nding at Sydney,
he applied for and obtained a situation at the theatre. His face secured
him all the "sentimental villains;" and his success fully entitles him,
at the present moment, to be regarded as the "acknowledged hero" of
"domestic (Sydney) melodrama."
VICHYANA.
No watering-place so popular in France as Vichy; in England few so
little known! Our readers will therefore, we doubt not, be glad to learn
something of the _sources_ and _re_sources of Vichy; and this we hope to
give them, in a general way, in our present Vichyana. What further we
may have to say hereafter, will be chiefly interesting to our medical
friends, to whom the _waters_ of Vichy are almost as little known as
they are to the public at large. The name of the town seems to admit,
like its waters, of analysis; and certain grave antiquaries dismember it
accordingly into two Druidical words, "Gurch" and "I;" corresponding,
they tell us, to our own words, "Power" and "Water;" which, an' it be
so, we see not how they can derive _Vichy_ from this source. Others,
with more plausibility, hold Vichy to be a corruption of _Vicus_. That
these springs were known to the Romans is indisputable; and, as they are
marked _Aquae calidae_ in the Theodosian tables, they were, in all
probability, frequented; and the word _Vicus_, Gallicised into Vichy,
would then be the designation of the hamlet or watering-place raised in
their neighbourhood. Two of the principal springs are close upon the
river; ascertaining, with tolerable precision, not only the position of
this _Vicus_, but also of the ancient bridge, which, in the time of
Julius Caesar, connected, as it now does, the town with the road on the
opposite bank of the Allier, (Alduer fl.,) leading to Augusta Nemetum,
or Clermont. The road on _this_ side of the bridge was then, as now, the
high one (_via regia_) to Lugdunum, or Lyons.
Vichy, if modern geology be correct, was not always _thus_ a
watering-place; but seems, for a long period, to have been a _place
under water_. The very stones prate of Neptune's whereabouts in days of
langsyne. No one who has seen what heaps of _rounded_ pebbles are
gleaned from the corn-fields, or become familiar with the copious
remains of _fresh water_ shells and insects, which are kneaded into the
calcareous deposits a little below the surface of the soil, can help
fetching back in thought an older and drearier dynasty. Vulcan here, as
in the Phlegrian and Avernian plai
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