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.

And haveing Ginnee once againe,
  If sheed doe her indeavour,
The world shall never make us twaine—­
  Weel live and dye together.

* * * * *

SONG BY KING CHARLES II.

On the Duchess of Portsmouth leaving England.

(For the Mirror.)

Bright was the morning, cool the air,
Serene was all the skies;
When on the waves I left my dear,
The center of my joys;
Heav’n and nature smiling were. 
And nothing sad but I.

Each rosy field their odours spread,
All fragrant was the shore;
Each river God rose from his bed,
And sighing own’d her pow’r;
Curling the waves they deck’d their heads,
As proud of what they bore.

Glide on ye waves, bear these lines,
And tell her my distress;
Bear all these sighs, ye gentle winds,
And waft them to her breast;
Tell her if e’er she prove unkind,
I never shall have rest.

* * * * *

The Anecdote Gallery

VOLTAIRE.

(From various Authorities.)

The Chateau of Ferney, the celebrated residence of Voltaire, six miles from Geneva, is a place of very little picturesque beauty:  its broad front is turned to the high road, without any regard to the prospect, and the garden is adorned with cut trees, parapet walls with flower-pots, jets d’eaux, &c.  Voltaire’s bed-room is shown in its pristine state, just as he left it in 1777, when, after a residence of twenty years, he went to Paris to enjoy a short triumph and die.  Time and travellers have much impaired the furniture of light-blue silk, and the Austrians, quartered in the house during the late war, have not improved it; the bed-curtains especially, which for the last forty years have supplied each traveller with a precious little bit, hastily torn off, are of course in tatters.  The bedstead is of common deal, coarsely put together; a miserable portrait of Le Kain, in crayons, hangs inside of the bed, and two others, equally bad, on each side, Frederic and Voltaire himself.  Round the room are bad prints of Washington, Franklin, Sir Isaac Newton, and several other celebrated personages; the ante-chamber is decorated with naked figures, in bad taste; each of these rooms may be 12 feet by 15.

Such is the narrative of an intelligent traveller, who recently visited Ferney.  “Very few,” says he, “remain alive, of those who saw the poet:  a gardener who conducted us about the grounds had that advantage; he showed us the place where the theatre stood, filling the space on the left-hand side in entering, between the chateau and the chapel, but the inscription on the last, Voltaire a Dieu, was removed during the reign of terror.  The old gardener spoke favourably of his old master, who was, he said, bon homme tout-a-fait, bien charitable, and took an airing every morning in his coach and four.”

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