of the Russian ships in the Euxine, might permit A GIGANTIC CALIFORNIAN EVERGREEN Having broken the Russian line of communication with Moldavia and Bessarabia, we soon enjoy the fruits of the movement. The advanced force under Omer Pacha will be secured,―the Russians remaining in Wallachia become literally entrapped, -a -a vast moral influence will be pro duced among the Molda-Wallachians who have already in many instances risen against the cruel oppressions of their invaders. By placing arms in the hands of these provincialists, we shall be enabled to convert them into useful allies, and with them and the Turks we may effectively garrison the captured fortresses. The Crimea, inhabited by a Tartar race will fall as a corollary to this our first success-and our position in Asia will be freed from anxiety. We have thus intimated what we conceive to UNDER this imposing title the Gardeners' Chro nicle notices a new tree discovered by Mr. Wm. Lobb, well known as the collector of the Messrs. Veitch. This is probably the most magnificent tree of the Californian forests; and the fact of its being discovered, named, and introduced into England before we have heard a word of it in this country, shows how far we are behind England in botanical and arboricultural enterprise. Long ago our government should have sent competent collectors to explore the vast forest of California and Oregon, and bring their treasures to the light of day. Had they done so, this gigantic evergreen might have been known under an American instead of an English name. As it is, however, we be the course most likely to be taken for the rejoice to hear of its introduction. We copy the following account of it from the Gardeners' Chronicle:· distraction and defeat of the Russian forces on the western and northern shores of the Euxine, and we now direct a glance towards the Baltic where our adversary will find his utmost resources necessary for the preservation of his fsets, his forts, and of St. Petersburgh itself. The last we consider to be mainly vulnerable through Finland, a country stated to be fretting against domination;-nor does this seem improbable, for it must be remembered that the Russian tenure of that possession only dates from 1809, and consequently that there must be numbers of men still living who remember their subjugation, and scowl upon their conquerors. The Oesel and Aland Islands will perhaps be the first positions to be taken, but we must look for great sacrifices before the destruction or occupation of such defences as those of Revel, Cronstadt, or Helsingfors can be effected. Of this theatre, however, we take leave with the full conviction that the conduct of our affairs could not be in safer or sterner hands than those of Napier-and in doing so we should feel more at ease, could we reckon upon his being favoured with a meeting at sea by the Russian fleet, although it is said to include in its array no less than twenty-eight sail of the line. Judging however, from the care which has been taken by the Czar to increase the dangers of the Baltic navigation, it would seem to be the design to limit himself to the defence of his positions, when his ships will be in a state of comparative safety. And here we consign ourselves to a firm faith, and the exercise of a patience which will not be abused... *Aland has already been evacuated. · "When the unfortunate Douglas was last in California, he wrote thus in a letter to Sir William Hooker, of a coniferous tree inhabiting that country: But the great beauty of Californian vegetation is a species of Taxodium, which gives the mountains a most peculiar, I was almost going to say awful appearance-something which plainly tells us we are not in Europe. I have repeatedly measured specimens of this tree 270 feet long and 32 feet round at three feet above the ground. Some few I saw upwards of 300 feet high, but none in which the thickness was greater than those which I have instanced.' What was that No seeds or specimens ever reached Europe, although it appears that he possessed tree? both. "The late professor Endlicher referred Douglas' plant to Sequoia, calling it gigantea, and framing his distinctive character upon the representation of a supposed Taxodium sempervirens, figured in Hooker's "Icones," p. 379, from Douglas' last collections. But that plate, although with neither flowers nor fruit, represents beyond all question a branchlet of Abies bracteata. It is therefore evident that no materials exist for determining what Douglas really meant by his “Taxodium,” which may or may not have belonged to that genus, or, as Endlicher conjectured, to Sequoia. But species in natural history cannot be founded upon conjecture. "The other day we received from Mr. Veitch branches and cones of a most remarkable coniferous tree from California, seeds and a living specimen of which had just been brought him by. his excellent collector, Mr. W. Lobb, who, we are happy to say, has returned loaded with fine things. Of that tree Mr. Lobb has furnished the following account: rying off good pater Anchises upon his filial shoulders. And this may very well be true, if it does not grow above two inches in diameter in twenty years, which we believe to be the fact. "At all everts, we have obtained the plant. The seed received by Messrs. Veitch has all the appearance of vitality; and since the tree is hardy and evergreen, it is a prodigious acquisition. But what is its name to be! "This magnificent evergreen tree, from its extraordinary height and large dimensions, may be termed the monarch of the Californian forest. It inhabits a solitary district on the elevated slopes of the Sierra Nivada, near the head waters of the Stanislau and San Antonio rivers, in lat. 38° "Are the plants of Lobb and Douglas identiN., long. 120° 10' W., at an elevation of 5000 feet cal? Possibly no doubt; for Douglas reached from the level of the sea. From eighty to ninety lat. 38 deg. 45 min. N., and therefore was within trees exist, all within the circuit of a mile, and the geographical range of Lobb's discovery. But these varying from 250 feet to 320 feet in height it is quite as possible that he meant some other and from 10 to 20 feet in diameter. Their man- tree, also of gigantic dimensions; and it is hardly ner of growth is much like Sequoia (Taxodium) to be imagined that so experienced a traveller sempervirens, some are solitary, some are in pairs, would have mistaken a tree with the foliage of a while some, and not unfrequently, stand three and Cypress and the cones of a Pine for a Taxodium, four together. A tree recently felled measured and still less for the species of sempervirens. about 300 feet in length, with a diameter, includ- Besides the slenderness of the specimens he saw, ing bark, of 29 feet 2 inches, at five feet from the is greatly at variance with the colossal proportions ground; at eighteen feet from the ground it was of the plant before us. That, at all events, the 14 feet 6 inches through; at one hundred feet latter cannot be regarded as a Sequoia we have from the ground, 14 feet; and at two hundred explained in another column; and we think that feet from the ground, 5 feet 5 inches. The bark no one will differ from us in feeling that the most is of a pale cinnamon brown, and from 12 to 15 appropriate name to be proposed for the most gi. inches in thickness. The branchlets are round, gantic tree which has been revealed to us by somewhat pendant, and resembling a Cypress or modern discovery is that of the greatest of modern Juniper. The leaves are pale grass green; those heroes. Wellington stands as high above his conof the young trees are spreading with a sharp temporaries as the Californian tree above all the acuminate point. The cones are about two and surrounding foresters. Let it then bear hencefora half inhces long, and two inches across at the ward the name of Wellingtonia Gigantea. Emthickest part. The trunk of the tree in ques-perors and kings and princes have their plants tion was perfectly solid, from the sap-wood to and we must not forget to place in the highest the centre; and judging from the number of rank among them our own great warrior. concentric rings, its age has been estimated at 3000 years. The wood is light, soft, and of a reddish color, like Redwood or Taxoidum semNever allow your face to express what your pervirens. Of this vegetable monster, twenty-more the former should smile. The Spartan pocket feels. The more the latter is pinched, the one feet of the bark, from the lower part of the youth would not allow any one to see a wolf was trunk, have been put in the natural form in San gnawing his vitals. So with you, if you cannot Francisco for exhibition; it there forms a spaci- keep the wolf out of your interior, at all events ous carpeted room, and contains a piano, with do not let the world know it. seats for forty persons. On one occasion one hundred and forty children were admitted without inconvenience. An exact representation of this tree, drawn on the spot, is now in the hands of the lithographers, and will be published in a few days. "What a tree is this!-of what portentous aspect and almost fabulous antiquity! They say that the specimen felled at the junction of the Stanislau and San Antonia was above 3000 years old; that is to say, it must have been a little plant when Samson was slaying the Philistines, or Paris running away with Helen, or Aneas car coat out of elbows. It is extraordinary the num The most expensive article you can wear is a ber of odd things you never dreamt of that you will be called upon to pay in consequence of that coat! UNPLEASANT.-Knowing Hibernians, of cucumbrian coolness, who borrow your money, drink your best wine, smoke your best cigars, lame your favourite hunter, and make fun of you to your wife. The most economical dinner is when you invite at Richmond, or Greenwich, or the Clarendon. a creditor to dine with you; but be sure you dine Be sure the dinner is the best. What is friendship? Too frequently the wooden handle to a bill! JONATHAN AT THE SEA-SIDE. Miss Smith, may I have the pleasure of taking a bath with you, or of bathing you? is an invitation which one ofter hears at this place from a gentleman to a lady, just as at a ball the invitation is to a quadrille or a waltz, and I have never heard the invitation refused. Very various are the scenes which on all sides present themselves in the bathing republic. Here a young, handsome couple, in elegant bathing attire, go dancing out into the wild waves, holding each other by the hand, and, full of joy and courage of life, ready to meet anything,-the great world's sea and all its billows! There again is an elderly couple in gray garments, holding each other steadily by the two hands, and popping up and down in the waves, just as people dip candles, with solemn aspects, and merely observant to keep their footing, and doing all for the benefit of health. Here is a young smiling mother bearing before her her little beautiful boy, a naked cupid, not a year old, who laughs and claps his hands for joy as the wild waves dash over him. Just by is a fat grandmother with a life preserver round her body, and half sitting on the sands, in evident fear of being drowned for all that, and when the waves come rolling onward, catching hold of some of her leaping and laughing great children and grand-children who dance around her. Here a graceful young girl, who now, for the first time, bathes in the sea, flies before the waves into the arms of father or mother in whose embrace it may dash over her; there is a group of wild young women holding each other by the hand, dancing around and screaming aloud every time a wave dashes over their heads; and there in front of them is a yet wilder swarm of young men, who dive and plunge about like fishes, much to the amazement of the porpoises (as I presume,) who, here and there, pop their huge heads out of the billows, but which again disappear as a couple of large dogs rush forward through the water towards them in hope of good prize. IMITATIVE POWERS OF THE CHINESE. a It is generally supposed that the Chinese will not learn anything: but no people are more ready to learn if it is likely to be attended with advantage. They have lately been taught to make glass, and turn out bronze argand lamps and globes, emblazoned with the London maker's name all complete; and actually export these lamps to Batavia. They like putting an English name on their commodities, and are as free with the word "patent as any manufacturer in Germany. They excel in the manufacture of locks, particularly padlocks. One of my friends gave an order to a tradesman to varnish a box, furnished with a Chubb's lock, of which he had two keys, and one of these he sent with the box, retaining the other himself. When the box came back, he found that his key would not turn the lock, though the one he had given to the tradesman acted he accused the man of having changed the lock; very well. Thinking some trick had been played, and, after some evasion, he acknowledged the fact, stating that, on examination, he had found it such an excellent one, that he took it off and ker's name, and everything complete, except that kept it, making another exactly like it, with mathe original key would not open it. Their me chanical contrivances generally have some defect of this kind. They have never made a watch that will keep time. CHARACTER OF GOLDSMITH. Who, of the millions whom he has amused, does not love him? To be the most beloved of English writers, what a title that is for a man! A wild youth, wayward, but full of tenderness and affection, quits the country village where his boyhood has been passed in happy musing, in idle shelter, in fond longing to see the great world out of doors, and achieve name and fortune-and after years of dire turning back as fondly to his native place, as struggle and neglect, and poverty, his heart it had longed eagerly for change when sheltered there, he writes a book and a poem, full of the reollections and feelings of home-he paints the friends and scenes of his youth, remembrances of Lissoy. Wander he must, and peoples Auburn and Wakefield with but he carries away a home relic with him, and dies with it on his breast. His nature is truant; in repose it longs for change; as on the journey it looks back for friends and quiet. Ile passes to-day in building air-castles and he would fly away this hour, but that a for to morrow, or in writing yesterday's elegy; cage of necessity keeps him. charm of his verse, of his style and humour? What is the His sweet regrets, his delicate compassion, his soft smile, his tremulous sympathy, the him is half pity. You come hot and tired from weakness which he owns? Your love for the day's batttle, and this sweet minstrel sings to you. Who could ever harm the kind vagrant harper? Whom did he ever hurt? He carries no weapon-save the harp on which he plays to you; and with which he delights great and humble, young and old, the fire, or the women and children in the the captains in the tents or the soldiers round village, at whose porches he stops and sings his simple songs of love and beauty. With that sweet story of the Vicar of Wakefield, he has found entry into every castle and every busy or hard, but once or twice in our lives hamlet in Europe. Not one of us, however, has passed an evening with him, and undergone the charm of his delightful music. ABBOTT'S NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE. | cruelties of which Napoleon had been guilty, BY WILLIAM THOMAS HALEY. CHAPTER V. he was defeated by a comparative handful of Turks, led and aided by actually a mere handful of British seamen, and their gallant and accomplished officer Sir Sydeny Smith; coolly tells us that the whole is to be charged against the injustice and the cruelty of the allies. If, argues, Mr. Abbott, Napoleon had conquered at Acre, all success must needs have attended him in his onward progress; and of course the "lofty ambition" of the Corsican would have been crowned with full success; he and his brigands would have marched triumphantly from the Nile to the Ganges, ennobling their enemies by butchering them in pitched battles, or shooting them down, as prisoners of war, elevating women by in. sults, rousing lethargic nations to enterprise and industry by burning their towns and laying waste their fields, and teaching them thrift by leaving them not a piastre either to spend or to save. But that inopportune Nelson, and that impertinently daring and skilful Sir Sydney Smith, spoiled all these glorious prospects, and defeated all those benevolent projects. Napoleon was, in plain terms, disgracefully defeated at Acre; and Mr. Abbott thus touchingly romances there anent. "The Druses an1 other tribes hostile to the Porte, were in a state of great dismay when they learned that the French were retiring. They knew that they must encounter terrible vengeance at the hands of Achmet the butcher. The victory of the allies riveted upon them anew their chains, and a wail which would have caused the ear of Christendom to tingle, ascended from terrified villages, THOUGH Mr. Abbott dare not venture to deny that Mahometanism was the main cause of Egyptian ignorance, without a word of censure, ina tone of something very like applause, which he would openly bestow if he only dared to do so, he tells us what is as patent and undeniable as the visible sun at noon-day, that, far from intending to abolish the imposture of Mahometanism, to substitute the truly ennobling and elevating truths of Christianity, the selfish and Godless Corsican was prepared to disavow even his merely nominal Christianity, and openly, and in all due form, to become a Mabometan. To every man of common sense and of right principle, it must be painfully evident that Mr. Abbott is prepared to make use of any sophistry, of any chance, however clumsy or however unprincipled, for the sake of setting Napoleon in the most favorable, and Britain in the most unfavorable, light before his agape and credulous readers.-Nothing short of a fixed determination to do 80, could possibly induce a writer of any attainments, to talk to us about Napoleon's cheerful er.durance of toil, fatigue, and privation, in the prosecution of his designs, knowing as even Mr. Abbott must know, that it is plain to the meanest capacities, that toil, fatigue, and privation, are the first and most indispensable elements of action, or in execution of unprincipled and ruthless scheming. Yet in representing Napoleon as enduring as fathers, and mothers, and children cowered toil, fatigue, and privation, for the sake of elevating, ennob'ing, and enriching lethargic nations, Mr. Aboott shows us at once how utterly destitute he is of candor, and of either the love or the practice of truthfulness, and It would puzzle that proverbially astute how utterly destitute he must needs deem his personage a Philadelphia lawyer to decide readers to be even of the lowest and common- whether this passage should more powerfully est powers of intuitive discernment, to say excite indignation or merit contempt. What nothing about analysis and logical deduction. does Mr. Abbott mean by his sneers at But Mr. Abbott goes farther still; he impu- "pious" England? the British sovereign, his dently charges all Napoleon's practical failure ministers, and his gallant chieftains, military and terrible losses not to his own blunders, or naval, had not renounced Christianity, or but to Britain. Yes! this unscrupulous recognised the crced of the impostor Maho writer, when compelled to confess that, not met? Was it England who sent an expedition withstanding all the frightful crimes and into Egypt? Agonized and despairing shrieks VOL. IY.-Y beneath the storm of vengeance which fell upon them from the hand of the merciless Turk. But England was too far away for the shrieks to be heard in her pious dweilings." no doubt were heard, from Acre to Jaffa; province, and created an Egyptian Chamber but those shrieks were caused solely by the ambition of Napoleon. Britain and her allies were utterly innocent of all the vile atrocities of which Egypt was the scene. And Mr. Abbott, though unprincipled enough to charge those atrocities upon Britain, is so utterly destitute of even a plausible argument in support of his assertions, that even he, wholly unre strained as he proves himself to be by any moral considerations, does not venture to attempt to argue the case. Of the various murderous actions in which Napoleon fiercely and perseveringly, but ainly, endeavored to obtain a permanent footing in Egypt, or to make a decided progress towards the Turkish conquest which his vanity had represented to him as so certain and even so facile, we have neither space nor inclination to speak in any detail. We have shown that Napoleon, though nominally the general of the Directory of France, really and deliberately entered Egypt as an adventurer seeking wealth and despotic power on his own account, and without one real care or thought about that disenthralled France which Britain and her allies wished to enthral again by enthroning a discarded and hated king, and that his conduct in Egypt, like his subsequent conduct in Russia, fully showed that vanity, greed, and an ambition cruel as it was boundless, occasionally obtained so complete a predominance over his better judgment and clearer perceptions, that he was as pitiably short-sighted and overweening in self-confidence as the meanest drummer boy in his army could have shown himself. In certain of his battles, but especially in the final and terrible one, in which, within sight of Aboukir Bay, he captured Mustapha Pacha and utterly routed that brave though unsuccessful general's army, on the 26th of July, 1799, Napoleon was undoubtedly splendidly triumphant, but his success was, as to the realization of the designs with which he had entered Egypt, as utterly worthless as that slight specimen of an engagement in which, for a lady's amusement "he had, some years previously, caused his own men and the Austrians to cut each other's throats. of Commerce, the whole coast was so strictly blockaded that not so much as a fishing boat could sail into or out of port, and he knew that he and his army were just so many prisoners in a strange land, without means to march upon Turkey or to return to France, and with exceedingly small prospect of making their newly acquired colony a very desirable abode as regarded health or safety. Even Mr. Abbott is compelled to confess that the situa tion was anything rather than a pleasant one; though he is utterly silent as to any slight touch of remorse of conscience felt by the heroic Corsican, on the score of the frightful sacrifice of life through which he had purchased the rather doubtful triumph of becom ing the master of a colony which he could neither occupy to advantage, nor quit eastward with hope, or westward with safety. Scott, in his dry way, sums up the results of Napoleon's murders and marches by saying that, victor as he was over Mustapha Pacha, "the situation of Napoleon no longer permitted him those brilliant and immense prospects in which his imagination loved to luxuriate. The march upon Constantinople was now an impossibility, that to India an empty dream.” Abbott is less pithy than Sir Walter Scott; but he is more jaunty, more funnily prolix, and quite inimitable in the dogged drollery with which he shows that the Napoleonic dilemma was, after all, no more of a dilemma than a hero should be placed in, and obviously only a rather round-about road to despotic power further west. Having given a very glowing account of the battle of Aboukir, in which Mustapha Pacha was defeated and taken prisoner-having given this account, in terms which read very like an extract from some historical almanac, Abbott proceeds thus: "Egypt was now quiet;" Abbott saith, "not a foe remained to be encountered. No immediate attack from any quarter was to be feared. Nothing remained to be done but to carry on the routine of the infant colony. These duties required no especial genius, and could be very creditably performed by any respectable go vernor." The French were victorious over Mustapha Even we cannot withhold our applause from Pacha, and that gallant man was their prisoner, the workmanlike manner in which Mr. Abbott -but though Napoleon called Egypt a French (thus attempts a vindication of his hero. The |