, and absorbs the other. Scarlet cloth absorbs almost all the colours except red. Yellow cloth reflects the yellow rays most abundantly, and blue cloth those that are blue. Consequently colour is not a property of matter, but arises from the action of matter upon light. Thus a white riband reflects all the rays; but when dyed red, the particles of the silk acquire the property of reflecting the red rays most abundantly and of absorbing the others. Upon this quality of unequal absorption, the colours of transparent media depend; for they also receive their colour from their power of stopping or absorbing some of the colours of white light, and transmitting others. As, for example, black and red inks, though equally homogeneous, absorb different kinds of rays; and, when exposed to the sun, they become heated in different degrees; while pure water seems to transmit all rays equally, and is not sensibly heated by the passing light of the sun. The rich dark light transmitted by a smalt-blue finger-glass is not a homogeneous colour like the blue or indigo of the spectrum; but is a mixture of all the colours of white light which the glass has not absorbed. The colours absorbed are such as mixed with the blue tint would form white light. When the spectrum of seven colours is viewed through a thin plate of this glass, they are all visible; and, when the plate is very thick, every colour is absorbed between the extreme red and the extreme violet, the interval being perfectly black; but, if the spectrum be viewed through a certain thickness of the glass intermediate between the two, it will be found that the middle of the red space, the whole of the orange, a great part of the green, a considerable part of the blue, a little of the indigo, and a very little

of the violet, vanish, being absorbed by the blue glass, and that the yellow rays occupy a larger space, covering part of that formerly occupied by the orange on one side, and by the green on the other. So that the blue glass absorbs the red light, which, when mixed with the yellow, constitutes orange; and also absorbs the blue light, which, when mixed with the yellow, forms the part of the green space next to the yellow. Hence, by absorption, green light is decomposed into yellow and blue, and orange light into yellow and red. Consequently the orange and green rays, though incapable of decomposition by refraction, can be resolved by absorption, and actually consist of two different colours possessing the same degree of refrangibility. Difference of colour, therefore, is not a test of difference of refrangibility, and the conclusion deduced by Newton is no longer admissible as a general truth. By this analysis of the spectrum, not only with blue glass, but with a variety of coloured media, Sir David Brewster, so justly celebrated for his optical discoveries, has proved that the solar spectrum consists of three primary colours-red, yellow, and blue, each of which exists throughout its whole extent, but with different degrees of intensity in different parts; and that the superposition of these three produces all the seven hues according as each primary colour is in excess or defect. Since a certain portion of red, yellow, and blue rays constitute white light, the colour of any point of the spectrum may be considered as consisting of the predominating colour at that point mixed with white light. Consequently, by absorbing the excess of any colour at any point of the spectrum above what is necessary to form white light, such white light will appear at that point as never mortal eye looked upon before this experiment, since it possesses the remarkable property of remaining the same after any number of refractions, and of being capable of decomposition by absorption alone.