er, wiser than its ancient analogue; but still a
merely Caroline age--an age of pedantries and imbecilities, of effete
rulers, side by side with great nether powers, as yet unaccredited,
anarchic, unconscious of their own laws and destinies--an age of
formalisms and Pharisaisms, of parties embittered by the sense of their
own decrepitude--an age of small men, destined to be the fathers of
great ones. And in harmony with this, we have a poetic school of
Herberts and Vaughans, Withers and Daniels, to be followed hereafter, it
may be, by a Milton, of whom as yet the age has given no sign."

* * * * *

DEATH-BED SUPERSTITIONS.--The practice of opening doors and boxes when a
person dies is founded on the idea that the minister of purgatorial
pains took the soul as it escaped from the body, and flattening it
against some closed door, (which alone would serve the purpose,) crammed
it into the hinges and hinge openings; thus the soul in torment was
likely to be miserably pinched and squeezed by the movement on casual
occasion of such door or lid. An open or swinging door frustrated this,
and the fiends had to try some other locality. The friends of the
departed were at least assured that they were not made the unconscious
instruments of torturing the departed in their daily occupations. The
superstition prevails in the north as well as in the west of England;
and a similar one exists in the south of Spain, where I have seen it
practiced. Among the Jews at Gibraltar there is also a strange custom
when a death occurs in a house; and this consists in pouring away all
the water contained in any vessel, the superstition being that the angel
of death may have washed his sword therein.

* * * * *

Old authors notice the training of camels to move in measured time by
placing the animal on gradually heated plates, and at the same time
sounding a musical instrument.

* * * * *

AN ARAB GAME.--The Arabs are far more amusable, far more jovial and
open-hearted. They have their coffee-houses every night, and their
religious festivities periodically; they play at all sorts of
complicated games, resembling draughts and chess, and find means
ingeniously to vary their sports. If they compromise their dignity, they
succeed in whiling away their leisure time far more successfully than
the pride-stuffed Levantine. One of their amusements--called the g