into fish-stores; the disjecta membra of the Propyle and the Parthenon have been converted into hovels; and, but for the eloquent dissuasions of a European, the stately and impressive monuments of Luxor and Cheops would long ago have been metamorphosed by Mehemet Ali into materials for a canal. The curiosities of the Royal Burg Museum of Nuremberg a collection embracing the accumulations of centuries - have been knocked down to the highest bidder by the auctioneer's hammer; and the leaning tower of Pisa, one of the memorable " seven wonders of the world," at the picture of which in our school geography we once gazed with childish astonishment, is to be sold, or has been sold, by lottery. Travel, robbed of all its difficulties and dangers, is robbed also of its excitement and charm. A railway is projected to the top of the Jungfrau; the shrill whistle of the locomotive is already heard from Jaffa to Jerusalem; a line of steamboats will soon be running on the Sea of Galilee, also one of horsecars from Cairo to the Pyramids; and an elevator (horresco referens!) will take the modern effeminate traveller to the top of those once mysterious and awe-inspiring but now vulgarized piles. As to poetry, we see its doom foretold in the speculative thought, the subjective idiosyncrasies, the metaphysical analyses, the sphinxian riddles, and the dreamy monologues and parentheses of the over-intellectual and self-conscious Robert Browning. The days of the "Tempest" and "Midsummer Night's Dream" have fled, never to return. As Dion Boucicault observed some time ago in one of his felicitous contributions to the North American Review: "The whole world is plotted out and turned into real estate. The Island of Prospero is a thriving settlement; and if Rosalind should trespass into the

forest of Ardennes, a sturdy keeper wonld take her into

custody."

Ptyalism.

AMONG the offences against "the linen decencies" of society, one of the most common in this country is the practice of spit, spit, spitting, which is so rife among smokers, snuffers, and chewers, especially in the South and the West. The subject is not a very dignified one, yet Henry Ward Beecher did not disdain some years ago to write against the practice, and even to denounce it from the pulpit. Willis Gaylord Clark, the accomplished poet and essayist, also wrote a vigorous and characteristic paper on "American Ptyalism." As a people, we Americans have often provoked the sarcasm of foreigners by this habit; and spit as we may at the exaggerations of travelling cockneys and cosmopolitan old women of both sexes, it must be confessed that we are the most salivating nation on the globe.

Whether the corporeal juices are more abundant in the Yankee than in the Englishman, Frenchman, German, etc., we know not; but we do know that the practice is a filthy one, and we wonder that persons who regard themselves as gentlemen, and who are scrupulously delicate and cleanly in other respects, should addict themselves to it. It is perhaps folly to hope for a reformation so long as the Virginia weed retains its despotism over the nation; yet it is enough to make Nestor himself "show his teeth i' the way of smile" to hear the frequent eloquent declamations on woman's influence, and especially on the chivalrous devotion, the profound homage shown to her in this country, considering that with all her charms she cannot win away her worshipper from the witchery of tobacco. Think

of the disagreeable sensations, the nausea, and sickness even which she is made to experience by her professed adorer through the inhaling of cigar-smoke on the street, in the horse-car, and even in her own home! Think of a man's pretending to love his wife who compels her, whenever she would kiss him, to place her chaste, pouting lips, "like two young rose-leaves torn," in contact with what by courtesy may be called the mouth of a man, but in reality is nothing better than a damp tobacco-box!

While we thus acknowledge a lack of refinement, in one particular, in a considerable class of Americans, we must at the same time express our belief that among all the authors of this country, and a fortiori among all the poets, not one could be found who would spit out his indignation upon an offender, fancied or real, in such abuse as that which Robert Browning wreaked upon verse recently in the "London Athenæum." Mr. Fitzgerald, an English author, having thanked God in a book of his that "we should have no more Aurora Leighs," Mr. Browning chose to misrepresent him as saying that he thanked God that Mrs. Browning was dead (an utterly different thing), and wrote, after half-a-dozen lines introducing the misstatement, the following:

"Ay, dead! and were yourself alive, good Fitz,
How to return you thanks would task my wits.

Kicking you seems the common lot of curs,

While more appropriate greeting lends you grace;
Surely to spit there glorifies your face, -

Spitting from lips once sanctified by hers!"

Rage is not nice in its choice of language; but we doubt if the rage of any other bard or bardling in ancient or in modern times, irritabile genus though Horace confesses

the race to be, ever before was so impotently coarse in its manifestation, labored under such an incapacity to express itself, descended to such a depth of vulgarity and bathos, or made such havoc of syntax, as does the wrath of the sphinxian author of "Sordello" in this instance. All his ice-cold metaphysical conceits, mysticism, affectation, obscurity, and utter incomprehensibility are excusable in comparison.

The intimation of Mr. Browning that he would spit in the face of "good Fitz" but for the unlucky circumstance that he would thus glorify it, suggests the question whether such a mode of expressing resentment is ever justifiable. If it ever be so (which we do not believe), it must be when, under circumstances of extreme exasperation, a man would express toward some brute in human form, some hateful oppressor of the weak or other miscreant, the utmost loathing, scorn, and defiance of which a human being is capable. Bulwer, in his "England and the English," speaks of a creature of this sort, under the name of Sneak (onē Westmacott, a common libeller), in this indignant phrase: "His soul rots in his profession, and you spit when you hear his name!" Who does not instinctively pardonnay, almost feel impressed with a sense of grandeur in Rebecca's answer in "Ivanhoe," when the lustful Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert invades her in her tower to compass her dishonor? Standing on the parapet, ready to spring from that dizzy height into the courtyard below, she exclaims to the craven knight, with a look of withering, ineffable contempt: "I spit at thee, I defy thee! Thanks to him who reared this dizzy tower so high, I fear thee not. Advance one step nearer my person, and I will plunge, to be crushed out of the very form of humanity,

into the deep beneath!" One can almost hear the scornful saliva darting from the curled lips of the Jewess, and cannot but hope that it may lodge on the brazen image of

her enemy.

Rebecca is not the first woman who is recorded as having vented her scorn in this way. When Ravenna, the capital of Italy, was surrendered after a long siege, in a. D. 538, by Vitiges, the Gothic commander, to Belisarius, who marched in triumph through the streets of the city, the wives of the tall and robust Goths were so indignant that they spat in the faces of their husbands, sons, and brothers, and bitterly reproached them for betraying their dominion and freedom to these enemies, enemies both contemp

tible in their numbers and diminutive in their stature.

In conclusion, we ask, Does not a man who is addicted to the practice on which we have commented, deserve to be spitted by an editor's pen; and can he, upon the most charitable construction of the laws of etiquette, expect-torate at this day as a gentleman?

A Tall Man's

THE inconveniences of an immoderately Troubles. tall stature we have often heard discoursed upon by men whose altitude towered aloft, but never more pathetically than by an aged bachelor friend of ours who stands six-feet-four in his "stocking-feet." It is to this melancholy" fixed fact" this sad, insuperable calamity that overtook him between the ages of fourteen and twentythat he attributes his wretched condition of single blessedFour times has he fallen on his knees (the NE plus ultra of humble affection), and offered himself to as many chosen ones of his heart! Four times has he been jeeringly refused!

ness.