There has recently emerged into notice, from her hiding-place in one of the outskirts of London, an ancient woman whose surroundings forcibly illustrate the persevering vitality of even the insanest forms of religious belief.  Joanna Southcott and her fanaticisms we are apt to associate with Dr. Faustus, alchemy, and persons and things of that kind, as belonging to an age with which we have no personal concern.  Yet this is a mistake.  The followers of the fatidical Joanna may still be counted by thousands in Great Britain, particularly in its metropolis; and their acknowledged head, in strict accordance with the fitness of things, is a woman.  She is a very old woman, too, her age symbolizing, perhaps, the longevity to which her crazy superstition is destined.  Elizabeth Peacock is the name of this relic of the past.  For many years she itinerated as a preacher, and at the great age of one hundred and three her health is still vigorous.  Modern priestesses, however, not unlike the prophets of antiquity, are subject to be scanted of due honor, or, at all events, of what is more essential than this as contributing to keep soul and body from parting company prematurely.  The fact of her being in a state of destitution was notified not long ago to the magistrate of the Lambeth police-court, and that unappreciative functionary, while consenting to subscribe, with others, for her relief, openly expressed his conviction that she would be best off in the workhouse.  Altogether, the old creature is a bit of a curiosity.  She has had three husbands, and the last of them, whom she married in 1852, killed himself only the other day, possibly from finding the twofold burden of domestic predication and a helpmeet of five score too much for his nerves.  If sane, the ungrateful fellow ought, in all reason, to have had the grace to survive her; for when he undertook matrimony, as he had nothing to turn his hand to, she instructed him herself in the art and mystery of cooperage.  At that time, so robust a specimen of anility was she, she could pitch an empty cask across the street, and her credulity is as strong at this moment as her arm was of yore.  We conclude, from her story, that the proper stuff for making prophetesses of the baser sort has, even in our day, only to be looked for to be discovered.

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Our countrymen have lately learned to admire, in its Western transformation, the extremely clever Rubaiyat of Omer Khayyam.  And they are certainly much in the right in so doing.  The sterling merits of the Persian original are preserved with striking fidelity in the English version of the poem, which, for the rest, has gone far to prove that the acceptableness among us of Oriental poetry may depend very largely on the skill with which it is transplanted into our language.  The translator of the Rubaiyat is Mr. Edward FitzGerald, of Woodbridge in Suffolk.  Mr. FitzGerald’s ancient family one may learn