the tenement; from the rafters, well blackened and polished with smoke, depend sundry flitches of bacon, dried salmon, and so forth, and above them, if you know the ways of the house “may be you couldn’t find (maybe you couldn’t means, maybe you could) a horn of malt or a cag of poteen, where the gauger couldn’t smell it.”  If you are very ignorant, you must be told, that poteen is the far famed liquor which the Irish, on the faith of the proverb, “stolen bread is sweetest,” prefer, in spite of law, and—­no—­not of lawgivers, they drink it themselves, to its unsuccessful rival, parliament whisky.  Beneath the ample chimney, and on each side of the fire-place, run low stone benches, the fire of turf or bog is made on the ground, and the pot for boiling the “mate, or potaties” as the chance may be, suspended over it by an iron chain; so that sitting on the aforesaid stone benches, you may inhale, like the gods, the savour of your dinner, while your frostbitten shins are soothed at the same time by the fire which dresses it.—­Monthly Magazine.

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THE TRUE GENTLEMAN.

By a gentleman, we mean not to draw a line that would be invidious between high and low, rank and subordination, riches and poverty.  The distinction is in the mind.  Whoever is open, loyal, and true; whoever is of humane and affable demeanour; whoever is honourable in himself, and in his judgment of others, and requires no law but his word to make him fulfil an engagement—­such a man is a gentleman:  and such a man may be found among the tillers of the earth.  But high birth and distinction, for the most part, insure the high sentiment which is denied to poverty and the lower professions.  It is hence, and hence only, that the great claim their superiority; and hence, what has been so beautifully said of honour, the law of kings, is no more than true:—­

  It aids and strengthens virtue where it meets her,
  And imitates her actions where she is not.

De Vere.

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ROYAL PLANTERS.

Among the earliest and most successful planters was Count Maurice, of Nassau, who flourished in the seventeenth century.  This prince had the advantage of operating in the genial clime, and with the fruitful soil of Brazil, of which in the year 1636, he was governor.  He was a man of taste and elegance, and adorned his palaces and gardens in that country with a magnificence worthy of the satraps of the east.  His residence was upon an island formed by the confluence of two rivers, a place which before he commenced his improvements presented no very promising subject, being a dreary, waste, and uncultivated plain, equally worthless and unattractive.  On this spot, however, he erected a splendid palace, laid out gardens around it of extraordinary