homage with which they gratified him, was
considered as imparting dignity to themselves.

"Louis acknowledged and repaid this tribute of courtesy, by a
condescension still more refined, and by attentions yet more
delicate than their own. The harshness of power was so
ingeniously veiled, every shade of approbation was so nicely
marked, and every gradation of favor so finely discriminated,
that the tact of good society--that acquired sense, which
reveals to us the impression we make on those with whom we
associate--became the indispensable condition of existence at
Versailles and Marly. The inmates of those palaces lived under
a law peculiar to themselves; a law most effective for its
purposes, though the recompense it awarded to those who pleased
their common master was but his smile, and though the penalty
it imposed on those who displeased him was but his frown."

AMERICAN WAR-ENGINES.

The probabilities of a general war in Europe invest the subject of the
following paper with an unusual interest. It is worthy of notice that
America has furnished so large a proportion of the improvements in
war-engines of every description. Fulton's schemes are well known; we
all remember something of the guns invented by Perkins; there is a
gentleman now in daily conference with Mazzini and the revolutionary
committees, in London, who proposes the noiseless discharge of twenty
thousand missiles in a minute, by means of a machine invented in Ohio;
and we find in the _Times_ an abstract of a paper read at the
Institution of Civil Engineers, on the 25th of November, by our famous
countryman Colonel Colt, "On the Application of Machinery to the
Manufacture of Rotating Chambered-Breech Fire-Arms, and the
Peculiarities of those Arms." The communication commenced with a
historical account of such rotating chamber fire-arms as had been
discovered by the author, in his researches after specimens of the early
efforts of armorers for the construction of repeating weapons, the
necessity for which appears to have been long ago admitted; and with the
attention of such an intelligent class devoted to the subject, it is
certainly remarkable that during so long a period so little was really
effected towards the production of serviceable weapons of this sort. The
collections in the Tower of London, the United Service Museum, the
Rotunda at Woolwich, Warwick Castle, the Mu