It is a familiar observation that great inventions are commonly foreshadowed in theory or speculation, and very often are approached gradually in a long series of tentative experiments before the perfected result is reached. Exceptions occur to this rule, but they are exceedingly few, since usually it is a general sense of the need of any new device which directs mechanical skill toward supplying it. Nevertheless, it is with no little surprise that one reads how thoroughly a century ago the entire theory of the modern electric telegraph was comprehended; for a most remarkable premonition, so to speak, of this great device is contained in a letter recently brought to public notice, written by the abbé Barthélemy (the once famous author of the Voyage of Anacharsis) to the marchioness du Deffand. "I often think," says the abbé, writing under date of Chanteloup, 8th August, 1772, "of an experiment which would be a very happy one for us. They say that if two clocks have their hands equally magnetized, you need only to move the hands of one to make those of the other revolve in the same direction; so that, for example, when one strikes twelve, the other will denote the same hour. Now, suppose that artificial magnets can some day be so improved as to communicate their power from here to Paris: you shall procure one of these clocks, and we will have another. Instead of the hours, we will mark on the two dials the letters of the alphabet. Every day at a certain hour we will turn the hands. M. Wiart will put the letters together, and will read them thus: 'Good-morning, dear little girl! I love you more tenderly than ever.' That will be grandmother's turn at the clock. When my turn comes, I shall say about the same thing. Besides, we could arrange to have the first motion of the hand strike a bell, to give warning that the oracle is about to speak. The fancy pleases me wonderfully. It would soon become corrupted, to be sure, by being applied to spying in war and in politics; but it would still be very pleasant in the intercourse of friendship." In 1774—that is, two years after Barthélemy's letter—Lesage, a Genevese professor of physics, guardedly intimated that an apparatus could be constructed to fulfill these vague suggestions. There were a few experiments in electro-magnetism during the succeeding half century. It was reserved for our own Morse to put into practical application the grand system which the abbé Barthélemy had so curiously foreshadowed in a freak of fancy.
Endless are the blandishments and the seductive devices of trade. A famous dry-goods store lately startled the shopping community of Paris by opening a free restaurant, a billiard-hall and a reading-room for the use and behoof of its customers. When ladies go to purchase at this place, while preparing their lists a polite clerk escorts them to the buffet, which is set out with ices, cakes, madeira wine, and so forth; and, having ended their repast, they are again escorted to the counter at which they desire to buy. But sometimes ladies bring their escorts—husbands, brothers or other useful bankers and purveyors of lucre—and the question arises, therefore, how to provide for them. The device of the reading-room and the billiard-table is interposed for this purpose, and a servant in livery informs them when the buying is completed, and when their own duties—namely, of footing the bills—are to begin. The care and ingenuity with which the French guard against having any annoying moments in life are well exemplified in this device. The free reading-room as an adjunct of the dry-goods store is not wholly unknown in New York, but the free buffet has not yet, we believe, been transplanted there. A very much cheaper and a far less praiseworthy mercantile trap for catching custom in the same branch of trade also originates at Paris. One popular store has a superb clerk, whose spécialité is to place himself near the door, and to murmur whenever a new customer enters, "Hum! la jolie femme!" The storekeeper is said to have observed that the effect was immediate and lasting, the new-comer remaining a faithful and habitual customer; but this device is not to be ranked for breadth of enterprise with the one already mentioned.
The project to turn the famous palace of Madrid into a museum like that of Versailles inspires Angel de Miranda to recall the strange vicissitudes of government which the vast, majestic edifice has witnessed—it and its predecessor on the same site—during seven centuries. Situated in the western quarter of the city, its principal face dominates a grand esplanade called the "Field of the Moor," after the Moorish camp there established in the twelfth century. A fortress first, the original structure was turned by Peter the Cruel, a lover of fine architecture, into a royal castle, or alcazar, as it was then called, the word being borrowed from the Arabic. It became thenceforth an historic spot of Spain. It was the prison of Francis I. after Pavia. It was the dwelling of Philip II., who first made it the official royal residence; and there died his son, Don Carlos, whose tragic career has inspired so much dramatic literature, from Schiller's fierce handling of Philip II. to the widely different treatment of the subject by Don Gaspar Nuñez de l'Arce in his drama played for the first time the past year. In the same palace, continues Miranda, died Elizabeth of Valois. There Philip IV. had farces played by ordinary comedians while the tragedy of his own downfall was enacting without. A fire reduced to ashes the haughty Alcazar at the moment when the Austrian dynasty disappeared from the realm, and on its ruins Philip V., first of the Spanish Bourbons, built the sumptuous palace that exists today. Stranger tenants even than its predecessor's it was fated to see—Riperda, Farinelli, Godoy, who began his political rise by his skill with the guitar; and Joseph Bonaparte, to whom his fraternal patron said, "Brother, you will have better lodgings now than mine." There Ferdinand VII. passed his life in breaking his word, and there reigned Isabella II., first adored, then execrated. Marshal Serrano established there his modest headquarters as regent of a provisory kingdom, and there lived Amadeo, who had the spirit to quit a throne which he could not occupy with dignity. What a story of changed times and manners does it tell, when, in a detached wing of this royal edifice, we find installed Don Emilio Castelar, foreign minister of the Spanish republic!
"I must be cruel, only to be kind," says Hamlet. In a different sense the kindness of some people is pretty sure to be cruel, their very charity ferocious. There is a story of an old maiden lady whose affection was centred on an ugly little cur, which one morning bounded into her room with a biscuit in his chops. "Here, Jane," cries the good lady, twisting the tidbit out of his mouth and giving it to her maid, "throw away the bread—it may be poisoned; or stop, put it in your pocket, and give it to the first poor little beggar you find in the street!" The story is hardly overdrawn, for if "all mankind's concern is charity," as Pope says, yet at least some of mankind's methods of exhibiting generosity are questionable. An English paper recounts that a Croydon pork-butcher was lately arrested for selling diseased pork, and the man from whom he bought the pig, being summoned as a witness, admitted that the animal had been killed "because it was not very well"—that he was just about to bury the carcass when the butcher opportunely came and bought it; but the strange point is that, in a burst of munificence, "the head had already been given to a poor woman who lived near." Evidently, the worthy pair thought this to be the sort of charity that covers a multitude of sins; and to a question whether their intents, as a whole, were wicked or charitable, they might properly have answered "Both." The "charities that soothe and heal and bless" are not the only ones that pass current under the general form of almsgiving.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Literature and Dogma: An Essay toward a Better Apprehension of the Bible. By Matthew Arnold. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.