It is to be supposed that Mrs. Gilpin, in the interval between dinner and tea, finding the time to hang upon her hands, during her husband's involuntary excursion, ram bled out with the children into the fields at the back of the Bell, (as what could be more natural?) and at one of those high aukward styles, for which Edmonton is so proverbially famed, the embarrassment represented, so mortifying to a substantial City Madam, might have happened; a predicament, which leaves her in a state, which is the very Antipodes to that of her too loco-motive husband; in fact she rides a restive horse.-Now I talk of Edmonton styles, I must speak a little about those of Enfield, its next neighbour, which are so ingeniously contrived-every rising bar to the top becoming more protuberant than the one under it-that it is impossible for any Christian climber to get over, without bruising his (or her) shins as many times as there are bars. These inhospitable invitations to a flayed skin, are planted so thickly, too, and are so troublesomely importunate at every little paddock here, that this, with more propriety than Thebes of old, might be entitled Hecatompolis: the Town of the Hundred Gates, or styles.

July 16, 1827.

A SOJOURNER AT ENFIELD.

For the Table Book.

SAWSTON CROSS.

In the summer of the year 1815, I fulfilled my long standing promise of spending a day with an old schoolfellow at Sawston, a pleasant little village, delightfully situated in a fertile valley about seven miles south of Cambridge, the north of which is encompassed by the Gogmagog hills, which appear Apennines in miniature; the south, east, and west, are beautifully diversified with trees and foliage, truly picturesque and romantic. After partaking of the good things at the hospitable board of my friend, we set out for a ramble among the quiet rural scenery, and suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a group of people, near the road leading to the church. They were holding a conversation on a grassplot; from the centre of which rose a cross, enclosed in a small covered building, like an amphitheatre, that added not a little to the romantic appearance of the village; towards the bottom of the southern slope

of the grass-plot, propped with uncommon care, and guarded by a holy zeal from the ravages of time, stood an ancient sycamoretree; and on the east side, to the terror of evil-doers, stood the stocks. Alas! unsparing ignorance has, since then, destroyed this fine tree; "the place that knew it knows it no more," and the stocks are fallen never to rise again.

My friend, taking me aside, informed me the persons assembled were residents of the place, and that the meeting was convened to sell the cross. "This cross," continued my friend," is the ornament of the village. It escaped the phrenetic rage of the puritans in the civil wars, and is of such antiquity, that when it was built is not to be traced with certainty in the records of history. It may be supposed, however, to have been erected by the Knights Templars, as the living belonged to them; for, I believe, it was usual for them to erect crosses on their property. Upon the abolition of the Templars, the living came into the hands of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John, afterwards called the Knights of Rhodes, and lastly, of Malta. So early as the thirteenth century public officers sat on this cross to administer justice; at other times, the bishop's house, near the Campion-field, was used for that purpose: this house is now in ruins, but the cross," continued my friend,

we possessed as an inheritance from our forefathers, and at this moment the cupidity and folly of the covetous and ignorant are conspiring to destroy the venerable relic."

Wishing to preserve a memoranda of the old cross, I took a hasty sketch of it, (too hastily perhaps to be sufficiently accurate for an engraving,) and having reached my home, recorded the adventures of the day in my pocket-book, from whence the above extract is taken. Passing through the village in the following autumn, I found that the inhabitants had sacrilegiously levelled the cross and sold the remnants.

: Descartes sets forth, as a first principle, that whoever searches for truth, ought once in his lifetime at least to doubt of every thing. He then lays down the four follow ing rules, wherein consists the whole of his logic.-1. Never to admit any thing as true, but what we evidently discern to be so; that is, we should carefully avoid rashness and prejudice, and assent to nothing, till it present itself so clearly to the mind, that there be no occasion to hesitate about it. 2. To reduce every difficulty into as many separate parts, as may be necessary to come at its solution.-3. So to arrange our thoughts, that we may gradually arise from the more simple and obvious, to the more complex and remote, adhering to the order wherein they naturally précede one another.-4. To take so extensive a view of our subject, and be so exact in the enume ration of its parts, that nothing may escape our observation.

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...The first of these principles of doubt and circumspection, so boasted of in Descartes, is clearly laid down by Aristotle, and forcibly recommended by the very arguments that Descartes assumes. "Whoever seeks after instruction," says Aristotle, ought first of all to learn to doubt; for that simplicity of mind, which accompanies hesitation, contributes to the discovery of truth:" and, "whoever searches for truth, without beginning his investigation by doubting of every thing, is like one who wanders he knows not whither, and having no fixed scope, cannot determine where he is; whilst, on the contrary, he who hath learned to doubt, so as to inquire, will find, in the end, the place where he ought to rest" So, also, speaking of the method

to be observed in our investigations, Aristotle bids us begin always with what is most evident and best known; and carefully trace to its first elements and principles whatever is obscure, by properly severing and defining them.

Descartes imagined he had been the first discoverer of one of the most proper engines for sapping and demolishing the great bul wark of scepticism, when he reared even upon doubt itself a basis for truth; for he looked upon himself as the original advancer of the Enthymem, "I doubt (or think) therefore I am." To Descartes has been assigned the whole honour of this argument, though in reality it is to be found in St Augustine. "I do not see," says that great man, "what mighty force there is in the scepticism of the academics. For my part, I look upon it as a very just observation of theirs, that we may deceive curselves. But if I deceive myself, may I not thence conelude that I am? For he who has no exist ence, cannot deceive himself; wherefore, by that very circumstance, that I deceive myself, I find that I am.”

Locke, in his "Essay on the Human Understanding," merely advances the fruits of an exact attention to the principles of Aristotle, who taught that all our ideas originally spring from the senses, insomuch that a blind man can never conceive the idea of colours, nor a deaf man of sounds; and who makes the senses to convey truth, so far as the imagination can discern it; and the understanding, so far as truth regards the conduct of life and morals. It

was Aristotle who laid the foundation of that principle, so celebrated among the Peripatetics, that "there is nothing in the understanding but what came into it by the senses." This principle diffuses itself through his works in a thousand places, and Locke was singularly indebted for the very foundation of his system to the Stoics. The basis of his work is, that our sensations are the materials which reflection makes use of to come at mental notions; and that our sensations are simple ideas. It is true, that he has thrown great light upon our manner of acquiring and associating ideas; but the Stoics reasoned in the very same manner; and if all that they advanced on this subject, in those works of which we have nothing now remaining but the titles, had reached our times, we had not needed

the labours of a Locke. There is a most remarkable passage to this point in Plutarch. He says, "The foundation of the doctrine of Zeno and his school, as to logic, was, that all our ideas come from sensation. The mind of man at his birth, say they, is like white paper, adapted to receive whatever may be written on it. The first impressions that it receives come to it from the senses: if the objects are at a distance, memory retains those types of them; and the repetition of these impressions constitutes ex perience. Ideas or notions are of two kinds, natural and artificial. The natural have their source in sensation, or are derived from the senses; whence they also gave them the name of anticipations: the artificial are produced by reflection, in beings endowed with reason." This passage, and others in Origen, Sextus Empiricus, Diogenes Laertius, and St. Augustine, may serve to trace the true origin of the principle, "That there is nothing in the understanding, but what entered into it by the senses. It may be observed, that this axiom, so clearly expressed by the ancient Stoics and Epicureans, and by Locke among the moderns, has been erroneously attributed by several learned men, especially Gas sendi and Harvey, to Aristotle.

ter yarn has been spun so fine, as to require 350 hanks to weigh one pound avoirdupois. The perimeter of the common reel being one yard and a half, 80 threads or. revolutions would measure 120 yards; and one hank seven times as much, or 840 yards, which multiplied by 350, gives 294,000 yards, or 167 miles and a fraction.

A steam-engine of the ordinary pressure and construction, with a cylinder of thirty inches in diameter, will perform the work of forty horses; and, as it may be made to act without intermission, while horses will not work more than eight hours in the day, it will do the work of one hundred and twenty horses; and as the work of a horse is equal to that of five men, it will perform as much as six hundred men can; while its whole expense is only equal to about half the number of horses for which it is substituted.

The only purpose to which steam-engines were first applied was the raising of water from coal-pits, mines, &c.; but they are now used for many different purposes in which great power is required. `Mr. Bolton applied the steam-engine to his apparatus for coining; and, by the help of four boys only, it was capable of striking thirty thousand pieces of money in an hour; the machine itself was made to keep an accurate account of the number struck off.

MECHANICAL POWER.

Mr. Robert Owen calculates that two hundred arms, with machines, now manufacture as much cotton as twenty millions of arms were able to manufacture without machines forty years ago; and that the cotton now manufactured in the course of one year, in Great Britain, would require, without machines, sixteen millions of workmen with simple wheels. He calculates. further, that the quantity of manufactures of all sorts produced by British workmen with the aid of machines is so great, that it would require, without the assistance of machinery, the labour of four hundred millions of workmen.

In the wool manufacture, machines possess an eminent advantage over common wheels. The yarn on thirty or thirty-six spindles is all equally twisted and drawn to the same degree of fineness. The most dexterous spinners cannot twist so equally and so gently twenty slips of yarn from wool of the same quality, as a machine can do twenty thousand.

At one of the cotton mills in Manches

MANUFACTURING CELERITY.

In 1811 a gentleman made a bet of one thousand guineas, that he would have` a coat made in the course of a single day, from the first process of shearing the sheep till its completion by the tailor. The wager: was decided at Newbury, on the 25th of June in that year, by Mr. John Coxeter, of Greenham Mills, near that town. At five o'clock that morning, sir John Throckmor-. ton, bart. presented two Southdown wedder sheep to Mr. Coxeter, and the sheep were shorn, the wool spun, the yarn spooled, warped, loomed, and wove; and the cloth burred, milled, rowed, dried, sheared, and, pressed, and put into the hands of the tailors by four o'clock that afternoon: and at twenty minutes past six the coat, entirely finished, was presented by Mr. Coxeter to sir John Throckmorton, who appeared with it before upwards of five thousand spectators, who rent the air with acclamations at this remarkable instance of despatch.

There is a narrow pass between the mountains in the neighbourhood of Bendearg, in the Highlands of Scotland, which, at a little distance, has the appearance of an immense artificial bridge thrown over a tremendous chasm : but on nearer approach it is seen to be a wall of nature's own masonry, formed of vast and rugged bodies of solid rock, piled on each other as if in giant sport of architecture. Its sides are in some places covered with trees of a considerable size; and the passenger who has a head steady enough to look down, may see the eyrie of birds of prey beneath his feet. The path across is so narrow, that it cannot admit of persons passing, and indeed none but natives attempt the dangerous route, though it saves a circuit of three miles; yet it sometimes happens that two travellers meet, owing to the curve formed by the pass preventing a view over it from

either side, and, in that case, one person lies down while the other creeps over his body. One day, a highlander walking along the pass, when he had gained the highest part of the arch, observed another coming leisurely up, and being himself one of the patrician order, called to him to lie down; the person addressed disregarded the command, and the highlanders met on the summit. They were Cairn and Bendearg, of two families in enmity to each other. "I was first at the top," said Bendearg," and called out first; lie down, that I may pass over in peace." "When the Grant prostrates himself before the M'Pherson," answered the other, "it must be with a sword through his body." "Turn back then," said Bendearg," and repass as you came." "Go back yourself, if you like it," replied Grant; "I will not be the first of my name to turn before the M'Phersons." They then threw their bonnets over the precipice, and advanced with a slow and cautious pace closer to each other-both were unarmed. Preparing for a desperate struggle, they planted their feet firmly on the ground, compressed their lips, knit their brows, and fixing fierce and watchful eyes on each other, stood prepared for an onset. They both grappled at the same moment; but, being of equal strength, were unable to shift each other's position, and stood fixed on the rock with suppressed breath, and muscles strained to the "top of their bent," like statues carved out of the solid stone. At length M'Pherson, suddenly removing his right foot so as to give him greater purchase, stooped his body, and bent his enemy down with him by main strength, till they both leaned over the precipice, looking into the terrible abyss. The contest was doubtful, for Grant had placed his foot firmly on an elevation at the brink, and had equal command of his enemy, but at this moment M'Pherson sunk slowly and firmly on his knee, and, while Grant suddenly started back, stooping to take the supposed advantage, whirled him over his head into the gulf. M'Pherson himself fell backwards, his body partly hanging over the rock, a fragment gave way beneath him, and he sunk further, till, catching with a desperate effort at the solid stone above, he regained his footing. There was a pause of death-like stillness, and the bold heart of M'Pherson felt sick and faint. length, as if compelled by some mysterious feeling, he looked down over the precipice. Grant had caught with a death-like gripe by the rugged point of a rock-his enemy was almost within his reach. His face was

At

turned upward, and there was in it horror and despair-but he uttered no word or cry. The next moment he loosed his hold, his brains were dashed out before the eyes of his hereditary foe: the mangled body disappeared among the trees, and his last heavy and hollow sound arose from the bottom. McPherson returned home an

altered man. He purchased a commission in the army, and fell fighting in the wars of the Peninsula. The Gaelic name of the place where this tragedy was acted signifies "Hell Bridge."

Clubs

AT BIRMINGHAM.

The whole British empire may be justly considered as one grand alliance, united for public and private interest; and this vast body of people is subdivided into an infinity of smaller fraternities, for individual benefit.

Perhaps there are hundreds of these societies in Birmingham, under the name of "clubs;" some of them boast the antiquity of a century, and by prudent direction have acquired a capital, at accumulating interest. Thousands of the inhabitants are connected; nay, to be otherwise is rather unfashionable, and some are people of sentiment and property.

Among a variety of purposes intended by these laudable institutions, the principal one is that of supporting the sick. Each society is governed by a code of laws of its own making, which have at least the honour of resembling those of the legislature; for words without sense are found in both, and we sometimes stumble upon contradiction.

The poor-rates, enormous as they appear, are softened by these brotherly aids; they tend also to keep the mind at rest, for a man will enjoy the day of health, with double relish, when he considers he has a treasure laid up for that of sickness. If a member only of a poor family be sick, the head still remains to procure necessaries; but if that head be disordered, the whole source of supply is dried up.

The general custom is to meet at a public house every fortnight, spend a trifle, and each contribute sixpence, or any stated sum, to the common stock. The landlord is always treasurer, or father, and is assisted by two stewards, annually or monthly chosen.

As honour and low life are not always found together, we sometimes see a man, who is idle, wish the society may suppose him sick, that he may rob them with more security; or, if a member hang long "upon the box," his brethren seek a pretence to expel him. On the other hand, we frequently observe a man silently retreat from the club, if another falls upon the box, and fondly suppose himself no longer a member; or if the box be loaded with sickness, the whole club has been known to dissolve, that the members might rid themselves of the burden. The Court of Requests finds an easy remedy for these evils, at a trifling expense.

The charity of the club is often extended beyond the grave, and terminates with a present to the widow.

Philosophers tell us, "There is no good without its kindred evil." This amiable body of men, marshalled to relieve disease, has one small alloy, and perhaps but one. As liquor and labour are inseparable, the imprudent member is apt to forget to quit the club-room when he has spent his necessary two-pence, but continues there, to the injury of his family.

One of these institutions is the "Rent Club," where, from the weekly sums deposited by the members, a sop is regularly served up twice a year, to prevent the growlings of a landlord.

In the "Breeches Club" every member ballots for a pair, value a guinea, promised of more value by the maker. This club dissolves when all the members are served.

The intentions of the "Book Club" are well known to catch the productions of the press as they rise.

The "Watch Club" has generally a watchmaker for its president, is composed of young men, and is always temporary.

If a tailor be short of employment, he has only to consult a landlord over a bottle, and by their joint powers, they give birth to a "Clothes Club," where every member is supplied with a suit to his taste, of a stipulated price. These are chiefly composed of bachelors, who wish to shine in the eyes of the fair.

A bricklayer stands at the head of the "Building Club," where every member perhaps subscribes two guineas per month, and each house, value about one hundred pounds, is balloted for as soon as erected. As a house is a weighty concern, every member is obliged to produce two bondsmen for the performance of covenants.

I will venture to pronounce another, the "Capital Club ;" for when the contributions