Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 by Various
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Various >> Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276
The Central Market, is erected on the site of the old post-office, at
the north-east corner of Duncan-street, the foundation stone of which
was laid in 1824. The whole site was excavated, and is divided into
cellars, arched and groined, with a spacious area round the whole, for
the convenience of access to each, and lighted by powerful convex lenses
from the interior of the building. Over these is the principal
building--an enclosed market-house, with twenty shops round the exterior
for butchers and others, and twenty others corresponding in size with
them, fronting the interior. The space within these, on the ground
floor, is fitted up with twenty single stands for fruit and vegetables.
Three sides of the square form a spacious gallery, commodiously fitted
up with thirty-six stands of convenient dimensions, as a Bazaar. The
interior is lighted and ventilated by three rows of windows, one row on
the Bazaar floor, and two rows in the roof. The roof, the carpentry of
which has been pronounced a master-piece, is supported by twelve
cast-iron columns and sixteen oak pillars, and is 34 ft. 6 in. high; the
height from the floor to the upper point of the ceiling being 54 ft. 4
in. The size within the walls is 138 ft. by 103 ft. The principal
entrance is at the south front from Duncan-street, on each side of which
are three large shops fronting the street, with a suite of six offices
above. Over this entrance is an entablature richly embellished with fine
masonry, and supported with two Ionic columns, and two pilasters or
antaes, 30 ft. high. In the centre of the front, as well as within the
market, it is intended to place a clock. The outer boundary of the
market, which forms three sides of the square, and is separated from
the enclosed market by a carriage road, consists of twenty-five shops
devoted exclusively to butchers and fishmongers. At the south-west
corner of these is an hotel; at the south-east corner, near Call-lane,
are two shops, with offices above; and, in another part, a house for the
clerk of the market. There are four pumps on the premises, and the floor
of the interior is so contrived and fitted up with proper drains, that
it can be washed down at pleasure. The whole will be lighted with gas.
The architect of the Central Market is Francis Goodwin, Esq., and it is
but justice to say, that it is highly creditable to his taste and skill.
The front is of the Grecian order, and perhaps the largest piece of
masonry in the county of York, with the fewest observable joints. It is
expected to prove an advantageous investment.
[2] Too much praise cannot be conferred on this and similar instances
of provincial improvement; while it is much to be regretted
that such praise cannot be extended to the _metropolis_ of
England; for, strange to say, LONDON is still without a
market-place suitable to its commercial consequence. Hence,
Smithfield market is almost a public nuisance, while its extensive
business is settled in public-houses in the neighbourhood; and the
hay market, held in the fine broad street of that name, but ill
accords with the courtly vicinity of Pall Mall and St. James's.
It is, however, to _fruit and vegetable markets_ that this
observation is particularly applicable: for instance, what a
miserable scene is the area of _Covent Garden market_. The
non-completion of the piazza square is much to be lamented, while
splendid streets and towns are erecting on every side of the
metropolis. How unworthy, too, is the market, of association with
Inigo Jones's noble Tuscan church of St. Paul, "the handsomest
barn in Europe." To quote Sterne, we must say "they manage these
things better in France," where the _halles_, or markets are among
the noblest of the public buildings. Neither can any Englishman,
who has seen the markets of Paris, but regret the absence of
fountains from the markets of London. They are among the most
tasteful embellishments of Paris, and their presence in the
markets cannot be too much admired. Water is, unquestionably, the
most salutary and effective cleanser of vegetable filth which is
necessarily generated on the sites of markets; but in London its
useful introduction is limited to a few pumps, and its ornamental
to one or two solitary _jets d'eau_ in almost unfrequented
places. It should be added, that in Southwark, an extensive and
commodious market-place is just completed, and the tolls are
proportionally increasing. A similar improvement is much wanted in
Covent Garden, by which means many of the evils of that spot would
be abated, and instead of seeing Nature's choicest productions
huddled together, and being ourselves tortured in the scramble and
confusion of a crowd, we might then range through the avenues of
Covent Garden with all the comfort which our forefathers were wont
to enjoy on this spot, or certainly with comparative ease.--ED.
* * * * *
_THE SELECTOR_;
AND
LITERARY NOTICES OF
_NEW WORKS_.
RISE AND FALL OF NAPOLEON.
With his passions, and in spite of his errors, Napoleon is, taking him
all in all, the greatest warrior of modern times. He carried into battle
a stoical courage, a profoundly calculated tenacity, a mind fertile in
sudden inspirations, which by unhopedfor resources disconcerted the
plans of the enemy. Let us beware of attributing a long series of
success to the organic power of the masses which he set in motion. The
most experienced eye could scarcely discover in them any thing but
elements of disorder. Still less let it be said that he was a successful
captain because he was a mighty monarch. Of all his campaigns, the most
memorable are,--the campaign of the Adige, where the general of
yesterday, commanding an army by no means numerous, and at first badly
appointed, placed himself at once above Turenne and on a level with
Frederick; and the campaign in France in 1814, when, reduced to a
handful of harassed troops, he combated a force of ten times their
number. The last flashes of imperial lightning still dazzled the eyes of
our enemies; and it was a fine sight to see the bounds of the old lion
tracked, hunted down, beset, presenting a lively picture of the days of
his youth, when his powers developed themselves in the fields of
carnage.
Napoleon possessed, in an eminent degree, the faculties requisite for
the profession of arms; temperate and robust, watching and sleeping at
pleasure, appearing unawares where he was least expected, he did not
disregard details to which important results are sometimes attached. The
hand which had just traced rules for the government of many millions of
men would frequently rectify an incorrect statement of the situation of
a regiment, or write down whence two hundred conscripts were to be
obtained, and from what magazine their shoes were to be taken. A patient
and easy interlocutor, he was a home questioner, and he could listen--a
rare talent in the grandees of the earth. He carried with him into
battle a cool and impassable courage; never was mind so deeply
meditative, more fertile in rapid and sudden illuminations. On becoming
emperor he ceased not to be the soldier. If his activity decreased with
the progress of age, that was owing to the decrease of his physical
powers.
In games of mingled calculation and hazard, the greater the advantages
which a man seeks to obtain, the greater risks he must run. It is
precisely this that renders the deceitful science of conquerors so
calamitous to nations. Napoleon, though naturally adventurous, was not
deficient in consistency or method; and he wasted neither his soldiers
nor his treasures where the authority of his name sufficed. What he
could obtain by negociations or by artifice, he required not by force of
arms. The sword, although drawn from the scabbard, was not stained with
blood, unless it was impossible to attain the end in view by a
manoeuvre. Always ready to fight, he chose habitually the occasion and
the ground. Out of fifty battles which he fought, he was the assailant
in at least forty.
Other generals have equalled him in the art of disposing troops on the
ground. Some have given battle as well as he did; we could mention
several who have received it better; but in the manner of directing an
offensive campaign he has surpassed all.
The wars in Spain and Russia prove nothing in disparagement of his
genius. It is not by the rules of Montecuculii and Turenne, manoeuvring
on the Renchen, that we ought to judge of such enterprises. The first
warred to secure such or such winter-quarters; the other to subdue the
world. It frequently behoved him not merely to gain a battle, but to
gain it in such a manner as to astound Europe and to produce gigantic
results. Thus political views were incessantly interfering with the
strategic genius; and to appreciate him properly we must not confine
ourselves within the limits of the art of war. This art is not composed
exclusively of technical details; it has also its philosophy. To find in
this elevated region a rival to Napoleon, we must go back to the times
when the feudal institutions had not yet broken the unity of the ancient
nations. The founders of religions alone have exercised over their
disciples an authority comparable with that which made him the absolute
master of his army. This moral power became fatal to him, because he
strove to avail himself of it even against the ascendancy of material
force, and because it led him to despise positive rules, the long
violation of which will not remain unpunished.
When pride was hurrying Napoleon towards his fall, he happened to say,
"France has more need of me than I have of France." He spoke the truth.
But why had he become necessary? Because he had committed the destiny of
the French to the chances of an interminable war; because, in spite of
the resources of his genius, that war, rendered daily more hazardous by
his staking the whole of his force, and by the boldness of his
movements, risked in every campaign, in every battle, the fruits of
twenty years of triumph; because his government was so modelled that
with him every thing must be swept away, and that a re-action
proportioned to the violence of the action must burst forth at once both
within and without. The mania of conquest had reversed the state of
things in Europe; we, the eldest born of liberty and independence, were
spilling our blood in the service of royal passions against the cause of
nations, and outraged nations were turning round upon us, more terrible
from being armed with the principles which we had forsaken.
At times, this immense mass of passions which he was accumulating
against him, this multitude of avenging arms ready to be raised, filled
his ambitious spirit with involuntary apprehension. Looking around him,
he was alarmed to find himself solitary, and conceived the idea of
strengthening his power by moderating it. Then it was that he thought of
creating an hereditary peerage, and reconstructing his monarchy on more
secure foundations. But Napoleon saw without illusion to the bottom of
things. The nation, wholly and continually occupied in prosecuting the
designs of its chief, had previously not had time to form any plans for
itself. The day on which it should have ceased to be stunned by the din
of arms, it would have called itself to account for its servile
obedience. It is better, thought he, for an absolute prince to fight
foreign armies, than to have to struggle against the energy of the
citizens. Despotism had been organized for making war; war was continued
to uphold despotism. The die was cast; France must either conquer
Europe, or Europe subdue France.
Napoleon fell: he fell, because with the men of the nineteenth century
he attempted the work of an Attila and a Genghis Khan; because he gave
the reins to an imagination directly contrary to the spirit of his age,
with which nevertheless his reason was perfectly acquainted; because he
would not pause on the day when he felt conscious of his inability to
succeed. Nature has fixed a boundary, beyond which extravagant
enterprises cannot be carried with prudence. This boundary the emperor
reached in Spain, and he overleaped it in Russia. Had he then escaped
destruction, his inflexible presumption would have caused him to find
elsewhere a Baylen and a Moscow-- _History of the War in the
Peninsula, from the French of General Foy._
* * * * *
ROBINSON CRUSOES.
At one of the islands belonging to Juan de Ampues, the pilot ran away.
Cifuentes and his crew, all equally ignorant of navigation, made sail
for San Domingo, were dismasted in a gale of wind, and driven in the
night upon the "Serrana" shoals; the crew, a flask of powder and steel,
were saved, but nothing else. They found sea-calves and birds upon the
island, and were obliged to eat them raw, and drink their blood, for
there was no water. After some weeks, they made a raft with fragments of
the wreck, lashed together with calf-skin thongs: three men went off
upon it, and were lost. Two, and a boy, staid upon the island--one of
whom, Moreno, died four days afterwards raving mad, having gnawed the
flesh off his arms: the survivors, Master John and the boy, dug holes in
the sand with tortoise-shells, and lined them with calf-skins to catch
the rain. Where the vessel was wrecked, they found a stone which served
them for a flint; this invaluable prize enabled them to make a fire.
Two men had been living upon another island two leagues from them, in
similar distress, for five years; these saw the fire, and upon a raft
joined their fellow sufferers. They now built a boat with the fragments
of the wreck, made sails of calf-skins, and caulked her with their fat,
mixed with charcoal: one man and the boy went away in her: Master John,
and one whose name has not been preserved, would not venture in her:
they made themselves coracles with skins, and coasted round the shoals,
which they estimated at twelve leagues long. At low water there were
seventeen islands, but only five which were not sometimes overflowed.
Fish, turtle, sea-calves, birds, and a root like purslane, was their
food. The whites of turtle-eggs, when dried and buried for a fortnight,
turned to water, which they found good drink: five months in the year
these eggs were their chief food. They clothed themselves and covered
their huts with calf-skins, and made an enclosure to catch fish,
twenty-two fathoms long, with stones brought out of the sea--and raised
two towers in the same laborious way, sixteen fathoms in circumference
at the base, and four in height, at the north and south extremities of
the island: upon these they made fires as signals. To avoid the crabs
and snails which tormented them at night, they slept in the day time.
Three years after the other went way, John's sufferings began to affect
his reason: in a fit of despair, he applied to the devil for that relief
his prayers had failed to bring; and, rising in the dark, he fancied the
devil was close to the hut. John awakened his companion, and taking a
crucifix for protection, ran praying to the other end of the island.
About a fortnight afterwards, John thought he heard his visiter again,
but did not see him. And it now pleased God to relieve them: they saw a
ship, and made a great smoke upon their tower, which was seen. John and
his companion were carried to the Havannah, where their appearance and
story attracted great attention. John was twice sick during the eight
years, both times in August, and both times bled himself.--_Southey's
Chronological History of the West Indies._
* * * * *
FIRST APPEARANCES OF MISS STEPHENS AND MR. KEAN.
During this memorable era of the British Stage, Mr. Hazlit was engaged
as theatrical reporter to the _Morning Chronicle_, newspaper, then
conducted by Mr. Perry, and printed on the exact site of the MIRROR
office: in his _Table Talk_ he gives the following portraiture of
their theatrical successes:--
What squabbles we used to have about Kean and Miss Stephens, the only
theatrical favourites I ever had! Mrs. Billington had got some notion
that Miss Stephens would never make a singer, and it was the torment of
Perry's life (as he told me in confidence) that he could not get any two
people to be of the same opinion on any one point. I shall not easily
forget bringing him my account of her first appearance in the
_Beggar's Opera_. I have reason to remember that article: it was
almost the last I ever wrote with any pleasure to myself. I had been
down on a visit to my friends near Chertsey, and, on my return, had
stopped at an inn at Kingston-upon-Thames, where I had got the
_Beggar's Opera_, and had read it overnight. The next day I walked
cheerfully to town. It was a fine sunny morning, in the end of autumn,
and as I repeated the beautiful song, "Life knows no return of spring,"
I meditated my next day's criticism, trying to do all the justice I
could to so inviting a subject. I was not a little proud of it by
anticipation. I had just then begun to stammer out my sentiments on
paper, and was in a kind of honey-moon of authorship.
I deposited my account of the play at the _Morning Chronicle_
office in the afternoon, and went to see Miss Stephens as Polly. Those
were happy times, in which she first came out in this character, in
Mandane, where she sang the delicious air, "If o'er the cruel tyrant
Love," (so as it can never be sung again,) in _Love in a Village_,
where the scene opened with her and Miss Matthews in a painted garden of
roses and honeysuckles, and "Hope thou nurse of young Desire," thrilled
from two sweet voices in turn. Oh! may my ears sometimes still drink the
same sweet sounds, embalmed with the spirit of youth, of health, and
joy, but in the thoughts of an instant, but in a dream of fancy, and I
shall hardly need to complain! When I got back, after the play, Perry
called out, with his cordial, grating voice, "Well, how did she do?" and
on my speaking in high terms, answered, that "he had been to dine with
his friend the duke, that some conversation had passed on the subject,
he was afraid it was not the thing, it was not the true _sostenuto_
style; but as I had written the article" (holding my peroration on the
_Beggar's Opera_ carelessly in his hand) "it might pass!" I could
perceive that the rogue licked his lips at it, and had already in
imagination "bought golden opinions of all sorts of people" by this very
criticism, and I had the satisfaction the next day to meet Miss Stephens
coming out of the editor's room, who had been to thank him for his very
flattering account of her.
I was sent to see Kean the first night of his performance of Shylock,
when there were about a hundred people in the pit, but from his masterly
and spirited delivery of the first striking speech, "On such a day you
called me dog," &c. I perceived it was a hollow thing. So it was given
out in the _Chronicle_, but Perry was continually at me as other
people were at him, and was afraid it would not last. It was to no
purpose I said it _would last_: yet I am in the right hitherto.
It has been said, ridiculously, that Mr. Kean was written up in the
_Chronicle_. I beg leave to state my opinion that no actor can be
written up or down by a paper. An author may be puffed into notice, or
damned by criticism, because his book may not have been read. An artist
may be over-rated, or undeservedly decried, because the public is not
much accustomed to see or judge of pictures. But an actor is judged by
his peers, the play-going public, and must stand or fall by his own
merits or defects. The critic may give the tone or have a casting voice
where popular opinion is divided; but he can no more _force_ that
opinion either way, or wrest it from its base in common-sense and
feeling, than he can move Stonehenge. Mr. Kean had, however, physical
disadvantages and strong prejudices to encounter, and so far the
_liberal_ and _independent_ part of the press might have been
of service in helping him to his seat in the public favour.
* * * * *
THE GATHERER.
"I am but a _Gatherer_ and disposer of other men's stuff."--Wotton.
* * * * *
INSANITY.
A French physician, in a recent work on the moral and physical causes of
insanity, noticing the influence of professions in promoting this
affliction, brings forward a curious table, showing the relative
proportion of different professions in a mass of 164 lunatics. It runs
thus:--merchants, 50; military men, 33; students, 25; administrateurs et
employes, 21; advocates, notaries, and men of business, 10; artists, 8;
chemists, 4; medical practitioners, 4; farmers, 4; sailors, 3;
engineers, 2. Total 164.
Never were the afflictions of Insanity more vividly portrayed than in
the following lines from _Churchill's Epistle to Hogarth_:--
Sure 'tis a curse which angry fates impose,
To mortify man's arrogance, that those
Who're fashioned of some better sort of clay,
Must sooner than the common herd decay.
What bitter pangs must humble genius feel,
In their last hour to view a Swift and Steele!
How must ill-boding horrors fill their breast,
When she beholds men, mark'd above the rest
For qualities most dear, plung'd from that height,
And sunk, deep sunk, in second childhood's night!
Are men indeed such things? and are the best
More subject to this evil than the rest,
To drivel out whole years of idiot breath,
And sit the monuments of living death?
O galling circumstance to human pride!
Abasing thought! but not to be deny'd.
With curious art, the brain too finely wrought,
Preys on herself, and is destroyed by thought.
Constant attention wears the active mind,
Blots out her pow'rs and leaves a blank behind.
* * * * *
MACADAMIZATION.
The cost of converting Regent-street,
Whitehall-place, and Palace-yard, into
broken stone roads, has been L 6,055 8_s_. 3_d_.
Value of old pavement taken up and
broken for that purpose L 6,787 7_s_. 0_d_.
------------
L12,842 15 3
------------
_Parliamentary Papers._
* * * * *
SILK
According to a late statement of Mr. Huskisson, the silk manufacture of
England now reaches the enormous amount of fourteen millions sterling
per annum, and is consequently after cotton, the greatest staple of the
country.
* * * * *
NEW LAMP.
At a recent meeting of the Royal Institution an ornamental lamp was
placed on the library table, the elegant transparent paintings and
spiral devices of which were kept in rotary motion by the action of the
current of heated air issuing from the chimneys of the lamp, which
contrivance is well adapted to a number of purposes of ornamental
illumination.
* * * * *
First and last there have been 120,000 copies printed of "Domestic
Cookery, by a Lady," (Mrs. Rundell;) and 50,000 "Receipt Book," by the
same authoress.
* * * * *
_Printed and Published by J. LIMBIRD, 143, Strand, (near
Somerset-house,) and sold by all Newsmen and Booksellers._
* * * * *