noticed by travellers, is the astonishing clearness of the atmosphere.  Captain Head was struck with it in the case of a condor shot, which appeared to fall within thirty or forty yards; but on sending one of his miners to bring it back, to his astonishment he found that the distance was such, as to take up above half an hour, going and returning.  In Norway, a friend of the present writer stepped out of a boat to visit a spot, as he conceived, of a few hundred yards distant, when in fact it proved to be some miles.  In the Pyrenees, the celebrated cascade of Gavarni appears about a short mile from the auberge, where travellers frequently leave their mules to rest, while they proceed on foot, little aware that they are thereby exposing themselves to a long and laborious walk of above an hour’s duration.  In the Andes, Humboldt remarks this phenomenon; stating that in the mountains of Quito he could distinguish the white poncho of a person on horseback, at the distance of seventeen miles.  He also notices the extreme clear and steady light of the stars, which we can vouch to be true to a most extraordinary degree even in Europe, having distinctly seen the planet Venus, in a dazzling sunshine, at half past eleven, from the summit of the port of Venasque, in the Pyrenees.

London Review.

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TITLES.

Everybody knows that titles and dignities are not only integral parts of the person, but its most distinctive attributes.  When Earl Grey said he would stand or fall by his order, it was as if he had said, he would stand or fall by himself.  Take a noble lord, and, if the process be possible, abstract him mentally from his titles and privileges, and offer the two lots separately for sale in the market, who would not buy the latter if they could? who would, in most cases, even bid for the first?  It is the title that is asked everywhere to dinner; it is the title receives all the bows and prostrations, that gets the nomination to so many places, that commands the regiments and ships-of-war, and “robs the Exchequer with unwashed hands.”  The man who owns it, may be what he can, an honest man, or a scoundrel, a mushroom or an Howard, a scholar, or a brute, a wit or a blockhead, c’est egal.  Proud, haughty, highdaring, free England, is not this true to the letter?—­New Monthly Magazine.

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At Thetford, not far from his beloved Newmarket, James I. was threatened with an action of trespass for following his game over a farmer’s corn.—­Quarterly Review.

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SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

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“SIR DAN DANN’LY, THE IRISH HAROE.”

From “Walks in Ireland,” in the Monthly Magazine.