least so we are told by the newspapers, which, always excepting the individuals themselves, are the worst imaginable authority) to go to Italy while his second daughter improves herself in music. Fanny, we suspect, has gained more notes in America than her sister will acquire in any part of Europe, just yet. We hear, however, that she is a most promising girl. What a happy family!-the one daughter so admirably promising, and the other so admirably performing,-nothing more can

be wished.

It has been suggested that Miss Kemble should take leave of the English stage,-nipped in the bud by matrimony,-by giving a course of her popular characters. We trust she will do so; and we trust, moreover, that her father will not take himself away from our stage, where, and we speak it with perfect sincerity, at this moment, he has no equal.

ST.

WATERING PLACES HERNE BAY - MARGATE HASTINGS LEONARD'S-BEULAH SPA.-We last month noticed the extraordinary capriciousness of public taste as regards public amusements; nothing can be more curious than its whimsicality as relates to watering-places. It appears that this year every possible facility that steam can afford having been given to the intercourse between it and the metropolis, Margate, the hitherto cheap and nasty, and exclusively popular resort of the cocknies, has been comparatively deserted. So it is; the mind wants excitement-in love, or any other less important pursuit, a few obstacles, and a little difficulty, increase our anxiety to obtain the object.

When there was a difficulty in getting to Margate, Margate was the place for all the dear dirty folks who, like their own table-cloths, wanted washing only once a-week; and the deputies' wives, and the deputies themselves, and the violet-backed common councilmen, and the furredrobed liverymen, and their rosy-cheeked ladies raved about Margate: the difficulties were smoothed away, and then for a year or two the very facilities were novelties; and so it went on, till at last the violets, and the furs, and all the rest of them, suggested, according to the rule of three, that if it were so easy to go to Margate in such a time, it would be just as easy to go to some other place much farther off in so much more time; and "Besides that," says the wife of the Newgate-street salesman, or the Leadenhall butcher, "everybody can go to Margate now ;-it is so cheap, and so easy" and accordingly Margate is voted vulgar, even by the gentlemen of the second table, and nobody who is anybody ever goes there.

Some innocent people have taken advantage of this change of feeling, and have endeavoured to make a watering-place of a thing in a nook called "Herne Bay;" and have stuck out a pier like a comb into what, with a great deal of good-nature, is considered the sea; and here they have donkeys-besides the visiters, and a hotel, and half-a-dozen wretched holes of houses, for which they charge the price of lodgings in Grosvenor Street or Park Lane. To be sure, as contrasted with that most odious of swamps, Southend, where, to get a sight of day, you are obliged to climb to a row of houses, where you are repaid with little else than the smell of the mud which you have luckily escaped,-Herne Bay, they say, is a paradise; but it is, after all, a fool's paradise, as the speculators in land will find to their cost.

Brighton, owing to the admirable arrangement of the coaches, and the improvement and curtailment of the road, stands pre-eminent. There, ugly, frightfully ugly as the place is in itself,-are air, and sea, and sunshine, all pure; and in winter (for in summer, when our grandmothers patronized it, it is odious) it affords to the healthy and the invalid everything that can be desired. No change of season is there perceptible; for how should the fall of the leaf afflict us where there is not a tree to be seen?

Hastings is a sort of rabbit-warren: somebody has called it a row of houses in a fives court. It is an odious hole in hot weather; and nobody goes to it when it is cold. Its neighbour, St. Leonard's, appears, like another Venus, to have sprung from the sea in full-matured beauty at a leap. Mr. Burton, who is the founder of this flourishing town, (for so it has become,) seems as if he had served a piece of the Regent's Park'as butter-sellers treat a piece of butter,-clapped it up between two wooden paddles all entire, and popped it down at Bulverhithe, or whatever the hamlet is called which he selected for his enterprize. It is truly beautiful, and from the sea has a most imposing effect. Whether the tavern-bills in this place possess a similar character,

"Those best can tell who feel them most."

Eastbourne is delightful in its way. The sea-houses, as long as they stand, will be charming: but some fine night they will be either blown down or washed away. All the rest of the place is detestable. But none of these once favourite receptacles have been blest by violent overflows —at least, of visiters-this year. No;-my lord and my lady, and my lordling and my ladyling, all go abroad: so must the tag-rag and bobtail; for those who most affect to despise the nobility invariably try most assiduously to imitate them; and all the odd shillings and sixpences out of the till have gone to afford the interesting Dolly or the pathetic Patty a trip to Brussels, a peep at Antwerp, the jouissance of Calais fair, or the delights of a fête at Boulogne.

In revenge for this, a gentleman of the name of Smith, who constantly walk, about in company with a black cane, like that of Simpson of Vauxhall, only on a smaller scale, has astounded the world with the splendours of the Beulah Spa, where all the population of civilized London go to drink water; which water, we are weak enough to believe, is poured into a sort of puddle every morning from some well-regulated recipe of an experienced chemist. The thing under which it is secreted is very like a beehive, and about three times the size of those in which the industrious honey-makers live.

It is a pretty place-when you are out of it; when you are in it you are very much in the position of a beef-steak in a giblet-pie,-perhaps our readers have heard of the dish,-we mean at the bottom; and when the valley gets pretty-that is to say, when the trees grow upyou might as well be an owl in an ivy-bush, or acting Jack in the Green on May-day, as in the middle of it. However, seriously speaking, it is quite worth going to, even if it were for nothing but the pleasure of getting away from it. No less than two thousand people paid a shilling a-head for admission in one day last year to the beauties of this most popular garden.

In our Commentary of last month, it became our duty to notice the

loss of the Amphitrite convict-ship, which occurred, as it appears by the testimony of the surviving sailors, through the weakness of the surgeon and the pride of his wife, who, by the way, was going out with him without permission. This month we have to notice a case, which, if not involving so great a loss of human life, is characterized by quite as much ignorance or carelessness, and by some acts of atrocity, almost unparalleled in history-we mean as relate to the Earl of Wemyss smack.

Of the criminalities alleged against the man Reeve, who has been committed to Norwich Castle to take his trial, we have no intention to speak; for two reasons, one, because, pending a legal investigation, it would appear unfair to add anything to what is generally known on the subject likely to prejudice the case; and the other, because we consider the felonious part of the affair infinitely less culpable in the scale of enormities, than the besotted callousness which left eleven innocent women and children to perish at a moment when there were but eighteen inches water under the bow of the vessel within two hundred yards of the shore, which gradually shelved to a place of perfect security.

These unhappy persons were told by the master of the smack to get into the upper berths, and they would be quite safe; that the tide was ebbing, and that in an hour it would be so dry round the vessel, that they would be able to walk on shore without wetting their feet. Dissuaded from immediate escape at the hazard of damping their shoes, these unhappy victims betook themselves to these upper berths, and lay there waiting for the water to decrease; and the master of the smack on deck, who could see, of course, what effect the time had produced on the tide, permitted them to remain there, although he found that instead of ebbing the tide was flowing.

But this is not the worst part of the history: the passengers, male passengers, huddled themselves on the companion stairs, where they were standing when a sea broke over the smack, and, breaking through the cabin sky-light, swamped the cabin; to what extent, the reader will understand by reading a letter which has been published by one of these passengers, in which he says, that after the sea had struck the skylight, he looked into the cabin, and that Mrs. Cormack (who was in one of the upper berths) held up her child to him and shook her head. Is it not clear that if, instead of acquiescing in her melancholy presentiment of death, these gentlemen had rushed into the cabin and hauled the helpless and frightened women out, that they could all have been preserved? Instead of that, these gentlemen were of such delicate tastes and fine feelings, that because it was the ladies' cabin, and some of the ladies were partly undressed, they were afraid or ashamed of taking the liberty of saving their lives! There they stood, till sea after sea burst over the broken sky-lights, each worse than the preceding one, as the tide rose, until the delicate gentlemen left their snuggery and got forward; whence they, the master and the crew, all got safe on shore, as soon as a boat could pull off to them.

The superfine gentility of the gentlemen passengers, however, might in a certain degree have been excited by that love of self which is inherent in the majority of human beings; they saved themselves: and as they were, as the sailors say, "only passengers," they were not, in point of fact, responsible for any one's safety except their own; but that the captain, wholly engrossed by the duty, which we admit to be a very important

one, of saving his vessel, should totally have forgotten the helpless and terrified women under his charge, seems almost inconceivable. It is clear he was in error about the tide; but it is also clear that he must very soon have discovered that error; and if he had discovered it before there were three feet water on the land side of the smack, he could have saved every one of his passengers by handing them over the side, and letting his men wade with them on their shoulders to the shore. The fact is, that he believed them to be safe and out of the way, and expected that the smack would float at the next high water; and the unexpected accident of the sea striking her, which ought to have been anticipated and provided against, by either battening in the sky-lights or covering them with tarpaulins, put an end to his scheme.

The strongest proof of the needlessness of this waste of life is to be found in the fact, that, before the ladies took to the berths, there were but eighteen inches water round the vessel, and that, after they were all drowned, a cart was driven alongside the vessel, and these yet warm bodies outraged in their removal beyond precedent-were placed in it for removal to the church; the same cart and the same horses, it is quite clear, might have conveyed them to the dry land while they were alive and in safety.

We trust that the trumpery six-and-eightpenny feeling of human nature will not predominate in this affair, and that the paltry vengeance upon the supposed stealers of rings and reticules will not supersede the infinitely more just and noble indignation which every one must feel at the conduct of the master of the vessel, and that a question of murder, which might fairly arise out of his conduct, may not be stifled by the punishment of petty larceny, committed by an amateur wrecker, who had nothing whatever to do with the original cause of the mischief and misery.

The details of the unexpected and happy return of Captain Ross and his adventurous companions will be found in another part of our Number; it deserves a few words in our department, because, as it appears to us, Captain Ross, in his last expedition, has done what is the next best thing to succeeding in establishing the existence of a north-west passage that of establishing its non-entity-he has not only saved himself and his colleagues, but the lives of many others who doubtlessly would have made new attempts for the purpose of completing the discovery, if the gallant captain had not so completely extinguished the hopes of their enterprising spirits. Captain Ross and his nephew must, to be sure, have felt not a little gratified, when dining at Windsor with our gracious king, by comparing his situation with that in which he was placed a year or two years before on the corresponding day of the month. Of course, we shall have an account of his proceedings during his protracted absence published, which cannot fail to be highly interesting to his countrymen.

The most remarkable feature of our domestic politics during the month is the openly avowed determination on the part of the people not to pay the assessed taxes-a determination fraught, as it must be evident to the meanest capacity, with the most serious consequences, and one at which these popular orators and legislators seem to have arrived without the slightest reason.

In party politics, men providentially and naturally differ; some men

extol, while others others decry the present ministry. We have no political feeling one way or another, but a general desire and disposition to uphold the constitution and the state. In a ship, a mutiny may arise upon a question of destination; and those who dissent from the majority may have some hidden interested motive for wishing the vessel to go to Odessa, while the others rigidly maintain the original intention of steering for Ancona.

It may be, that this very difference of opinion is caused without any sinister intention, but merely upon a different view of the advantages of the probable results of one or the other course; and these bickerings and dissensions are only to be put down by the force of the authority which is delegated to the captain;-but, let the storm lower-let the gale rise and the sea swell-all minor differences upon the point of whither the ship is to go, merge at once in the unanimous effort to keep her afloat, and secure her against the effects of the storm, and save her from wreck and destruction. So with the true patriot, whatever his private opinion of the individuals at the helm of the state may be, and however much he may differ with them on points of duty or discipline, the moment a storm threatens to overwhelm the country, he abandons all party feeling, and lends his aid to the preservation of her best interests and her valuable institutions.

It may be true that the people who now refuse to pay taxes are disappointed, because the performance of ministers has not equalled their promises; but they ought to recollect that all great changes require time to effect them,-at least, if they are to be of any permanent service, and that it is not a question of promise or pledge which ought to invole an abolition of imposts which are actually and absolutely essential to the existence of the country as a nation.

Now, it is clear that whatever opinion the anti-tax people have formed of the present ministry, they are wrong in their facts;-they say that the assessed taxes were war-taxes, and, therefore, they will not pay them in time of peace; this is gratuitous nonsense: they have paid them for seventeen years in time of peace, and there is no reason upon earth why they should be repealed now more than there was four, seven, or ten years since; the action upon the public mind has been produced, not by this great discovery about peace or war, but because the people are disappointed by the effects of the Reform Bill, which, as these very orators tell us, has reduced trade in the metropolis to such a state of depression that they cannot continue to pay the taxes.

We suspect, although we are ready to admit that the extensive emigration of persons of rank and property must considerably affect the metropolitan tradesmen, that the shopkeepers of the present day are as well off as any class of the community: but whether they are or are not, it is clear that, if they choose to refuse their share of contributions to the exigencies of the state, they can claim no share of its protection: and what then? They weaken the arm of the law which protects their property, Might will overcome Right, and the whole country will present one extended scene of anarchy and confusion..

It is quite a mistaken idea to suppose that injuring a government is the way to produce content and comfort. Look at Belgium,-in consequence of the revolution in that country, trade is absolutely dead; look at all the countries where the people have turned round upon their