The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 46 pages of information about The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction.

The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 46 pages of information about The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction.

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The Spaniards are infinitely more careful than the French, and other nations, in planting trees, and in taking care of them; for it rarely happens, when a Spaniard eats fruit in a wood or in the open country, that he does not set the stones or the pips; and thus in the whole of their country an infinite number of fruit-trees of all kinds are found; whereas, in the French quarters you meet with none—­Labat.

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PAINTING.

It is painful to think how soon the paintings of Raphael, and Titian, and Correggio, and other illustrious men will perish and pass away.  “How long,” said Napoleon to David, “will a picture last?” “About four or five hundred years!—­a fine immortality!” The poet multiplies his works by means of a cheap material—­and Homer, and Virgil, and Dante, and Tasso, and Moliere, and Milton, and Shakspeare, may bid oblivion defiance; the sculptor impresses his conceptions on metal or on marble, and expects to survive the wreck of nations and the wrongs of time; but the painter commits to perishable cloth or wood the visions of his fancy, and dies in the certain assurance that the life of his works will be but short in the land they adorn.—­For.  Rev.

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A Chinese novelist, in describing his hero, says, “the air of the mountains and rivers had formed his body; his mind, like a rich piece of embroidery, was worthy of his handsome face!” Pity he has not been introduced among our “fashionable novels.”

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PHRENOLOGY.

In 1805, Dr. Gall, the celebrated phrenologist, visited the prison of Berlin in the course of his experimental travels to establish his theories.  On April 17, in the presence of many witnesses, he was shown upwards of two hundred culprits, of whom he had never heard till that moment, and to whose crimes and dispositions he was a total stranger.  Dr. Gall immediately pointed out, as a general feature in one of the wards, an extraordinary development in the region of the head where the organ of theft is situated, and in fact every prisoner there was a thief.  Some children, also detained for theft, were then shown to him; and in them, too, the same organ was very prominent.  In two of them particularly it was excessively large; and the prison-registers confirmed his opinion that these two were most incorrigible.  In another room, where the women were kept apart, he distinguished one drest exactly like the others, occupied like them, and differing in no one thing but in the form of her head.  “For what reason is this woman here,” asked Gall, “for her head announces no propensity to theft?” The answer was, “She is the inspectress of this room.”  One prisoner had the organs of benevolence and of religion as strongly developed as those of theft and cunning; and his boast was, that he never had committed an act of violence,

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The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.