We pro line, painted on the rough ceiling of stone, pointing out a direct course to the entrance of the great city of the dead. It is supposed that the bones of more than three millions of people are collected in this { vast charnel-house, but the space occupied by them forms a very small portion of the quarries under the city. These excavations compose a series of passages, from fifteen to twenty feet in width, and ten or twelve in height, running in every possible direction, and intersecting each other so frequently, and at angles so irregular, as to render it absolutely impossible to find one's way, but by the aid of some such contrivance as a line painted on the ceiling. ceeded some distance along one of these passages, before reaching the portal of the great cemetery: An appropriate inscription reminded us that we had arrived at the awful limits of this dread abode of the dead. We passed within. Piles of human bones, several feet deep, reached on either hand from the floor to the ceiling. A peculiar but not offensive smell, which I fancied to proceed from these great masses of mouldering bones, ossa non inodora, left an impression on my nerves I shall scarcely ever forget. We wandered through these passages, examining, with a curious attention, that quite exhausted the patience of our guide, every object that we passed. Innumerable inscriptions, from Latin and French poets, among whom Virgil and J. B. Rousseau seemed the greatest favorites, some full of tenderness and regret, others of a more philosophizing but equally melancholy turn, caught our eyes wherever we turned. The air of this subterranean world was of balmy softness; the surface on which we walked dry and smooth ; and if one could be reconciled to the mute society of this unliving multitude, and to the endless night which pervades a region where the sun never shone, and from which the face of heaven is for ever shut out, it would be difficult to select a more enviable habitation. For some time I found it absolutely impossible to rid myself of the strange feelings excited by so novel a situation. Enclosed in the very bosom of the earth, deep buried beneath the possibility of human assistance, our little party was surrounded by three millions of the dead! I felt that the most frivolous curiosity had led us to violate, with irreverent steps, the solemn repose of the grave. I looked upon myself as a criminal; and shuddered as I thought upon the dreadful punishment that might await our impious rashness. 1 amagined every instant that I should see the long buried ghosts of the millions around me, rising from the dead, to avenge our sacrilegious presence. I was overwhelmed with terror; I strained my ears to catch the faintest sound ; I fixed my eyes upon a skull, to see if its hideous features changed their fixed grin of death. Not a sound was heard; nothing moved; the silence of the vaults was unbroken, save by the distant footsteps of our party, who were by this time some distance before me. I was safe." The iron hand of Death held down the vast multitude around me! How mighty is his power! The great mass of bones in these catacombs were brought from the cemeteries within the walls of Paris, before the first revolution. It has never been a place of private interment. The remains of those who were murdered on the memorable tenth of August, and in one or two other of the more dreadful massacres of the revolution, are deposited here; their bones are not exposed to view. A separate vault, closely walled up, contains the remains of the victims of each of these massacres. A brief inscription records the time and manner of their death. The spirit of collecting seems to have invaded even these dismal caverns. In the arrangement of the bones, a selection was made of such as exhibited peculiar formation ; and they have been carefully preserved in a museum. The guide conducted us to this interesting collection. We found it carefully laid out on shelves, in a chamber cut from the solid rock. Here were certainly specimens of the most curious distortions; skulls of a construction to afford inexpressible delight to any node-fingering disciple of Gall; and I am not entirely satisfied that some of them may not even now be attracting the attention of the learned upon the upper earth; for one of our party, a student of medicine, appeared to me to betray a very suspicious interest in this exhibition; and I soon after observed him arranging the folds of his cloak in a manner that was far from dissipating any doubt I might have previously entertained of his intentions. In a quarter remote from the stairway by which we entered, is a plan of the city and harbor of Mahon, with its fortifications, as they existed about the middle of the last century, cut from the rock by a soldier, who had been many years a prisoner of war in that town. He is said to have employed more than seven years in the execution of this wretched task, passing every day from ten to twelve hours in his solitary occupation. The work is rude, but is said to be exact. confess that this spot excited my interest, for it spoke eloquently of the desolate misery of man. This poor hermit had served the better part of his life in the armies of France; he had been scarred, maimed, imprisoned, for years. He had hoped, perhaps, to pass the remainder of his days in his own beloved country, in ease and happiness, in the bosom of his family, descending full of honor to the grave. He returned; but alas ! what a picture does this vain employment and hideous solitude not exbibit of ruined hopes, of disappointed affections, of bereavement, of utter nakedness and desolation of heart! What could man, or woman, or lisping childhood, or the sweet face of nature, have been to him, who, from no affectation of misanthropy, but from the mere impulse of the heart, could thus withdraw himself from the earth, to live buried in the frightful gloom of these unvi. sited vaults, amid death, and solitude, and eternal night! What a consciousness was here, of the emptiness of life, of the vanity of its ambition, of its labors and cares ! What was the surly cynicism of Diogenes to this! What think ye of the poetical philosophy of the wisest of men — - is there such a lesson in the proverbs of the Jewish monarch? Which was blessed with the “fortem animum, et mortis terrore carentem,' the poor hermit of the catacombs, or the king of kings? Turning in another direction, we passed a place where the earth had fallen in, and the broken rocks lay one upon another, as if the accident had occurred but a few days before. On a closer inspection, this appeared evidently not the case. I inquired with surprise why this breach had not been repaired; but the guide could give no exVOL. XII. 56 planation of the reasons which had caused it to be left in so insecure a condition. Here and there 1 observed occasional marks of recent work; but I confess it did not strike me that much labor had been expended in any part of the vaults through which we passed, or that there was any danger attending a visit to them, sufficient to justify the exclusion of the public. I concluded it was in the vast quarries beyond the limits of the burial place, that the danger was to be found; and that there perhaps workmen were employed in rebuilding and strengthening the foundations of the city, There was no temptation to visit those dark passages, in which we should have had to scramble over blocks of loose stone, exposed perhaps to atmospheres of the most fatal gases; and I never ascertained the truth of my conjecture. We still wandered on, among avenues lined with bones, built up with the same monotonous regularity. We perceived that our course led, with a rapid inclination, deeper into the earth. We had not proceeded very far, before we found ourselves at the top of a flight of broad steps; descending these, we discovered, at the extremity of a long passage, a spring of the purest water, collected in a basin hollowed in the rock. We held our tapers over its surface, smooth as glass, and counted the pebbles that covered its bottom. Not a breath of air had ever ruffled its placid surface; eternal darkuess rested upon its waters, save when the glimmering lights of some wanderers like ourselves were mirrored in its bosom. The guide informed us that numbers of little golden-backed fish had been left in its waters; but they never long survived. The last time he had been here, there were still two or three remaining, of a half dozen left not very long before. But they were no longer to be seen; after some minutes, we discovered the body of one, probably the last to die, floating on the surface. No living thing could long breathe such an atmosphere of darkness and death. Its sunless waters reminded me of the fabulous rivers of the infernal world; and I almost persuaded myself, as I stooped over its brink, that one draught would have steeped my senses in a pleasing oblivion of the world. Perhaps the poor prisoner of Mahon had tasted its Lethean powers. Our visit lasted several hours, during which we heard nothing of the upper earth, save the occasional rumbling of some heavily-laden wagon, as it passed directly over our heads. We returned along the route we had entered, and were not sorry to feel again the reviving coldness of the open air, and to find ourselves once more upon the earth; a sensation not completely realized, until we had locked the last door upon the catacombs, and were beyond the enclosures of this region of the dead. A TRAVELLER. THE BAD BARGAIN. THIS happy pair the day and night With every failing under heaven, C. LITERARY NOTICES. PUBLIC AND PRIVATE ECONOMY. Illustrated by Observations made in England, in the year 1836. By THEODORE SEDGWICK. One volume. pp. 210. New-York: HARPER AND BROthers. If this book, in its specific object, were entirely useless, which it is far from being, still it would effect the valuable purpose of showing, that a subject which most people suppose to be confined to high conclaves, abstract thinkers, and Adam Smith, may be naturally, simply, and clearly treated, without any solemn mystification, and learned nonsense. The reader is supposed to be acquainted with things in America, and our author takes him over to England in a packet ship. No sooner is he embarked, than he begins to examine the principles of the facts about him. He journeys through much of England, and his mind is active all the while. He is teaching his pupil political economy at every step; and the man who can read his remarks of sailors, packets, temperance, roads, dress, Christian equality, productive labor, ornament, etc., and find nothing to assent to, or much to blame, will disagree with us. It is an easy book to read. Some, on this account, may think it trite. Some people, not a few, have the idea that every thing which is called learned and useful, a science, must be hard to understand. They think 'the hardest way is the rightest way;' as the man who, ignorant of spelling, trying to spell Peter, did it thus, Pe-a-t-o-u-r, triumphantly; as much as to say, 'Find a harder way than that, if you can!' Now this man, in his lamentable views of orthography, is like many in their notions of religion, science, and art. With them, the hard is the right. But it is generally just the other way. Many persons will read this book, who never would nor could read Adam Smith. If it were possible for people to read it without thinking they were learning political economy, it were better. Our author places productive labor and temperance as the ground work of our national prosperity. These are to bring about that republican, Christian equality, which is the proper destiny of nations. While a man is manufacturing useless trinkets, he is paid for his work, but is not, beyond this, benefitted by his employment. His time is lost to society. But if he be employed in making a road, here too he is paid for his labor, but he has the privilege of using the road; the expense of carriage of produce is lessened; prices are equalized, and so the poor man is benefitted. The trinket is unproductive labor; the road is productive labor. Apply this principle to dress, food, etc. If a man wear garments that do not protect him comfortably, or subserve a good taste, or show off, by their adaptation to his employment, his manliness and dignity, this is unproductive dress. A productive dress is that which keeps him in the best health; suffers him to move with the least fatigue, or one which, by its cost, does not infringe upon his other wants. So too of diet. A productive diet will give him most strength, the best heart, the clearest judgment. Wine and stimulating drinks, which addle the brain, are very unproductive affairs. Simplicity in dress, and temperance in eating and drinking, are no less a man's interest than his Christian duty; indeed the duty is founded upon the fact of their being for his interest. There is hardly a page of the book where our author does not speak of the temperance principle; and to us the subject seems not to be dragged forward, but to come in, like all his other remarks, from the nature of the case. There are many good thoughts, upon many subjects, in this book. We might quote many beautiful passages, many sound opinions, many philanthropic notions; much religious, republican, patriotic feeling. We must content ourselves, however, with advising the reader to purchase the work; especially the laborer, and packet owners, over-dressy people, and those who eat dinners at five dollars a plate, or any larger sum. SKETCHES IN LONDON. BY JAMES GRANT, Author of 'Random Recollections of the Lords and Commons,' 'The Great Metropolis,' etc. In one volume. pp. 408. London: W. S. ORR AND COMPANY. New-York: WILEY AND PUTNAM. THE first and only copy of this work, which has reached America, lies before us; and 'at the present writing,' it has not even been published in England. We have perused portions of the book with very considerable interest and pleasure. In narrative and description, Mr. GRANT seldom fails in placing his pictures vividly before the reader; but his attempts at dialogue, and at making his personages reveal themselves, after the manner of the Pickwickians, by their bearing and conversation, are much less felicitous. He is sometimes tediously minute, and writes as if he were conscious of the solemnity of an oath, by which he is bound to 'state the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.' He pads out his sentences, too, occasionally, with unnecessary epithets, as in the following, where he takes the trouble to explain what could not but be clear to the dullest reader, and takes a score of words to say that a man slapped his thigh: ''On that I am resolved,' said he, laying a particular stress on the word 'resolved,' and giving a forcible stroke with the palm of his right hand, to one of his legs, a little above his knee!' Now and then, moreover, our author seems to labor under an absolute epilepsy of the fancy; and in the merely sentimental parts of his work, he not unfrequently exhibits a little fadeur and insipidity. Yet with all these blemishes, the volume is, as we have said, one of much general interest and cleverness; describing at large the begging impostors of the Great Babylon, its debtors' prisons, the VICTORIA parliament, penny theatres, metropolitan and city police and police-offices, work-houses, lunatic asylums, Bartholomew and Greenwich fairs, gaming-houses, gamblers, etc. The chapter upon the mendicant impostors of the town, commences with the begging letter-writers, who it seems are a very numerous corps, conducting their ramified operations on business principles, and keeping a regular diary of their proceedings, to prevent subsequent mistakes, and some of them even retain an active recording secretary. Mr. GRANT believes that a thousand letters are written daily to the nobility, and persons of known benevolence in the middle ranks of life, by these ingenious rogues, and often with incredible success. Sometimes the writers assume to be themselves men of substance, soliciting additions to their own subscriptions, in aid of some unfortunate person, in whose sad fate they have been made to feel a deep interest. Great was the surprise of a benevolent divine, on one occasion, on meeting at dinner a hale and hearty brother clergyman, with whom he was slightly acquainted by reputation, to whose numerous wants, as a bed-ridden pauper, in a distant suburb, he had long been contributing, through the medium of one of these disinterested epistolary philanthropists. Great delicacy was observed, in |