Footnote 1:[(return)]
We thank our correspondent for the above communication on one of the most interesting phenomena of British geology; for, as we hinted in our last, the pleasantest hours of our sojourn at Margate, about three years since, were passed in the watchmaker's museum, nearly opposite the Marine Library, which collection contains many Sheppey fossils, especially a prawn, said to be the only one in England. We remember the proprietor to have been a self-educated man: he had been to the museum at Paris twice or thrice, and spoke in high terms of the courteous reception he met with from M Cuvier; and we are happy to corroborate his representations. With respect to the reptile, or, as we should say, insect, alluded to in the preceding letter, we suppose it to have been a vermicular insect, similar to those inhabiting the cells of corallines, of whose tiny labours, in the formation of coral islands, we quoted a spirited poetical description in No. 279 of the MIRROR. Corallines much resemble fossil or petrified wood; and we recollect to have received from the landlady of an inn at Portsmouth a small branch of fossil wood, which she asserted to be coral, and that upon the authority of scores of her visiters; but the fibres, &c. of the wood were too evident to admit of a dispute.
Footnote 2:[(return)]
"Which, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along"—POPE.
Footnote 3:[(return)]
It is, indeed, difficult to avoid one, call it what you will, and quite as difficult to find a more absurd name than that adopted, unless, indeed, (why the machine goes but five miles an hour,) it is called a diligence from not being diligent, as the speaker of our House of Commons may be so designated from not speaking. It consists of three bodies, carries eighteen inside, and is not unfrequently drawn by nine horses. A cavalry charge, therefore, could scarcely make more noise. Hence, and from the other circumstance, its association in the second stanza with the triune sonorous Cerberus. A diligence indeed!
Footnote 4:[(return)]
The intrusive garrulity of French waiters at dinner is notorious.
Footnote 5:[(return)]
This "sea Mediterranean" is a most filthy, fetid, uncovered gutter, running down the middle of the most, even of the best streets, and with which every merciless Jehu most liberally bespatters the unhappy pedestrian. Truly la belle nation has little idea of decency, or there would be subterranean sewers like ours.
Footnote 6:[(return)]
French houses are cleaner even than ours externally, being all neatly whitewashed! mais le dedans! le dedans!
Footnote 7:[(return)]
The servants are as notorious for their incivility as for their intrusive loquacity.
Footnote 8:[(return)]
As Scott well observes in the introduction to Waverley, "the word comfortable is peculiar to the English language." The thing is certainly peculiar to us, if the word is not.
Footnote 9:[(return)]
All the tragedies are in rhyme, and that of the very worst description for elocutionary effect. It is the anapestic, like, as Hannah More remarks, "A cobbler there was, and he lived in a stall!"
Footnote 10:[(return)]
It is scarcely necessary to remark, that the absurdity (exploded in England at the Reformation) of a Latin liturgy still obtains in France.