ive mind, and left a copy of verses with Scribe for
a remembrance. Since then Lacenaire has confessed that he knew the
arrangement of Scribe's chamber, and had chosen an hour when the
servants were absent. "I put myself between Scribe and the bell-rope,
and if he had refused me, I should have made short and noiseless work
with my knife. Scribe owed his life to his generosity." In this little
story is there not an averted tragedy as sad as Eugene Aram's?

* * * * *

A new work, of great importance to the oriental student, will soon reach
England from Siam, where it has been already published. It is a new
Siamese grammar, prepared by the Roman Catholic Vicar General, who has
resided in Siam for twenty years. In the "Journal of the English
Archipelago," Mr. Taylor Jones announces the work and its value, with
some illustrative facts in the author's life. The bishop brings to the
task not alone his own remarkable intelligence and devotion, but the
results of the inquiries of his predecessors for two centuries. The work
forms a quarto of two hundred and forty-six pages, and treats of a mass
of matter necessary to the understanding of the language, but which is
not elsewhere to be found. Among this the reckoning of time, of money,
measures, and weights, as well as chronology, literature, and religion,
are included. The eight or ten pages devoted to chronology afford a
clear and just insight into the old history of Siam. The enumeration of
Siamese books, although not complete, shows that Siamese literature is
by no means poor. The miscellaneous list contains one hundred and fifty
various books upon grammar, arithmetic, astronomy, astrology, and
history, and many poetical works, especially romances. The various
warlike romances of China are very faithfully translated and broadly
diffused in Siam. Sometimes these ponderous productions climb to a
series of ninety volumes. The historical reports of Siam make forty
volumes, and there are no less than thirty-six holy Buddhist books. A
sketch of Buddhism is given in the present work, and the good bishop is
now about commencing a Siamese dictionary.

* * * * *

The literature of democracy has received another illustration in a
social tragedy in five acts, by the citizen Xavier Sauriac, entitled The
Death of Jesus. Its object of course is to embody dramatically the
sentiment of the old Revolution that Jesus Christ was a _S