over deal boards, and
form a cataract; and the Vauxhall proprietors, with the aid of a
_hydropyric_ exhibition, contrive to represent a naval battle. This
introduction during the past season was, however, as perfectly
_gratuitous_ as that of the _rain_ was uncalled for. Had they contented
themselves with the latter, the scene would have been more true to nature.

[2] Even the greatest hero of the age, who has won all his glory _by
land_, has lately been drinking the Cheltenham _waters_. The proprietor
of the well at which he drank, jocosely observed that his was "the best
_well-in-town_."

We carry this taste into our money-getting speculations, those freaks of
the funds that leave many a man with one unfunded coat. The Thames tunnel
is too amphibious an affair to be included in the number; but the ship
canal project, the bridge-building mania, and the _penchant_ for working
mines by steam, evidently belong to them. The fashion even extends to
royalty, since our good King builds a fishing-temple, and dines on the
Virginia Water; and the Duke of Clarence, as Lord High Admiral, gives a
_dejeune a la fourchette_ between Waterloo and Westminster bridges.

Whoever takes the trouble to read a paper in a late _Edinburgh Review_ on
the _Nervous System_, will doubtless find that much of our predilection
for hanging and drowning is to be attributed to this "insular situation."
Every man and woman of us is indeed a self _pluviometer_, or rain-gauge;
or, in plain terms, our nerves are like so many musical strings, affected
by every change of the atmosphere, which, if screwed up too tight, are apt
to snap off, and become useless; or, if you please, we are like so many
barometers, and our animal spirits like their quicksilver; so "servile"
are we to all the "skyey influences." Take, for example, the same man at
three different periods of the year: on a fine morning in January, his
nerves are braced to their best pitch, and, in his own words, he is fit
for any thing; see him panting for cooling streams in a burning July day,
when though an Englishman, he is "too hot to eat;" see him on a wet, muggy
ninth of November, when the finery of the city coach and the new liveries
appear tarnished, and common councilmen tramp through the mud and rain in
their robes of little authority--even with the glorious prospect of the
Guildhall tables, the glitter of gas and civic beauty, and the six pounds
of turtle, and iron knives and