and feeling, — of thought solid and sane, and of acute feeling, quickened by madness, in which he must have given to it its first embodiment in English verse.

A mile beyond Skirvington, when we had almost resigned ourselves to the hardship of walking over all the ground which we had bargained for being carried over, we were overtaken by the omnibus drawn by the "fresh hoss." It stopped for a few seconds as we entered Newport Pagnell, to pick up a passenger; and a tall, robust, hard-featured female, of some fiveand-forty or so, stepped in. Had we heard, she asked, when adjusting herself with no little bustle in a corner of the conveyance, — had we heard how the great fight had gone? No!

my two companions had not so much as heard that a great fight there had been. "O dear!” exclaimed the robust female, "not heard that Bendigo challenged Caunt for the championship!—ay, and he has beaten him too. Three hundred guineas a-side!"-"Bad work, I am afraid," said the gentleman in

black.

"Yes," exclaimed the robust female; "bad work, foul work; give 'em fair play, and Bendigo is no match for Caunt. Hard stiff fellow, though! But there he is!" We looked out in the direction indicated, and saw the champion of all Eng

land standing at a public-house door, with a large white patch over one eye, and a deep purple streak under the other. He reminded me exceedingly of Bill Sikes, in the illustrations by Cruikshank of Oliver Twist. For two mortal hours had he stood up, under the broiling sun of the previous day, to knock down, and be knocked down in turn, all in a lather of blood and sweat, and surrounded by a ring of the greatest scoundrels in the kingdom. And the ninety-third round had determined him the best man of two, and the champion of all England. I felt convinced, however, like the old king in the ballad, that England holds

"Within its realme,

Five hundred as good as hee."

There had been sad doings in the neighborhood, not a little thieving in the houses, several robberies on the highway, and much pocket-picking among the crowds; in short, as the reporter of a sporting paper, "The Era," who seemed to have got bitten somehow, summed up his notice of the fight,"had the crowds brought together been transported en masse to Botany Bay, they would have breathed forth such a moral pestilence as would have infected the atmosphere of the place.” Pugilism has been described as one of the manifestations of English character and manners. I suspect, however, that in the present day it manifests nothing higher than the unmitigated blackguardism of England's lowest and most disreputable men. Regarding the English ladies who take an interest in it, I must of course venture nothing untender; indeed, I saw but a single specimen of the class, and that for but twenty minutes or so, for the robust female left us at the first stage.

A pugilist, notwithstanding his pugilism, may be, I doubt not, a brave fellow; the bottom he displays is, in most instances, the identical quality which, in the desperate tug of war, so dis

tinguishes, over all the other troops of Europe, the British soldier. But the "science of defence can have in itself no tendency either to strengthen native courage, or to supply the want of it. It must take its place rather among those artificial means of inspiring confidence, that, like the bladders of the swimmer, serve but to induce a state of prostration and helplessness when they unexpectedly give way; and can be but an indifferent preparation for meeting full in front the bayonetpoint that breaks in upon its guards, or the whizzing bullet that beats them down. I have been told by an aged relative, now deceased, who saw much service, that in the first great naval battle in which he was engaged, and the first great storm he experienced, there were two men- one in each instance whose cowardice was palpable and apparent to the whole crew, and who agreed so far in character, that each was the champion pugilist and bully of his vessel. The dastard in the engagement that of Camperdown- was detected coiling up his craven bulk in a place of concealment, out of reach of the shot: the dastard in the storm was rendered, by the extremeness of his terror, unfit for duty. The vessel in which my relative sailed at the time the same relative who afterwards picked up the curious shell amid the whistling of the bullets in Egypt—was one of those old-fashioned, iron-fastened ships of the line that, previous to the breaking out of the first revolutionary war, had been lying in dock for years, and that, carefully kept, so far at least as externals were concerned, looked extremely well when first sent to sea, but proved miserable weather-boats amid the straining of a gale, when their stiff rusty bolting began to slacken and work out. The gale, in this especial instance, proved a very tremendous one; and the old Magnificent went scudding before it, far into the Northern Ocean, under bare poles. She began to open in the joints and

seams like a piece of basket-work; and though the pumps were plied incessantly by half-hour relays, the water rose fast within the hold, and she threatened to settle down. My relative was stationed in the well-room during one of the night-watches, just as the tempest had reached its crisis, to take note of the state of the leakage; and a man came round every quarter of an hour to receive his report. The water, dimly visible by the lantern of horn, rose fast along the gauge, covering, inch after inch, four feet and a half,-four feet nine,-five feet, five feet three, five feet and a half: the customary quarter of an hour had long elapsed, yet no one appeared to report; and the solitary watcher, wondering at the delay, raised the little hatch. directly above head, and stepped out upon the orlop, to represent the state of matters below. Directly over the opening, a picture of cold, yellow terror, petrifying into stone, stood the cowed bruiser, with a lantern dangling idly from his finger points. "What make you here?" asked my relative.-"Come to report.""Report! is that reporting?"-"O!!-how many feet water?"

"Five and a half.” "Five feet and a half!" exclaimed the unnerved bully, striking his hands together, and letting his lantern fall into the open hatch,"Five feet and a half! Gracious heaven! it's all over with us!" Nothing, I have oftener than once heard my relative remark, so strongly impressed him, during the terrors of the gale, as the dread-impressed features and fear-modulated tones of that unhappy man.

CHAPTER XVII.

Cowper and the Geologists. - Geology in the Poet's Days in a State of great Immaturity. - Case different now. - Folly of committing the Bible to a False Science. - Galileo. Geologists at one in all their more important Deductions; vast Antiquity of the Earth one of these. - State of the Question. - Illustration. - Presumed Thickness of the Fossiliferous Strata. - Peculiar Order of their Organic Contents; of their Fossil Fish in particular, as ascertained by Agassiz. — The Geologic Races of Animals entirely different from those which sheltered with Noah in the Ark.-Alleged Discrepancy between Geologic Fact and the Mosaic Record not real. Inference based on the opening Verses of the Book of Genesis. - Parallel Passage adduced to prove the Inference unsound. - The Supposition that Fossils may have been created such examined: unworthy of the Divine Wisdom; contrary to the Principles which regulate Human Belief; subversive of the grand Argument founded on Design. — The profounder Theologians of the Day not Anti-Geologists. — Geologic Fact in reality of a kind fitted to perform important Work in the two Theologies, Natural and Revealed; subversive of the "Infinite-Series" Argument of the Atheist; subversive, too, of the Objection drawn by Infidelity from an Astronomical Analogy. - Counter-objection. - Illustration.

It may have been merely the effect of an engrossing study long prosecuted, but so it was, that of all I had witnessed amid the scenes rendered classic by the muse of Cowper, nothing more permanently impressed me than a few broken fossils of the Oolite which I had picked up immediately opposite the poet's windows. There had they lain, as carelessly indifferent to the strictures in "The Task," as the sun in the central heavens, two centuries before, to the denunciations of the Inquisition. Geology, however, in the days of Cowper, had not attained to the dignity of a science. It lacked solid footing as it journeyed amid the wastes of Chaos; and now tipped, as