throughout Europe.  The French use of forks, napkins, &c. really requires some notice.  A French gentleman, in adjusting himself at his coarse deal table and shabby cloth, does not hesitate to fix a napkin about his neck, in such a manner as to protect his clothes in front against the certainty of being bespattered by his mode of eating.  An Englishman of the middle class would be ashamed of such a contrivance; for, without any particular care, he eats so as not even to stain the damask cloth with which his mahogany table is covered.  The French gentleman is perpetually wiping his dirty fingers on a napkin spread out before him, and of which the beauties are not invisible to his neighbours on each side.  The Englishman of the middle class requires no napkin, because his fingers are never soiled.  The French gentleman, incapable of raising his left hand properly to his mouth, first hastily hacks his meat into fragments, then throws down his dirty knife on the cloth, and seizing the fork in his right hand, while his left fixes a mass of bread on his plate, he runs up each fragment against it, and having eaten these, he wipes up his plate with the bread and swallows it.  An English peasant would blush at such bestiality.  A French gentleman not only washes his filthy hands at table, but, after gulping a mouthful, and using it as a gargle, squirts it into the basin standing before him, and the company, who may see the charybdis or maelstrom he has made in it, and the floating filth he has discharged, and which is now whirling in its vortex.  In England this practice is unknown, except to those whose taste and stomach are too strong for offence.  It has been stupidly borrowed from the Oriental nations, who use no knives and forks, and where, though it has this apology, it has always excited the disgust of enlightened travellers.  When dinner is over, the Englishman’s carpet is as clean as before; the Frenchman’s bare boards resemble those of a hog-sty.  In short, in all that regards the table, the French are some centuries behind the English.—­Blackwood’s Magazine.

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In the last Quarterly Review we find that “the safety of the British empire is now entrusted to 130,000 men.  Now France, we believe, maintains about 200,000 soldiers.  The forces of Austria and Prussia have always been on a much higher footing than ours.  Even the late King of Bavaria kept, we know not how, 70,000 men under arms.  Indeed Old England is by nothing more happily distinguished from her neighbours than by the silence of the trumpet and drum.  At this moment, moreover, the due level of our peace establishment is but an object of speculative research.  No man who looks to the placing of Roumelia, or whose vision reaches even to the palace of Elysee Bourbon, would consent that this country should lose the aid of a single right.”

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ALI PACHA’S HEAD.