y Louis Napoleon; namely, 'a reward of
50,000 francs to such person as shall render the voltaic pile
applicable, with economy, to manufactures, as a source of heat, or to
lighting, or chemistry, or mechanics, or practical medicine.' The
offer is to be kept open for five years, to allow full time for
experiment, and people of all nations have leave to compete. One of
the electric telegraph companies intends to ask parliament to abolish
the present monopoly as regards the despatch of messages; in another
quarter, an under-sea telegraph to Ostend is talked about, with a view
to communicate with Belgium independently of France; and there is no
reason why it should not be laid down, for the Dover and Calais line
is paying satisfactorily. And, finally, another ship-load of 'marbles'
and sculptures has just arrived from Nineveh; and the appointment of
Mr Layard as Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs (though now but
temporary) is regarded as a praiseworthy recognition of his merits and
services; and now that we have a government which combines a few
_litterateurs_ among its members, it is thought that literature will
be relieved of some of its trammels.

CHILDREN'S JOYS AND SORROWS.

I can endure a melancholy man, but not a melancholy child; the former,
in whatever slough he may sink, can raise his eyes either to the
kingdom of reason or of hope; but the little child is entirely
absorbed and weighed down by one black poison-drop of the present.
Think of a child led to the scaffold, think of Cupid in a Dutch
coffin; or watch a butterfly, after its four wings have been torn off,
creeping like a worm, and you will feel what I mean. But wherefore?
The first has been already given; the child, like the beast, only
knows purest, though shortest sorrow; one which has no past and no
future; one such as the sick man receives from without, the dreamer
from himself into his asthenic brain; finally, one with the
consciousness not of guilt, but of innocence. Certainly, all the
sorrows of children are but shortest nights, as their joys are but
hottest days; and indeed both so much so, that in the latter, often
clouded and starless time of life, the matured man only longingly
remembers his old childhood's pleasures, while he seems altogether to
have forgotten his childhood's grief. This weak remembrance is
strangely contrasted with the opposing one in dreams and fevers in
this respect, that in the two last it is always the cruel sorr