A MONUMENTAL obelisk has been erected at Krieblowitz, in Austria, to the memory of Blucher; it is composed of massive blocks of granite, quarried in the neighborhood. It contains the ashes of the marshal, and is ornamented with a half-length medallion portrait of him. The oldest soldiers of the Blucher hussar regiment are to have the honor of guarding the remains of the veteran warrior.

Mr. Healy, the artist, after spending a few weeks in this city, left for Europe recently with the view of remaining there some years, and prosecuting his profession, in which he has already won for himself the highest reputation. M. Friederich, a sculptor of Strasburgh, has resolved-so say the French papers-to erect a statue of red mountain stone in honor of St. Bernard de Menton, founder of the well-known hospital on the pass which bears his name. is to stand near the hospital, and will be the most elevated monument in Europe.

It

The death of the celebrated landscape painter, Callamme, is announced from Geneva. Though he had been ill for a long period, he did not permit the disease from which he suffered entirely to suspend the efforts of his pencil. He was one of the most admirable landscape painters of the age; his Forest in a Storm," and his "Ruins of Pæstum," are acknowledged by all who have seen them to be consummate master-pieces of art. Callamme was born in Neufchatel, but early took up his residence in Geneva, where he founded a school of painting.

The city of Bremen is about to send a block of marble for the Washington Monument. It ⚫ will bear the inscription, "To Washington, the great, the good, the last, from friendly Bre

men.

The first painter of France at the present day is Conture. He has just finished a great picture ordered by Cavaignac when at the head of the Republic. Its subject is Enlistment for the Defense of France. It contains some eighty figures, and is described as full of life, power, energy, and beauty of drawing, so far as much to excel all recent productions of French art. Nothing can be conceived more replete with enthusiasm than its groups rushing to the altar of the country, its women consecrating their children to the fatherland, and its men and youths approaching in sober earnestness to offer their lives for their native France.

The eminent Parisian artist Decamps, though not yet sixty, has abandoned his profession, in order not to injure his fame by producing inferior works as he advances in life. The sketches, cartoons, pictures, and other objects in his studio, brought about $20,000 at auction; the sale cccupied three days.

A portrait of the Emperor Napoleon III., in imperial costume, has recently been executed by M. David; the sceptre, instead of bearing an eagle as heretofore, has a statue of Charlemagne.

It is said that a government appropriation of eighty thousand francs is to be made for an equestrian statue of Napoleon I., which will figure in the Crystal Palace of the Champs d'Elysees, in imitation of Victoria's statue at the Crystal Palace of Hyde Park. The Minister of

the Interior has already sent out a circular to the Departments, sounding the note of preparation for the World's Fair in 1855.

In 1850, says the Randolph Whig, John H. Fairbanks, Esq., of this county, took out a patent for an invention calculated to enable any man who can move his hands rapidly in a vertical direction to report a speaker in full, with ease and certainty. It is operated by keys, which, by their movement connected with stenographic type, imprint a new alphabet of shorthand characters upon the paper. The alphabet contains only five elementary characters, and by combinations of these, all the other letters, together with numerous word-signs, are made. The fingers and thumb of one hand are sufficient to operate five keys, which constitute the alphabet, and to make innumerable changes upon the same, so that one hand can write one row of signs upon the paper, while another set of five keys under the other hand can, at the same time, be made to write another one. It is a curious and ingenious contrivance, and it is certain that it will write very rapidly in the hands of one who knows the alphabet perfectly and can operate the keys with facility. Messrs. Fairbanks & How have now in process of construction an improvement upon this invention, calculated to write out a speech in Roman characters, instead of short-hand. For sketch-reporting this would be admirable, as the "copy" would be more complete and easier for the compositor.

Mr. H. K. Browne, of Brooklyn, has executed, The statue is ten and a half feet high, The in bronze, a colossal figure of De Witt Clinton. costume is that of a gentleman fifty years ago. Over the left shoulder is thrown a cloak.

This

is held by the arm below, from which it depends

in graceful folds. The right shoulder and arm are thus left free, as if for action or gesture. The ample robe, while it leaves a sufficiency of the person visible, supplies or conceals the meagerness of our modern garb. Without departure from the truth, it gives to the figure a classic air-not inferior in grace and dignity to the Roman toga. The attitude is easy and dignified. The likeness is approved by persons who well knew the original. The pedestal, which is about as high as the statue itself, is also of

bronze. Its cornices are adorned with vines

and oak leaves. The two principal sides are covered with bass-reliefs. The cost is estimated at about $20,000.

Clark Mills has purchased a site for an American School of Design and Art, at the junction of the Anacesta and Potomac rivers. There he intends to mold and cast his equestrian statue of Washington; also, a group of statuary, representing two American Indians hunting the buffalo.

THE California Academy of Natural Sciences recently held their second meeting. A constitution was adopted and committees appointed to draft by-laws, an address setting forth the objects of the society, and an addendum giving directions for preparations of specimens to be donated to the institution. This society is engaged in spreading to the world a knowledge of the natural history and resources in California. The field of the State is new, almost untrodden by the naturalist. The society will act as a center, around which the facts of great interest to the scientific world will gather.

It has long been known to physiologists that certain coloring matters, if administered to animals along with their food, possessed the property of entering into the system and tinging the bones. In this way the bones of swine have been tinged purple by madder, and instances are on record of other animals being similarly affected. No attempt, however, was made to turn this beautiful discovery to account until lately, when M. Roulin, of France, speculated on what might have been the consequences of administering colored articles of food to silkworms just before spinning their cocoons. His first experiments were conducted with indigo, which he mixed in certain proportions with the mulberry leaves serving the worms for food. The result of this treatment was successful-he obtained blue cocoons. Prosecuting still further his experiments, he sought a red coloring matter capable of being eaten by the silk worms without injury resulting. He had some difficulty to find such a coloring matter at first, but eventually alighted on the Bignonia chica. Small portions of this plant having been added to the mulberry leaves, the silkworms consumed the mixture, and produced red-colored silk. In this manner the experimenter, who is still prosecuting his researches, hopes to obtain silk as secreted by the worm of many other colors.

The Northern Bee, a German paper published in Prussia, states that a Mr. Nobel, of Russia, exhihited an improvement on Ericsson's machine, which was kept in motion for some time to the great satisfaction of all the spectators, among whom was the Grand Duke Constantine. The improvement consists in putting the cylinders inside of each other, whereas Ericsson puts the supply cylinders on top of the working cylinders.

M. Rabinet, an eminent French astronomer, and member of the Academy of Sciences, in an article recently published, has given some interesting details respecting the comet which is expected to make its appearance about the year 1856:"This comet is one of the grandest of which historians make mention. Its period

of revolution is about three hundred years. It was seen in the years 104, 392, 683, 975, 1264, and the last time in 1556. Astronomers agreed in predicting its return in 1848, but it failed to appear. Already the observatories begin to be alarmed for the fate of their beautiful wandering star. Sir John Herschel himself had put a

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crape upon his telescope, when a learned calculator of Middlebourg, M. Bomme, reassured the astronomical world of the continued existence of the venerable and magnificent comet. Disquieted, as all other astronomers were, by the non-arrival of the comet at the expected time, M. Bomme, aided by the preparatory labors of Mr. Hind, has revised all the calculations, and estimated all the actions of all the planets upon the comet for three hundred years of revolution. The result of this patient labor gives the arrival of the comet in August, 1858, with an uncertainty of two years, more or less; so that, from 1856 to 1860 we may expect the great comet which was the cause of the abdication of the Emperor Charles V. in 1556."

A discovery has been made by Mr. Ira Hill, of Lawrenceburg, Pa., which, to persons having the care of steam-engines, may be valuable, by which the deposition of lime upon steam boilers may be obviated. Two or three shovels of sawdust are thrown into the boiler; after which process he states he never had any difficulty from lime, although using water strongly impregnated with it. He has always found the inside of his boilers as smooth as if just oiled. Whether the lime attaches itself to the floating particles of saw-dust, instead of the boiler, or whether the tannic acid in the oak saw-dust forms a salt with the lime which will not attach itself to iron, remains to be explained. The saw-dust was placed in the boiler for the purpose of stopping a leak. The experiment is cheap and easily tried.

The Fitchburg Reveille states that Mr. Cyrus Baldwin, of Manchester, N. H., the inventor of the bag-loom now used in the Stark Mill Manufactory, has invented two looms of wonderful, construction, which get greater speed with less power. They have entirely a new shuttle motion, so that the shuttle can be stopped without stopping the loom. They do away with the use of cams, levers, treadles, pickers, and racerods, thereby saving seventy-five per cent. of oil used about the looms. What is not less important, they can be used for weaving all kinds of fancy goods, with from one to twenty harnesses.

Judge Burnet, the first president of the Astronomical Society of Cincinnati, and an active member after he was eighty years of age, is dead. He was also president of several other literary and other institutions, and on the nomination of General Lafayette, he was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciencesa very rare compliment. In 1847 he published an octavo volume, of historical interest, called "Notes on the Early Settlement of the Northwestern Territory," containing a vast amount of information on the rise and progress of the State of Ohio.

Two lines of submarine telegraph between France and Algeria are under consideration.

A diamond of beautiful form and the first water, accompanied by a fine sapphire, has been found in Australia, and brought to England by Sir Thomas Mitchell.

history bears on its pages as those of martyrs of liberty, there is not one which justly challenges greater regard from Americans than that of John Hampden. The purity of his life, the integrity of his motives, the solidity of his character, the devotedness of his zeal, commend him as a model republican patriot, while the interest he felt in the American colonies, and the intimate connection VOL. III, No. 2.-H

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the origin of our own free institutions, mark his name as almost our own. American people have not honored his memory as he deserved. Our youth are not made as familiar as they ought to be with his name and history. His memory is not embalmed, as justice requires, along with that of our own Washington.

The great development of the spirit of liberty among the people of England dur

ing the reign of Elizabeth is not properly to be credited to any intention of hers; but was rather the incidental result of her efforts to aggrandize her kingdom by the cultivation of science and literature, the extension of manufactures and commerce, and the general diffusion of intelligence and enterprise. Under such a regimen, aided by a free Bible, the spirit of liberty could not but grow. And when James I. came to the throne, and disgusted and alarmed the people by the arrogance of his claims to be an absolute sovereign, it was impossible but that the spirit of resistance should soon show itself, as what could not brook and would never bear a despot. In his first Parliament he undertook to displace Sir Francis Goodwin, the member who was duly elected for Buckinghamshire; but the House of Commons resisted the interference with their privileges, and, after a severe struggle, established forever their right of judging of the returns of their members. His second Parliament was dissolved for its unanimous vote against the power of the king to impose taxes by his own authority. His third Parliament was dissolved for claiming the right of free discussion of public affairs as "the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance" of the people of England; and sundry of its prominent members, Coke, Phillips, Selden, Pym, and others, were imprisoned. In this Parliament John Hampden made his entrance upon the theater of public life, and though only twenty-seven years old, was admitted at once to the councils of the veteran parliamentary leaders who conducted the great contest for liberty.

John Hampden was the head and representative of an old and wealthy family, and at four years of age inherited large landed estates in Buckinghamshire and the adjacent counties. He was born in 1594, entered Magdalen College at Oxford in 1609, was admitted a student of the Inner Temple in 1613, married in 1619, and at once retired from a life of gayety in London to the quiet pursuits of an educated country gentleman, occupied at once with the care of his estates, the pursuits of literature, and the enjoyment of domestic and social life. Elected to Parliament in 1621, he soon proved himself a man of the highest order of wisdom, integrity, and independence. Lord Nugent says, in his memoir, that "scarcely

was a bill prepared, or an inquiry begun, upon any subject, however remotely affecting any of the three great matters at issue-privilege, religion, or the supplies but he was thought fit to be associated with St. John, Selden, Coke, and Pym, on the committee."

Charles I., on his accession to the throne, undertook to govern according to the absolutist principles of his father. Having tried two Parliaments without being able to persuade them to grant him the large supplies his extravagance required, he undertook to raise money by the device of a forced loan, by which wealthy subjects were required to lend the king for his necessities a sum equal to what would have been his tax if the bill had been passed by Parliament, and those who refused were imprisoned by order of the king. So, then, an attack both upon the property of the people and upon personal liberty required to be firmly resisted at the threshold, and Hampden was one of the first and boldest in refusing submission to the unjust demand, for which he suffered an imprisonment that not only established him inflexibly in his own purposes, but brought him conspicuously before the public as a man not to be subdued by arbitrary power. In the next Parliament, 1628, he assisted in preparing and passing the great

Petition of Right," by which the fundamental principles of English liberty were re-enacted; and then retired to his estates to devote his time to the study of the principles of government, the history of civil wars, and the military art. His religious principles, which were those of the Independents, in opposition both to Presbyterianism and Prelacy, led him also to the maintenance of the rights of conscience, in opposition to all forms of ecclesiastical authority.

For eleven years Charles now ruled without a Parliament, supporting his government by illegal exactions, by the shameless sale of offices and privileges, both civil and ecclesiastical, and by fines and confiscations obtained through subservient courts and the decrees of the despotic Star Chamber, enforced by imprisonments, loss of ears, and other cruelties. He even issued a proclamation making it criminal in the people to speak any more of Parliaments. In 1634 he revived the demand of ship-money, by which, under the pretext of chastising pirates, the towns and coun

ties were required to furnish the king with such and such ships, or, in default thereof, to pay a certain sum of money, to be assessed and collected by the king's officers. Here Hampden resolved to make a stand. The sum demanded of him was thirty-one shillings and sixpence a matter of no amount to him on the score of interest; but the very smallness of the sum served to show that his opposition was directed solely against the principle of the exaction. As Burke said in regard to the resistance of the colonies to the three-penny tax upon tea, "the payment of half twenty shillings, on the principle it was demanded, would have made Hampden a slave." His open refusal to pay the tax brought out the whole power of the king to crush him. The question was carried up to a hearing before the twelve judges of England. The whole kingdom looked on in breathless anxiety, while Hampden stood up with modest firmness, before a packed court, the representative in his own person of a nation's liberties. Lord Clarendon, a supporter of the king, testifies of Hampden that, in this momentous contest, "he grew the argument of all tongues, every man inquiring who and what he was that durst, at his own charge, support the liberty and property of the kingdom, and rescue his country, as he thought, from being made a prey to the court;" and he adds that "his carriage throughout this agitation was with that rare temper and modesty that they who watched him narrowly to find some advantage against his person, to make him less resolute in his course, were compelled to give him a just testimony."

The king, in his eagerness to carry out his own ideas of prerogative, undertook to change the religion of Scotland from Presbyterian to Episcopalian; but the Scotch people would not hold their consciences under the control of human authority, and they broke out in open rebellion. And when he marched an English army to bring them under subjection, he found among the officers and men such a dislike to the service that he was forced to compromise the matter by the Berwick Agreement in 1639, although, with characteristic perfidy, he disowned his own compact as soon as he had returned to London. Necessity then drove him to call a Parliament in hopes of inflaming national animosity against the

Scotch; but he soon found they were more anxious to recover and secure their own liberties than to help the king crush those of Scotland; and when they refused to grant any supplies until their grievances were redressed, he dissolved them in three weeks, and before they had passed a single bill. As Bolingbroke says, "The cup was now full, and this last drop made the waters of bitterness overflow." Such a manifest purpose on the part of the king convinced the leaders of the people that they had nothing left for their liberties but to fight for them. And it is highly probable that, as in the years which preceded our own independence, the more far-seeing clearly foresaw the necessity which was to arise of overthrowing the monarchy itself as the only means of breaking down the infatuation which guided it.

The "Short Parliament" in April, 1640, left the king so embarrassed that he could not get through the year without finding his wheels blocked, so that in November he was driven to summon his last-the famous "Long Parliament”—and run the risk of whatever they might decide in regard to the great questions of public liberty that were in issue. Of this, as of the preceding Parliament, Hampden was a leading member. Lord Clarendon calls him "the pilot that must steer the vessel through the tempest and rocks which threatened it."

He was the head of the committee to impeach Strafford. He pressed through the bill requiring triennial Parliaments. He labored to procure the exclusion of the bishops from the House of Lords; and failing in that, resolved to abolish episcopacy altogether as an institution hostile to liberty. His name was seen much less than his influence was felt, for he was not a forward or frequent speaker in debate. Lord Nugent, in his "Memorial of Hampden," says:—

until near the close of a debate; and then, "His practice was usually to reserve himself having watched its progress, to endeavor to moderate the redundancies of his friends, to weaken the impression produced by his opponents, to confirm the timid, and to reconcile the reluctant. And this he did, according to the testimony of his opponents themselves, with a modesty, gentleness, and apparent diffidence in his own judgment, which generally brought them round to his conclusions."

This is not the place to review the progress of the controversy during the