At Belfast, the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics has been, by the Lord Lieutenant, assigned to Dr. James M'Cosh, a minister of the Free Church of Scotland, author of one of the most profound works that have appeared of late years—The Method of the Divine Government, Physical and Moral.
Mr. Hayward, the translator of Faust, has written to The Morning Chronicle to insist on the improbability that there is any truth in a paragraph which has been going the round of the papers, and which described the late convert to Catholicism, the fair and vagrant Ida, Countess von Hahn-Hahn, as parading herself in the streets of Berlin in the guise of a haggard penitent, literally clad in sackcloth and ashes!
Lord Mahon, in the last volume of his History of England that has been published, has a good deal to say upon Junius, and his decision upon that vexed topic will be heard with interest: “But who was Junius?... I will not affect to speak with doubt when no doubt exists in my mind. From the proofs adduced by others, and on a clear conviction of my own, I affirm that the author of Junius was no other than Sir Philip Francis.” The Literary Gazette also says, “We are as much convinced that Sir Philip Francis was Junius as that George III. was king of Great Britain.”
In an elaborate article on the intellectual character of Kossuth, the London Athenæum remarks, “Of the minor merits of this remarkable man, his command of the English language is perhaps that which creates the largest amount of wonder. With the exception of an occasional want of idiom, the use of a few words in an obsolete sense, and a habit of sometimes carrying (German fashion) the infinitive verb to the end of a sentence—there is little to distinguish M. Kossuth's English from that of our great masters of eloquence. Select, yet copious and picturesque, it is always. The combinations—we speak of his words as distinct from the thoughts that lie in them—are often very happy. We can even go so far as to say that he has enriched and utilized our language; the first by using unusual words with extreme felicity, the latter by proving to the world how well the pregnant and flexible tongue of Shakspeare adapts itself to the expression of a genius and a race so remote from the Saxon as the Magyar.”
The Chancellorship of the Dublin University, vacant by the death of the King of Hanover, has been conferred on Lord John George Beresford, the primate of Ireland.