At Lyons, "they showed us, upon the top of the hill, a church, now dedicated to the Virgin, which was formerly a temple of Venus; near it dwelt Thomas a Becket, when banished from England.... About half a league from St. Vallier, we saw a house, a little out of the way, where they say Pilate lived in banishment. We met with the owner, who seemed to doubt the truth of the story; but told us there was mosaic work very ancient in one of the floors." At Montpelier, "I walked, and found them gathering of olives—a black fruit, the bigness of an acorn, with which the trees were thickly hung. All the highways are filled with gamesters at mall, so that walkers are in some danger of knocks.... Parasols, a pretty sort of cover for women riding in the sun, made of straw, something like the fashion of tin covers for dishes.... Monsieur Renaie a gentleman of the town, in whose house Sir J. Rushworth lay, about four years ago, sacrificed a child to the devil—a child of a servant of his own, upon a design to get the devil to be his friend, and help him to get some money. Several murders committed here since I came, and more attempted; one by a brother on his sister, in the house where I lay." [This species of crime is therefore not so new in France as recent cases have induced the philosophical to imagine.]
"At Toulouse saw the charteraux, very large and fine; saw the relics at St. Sernin, where they have the greatest store of them that I have met with; besides others, there are six apostles, and the head of the seventh; viz. two Jameses, Philip, Simon, Jude, Barnahas, and the head of Barthelmy. We were told of the wonders these and other relics had done being carried in procession, but more especially the head of St. Edward, one of our Kings of England, which, carried in procession, delivered the town from a plague some years since....
"At Paris, the bills of mortality usually amount to 19 or 20,000; and they count in the town about 500,000 souls, 50,000 more than in London, where the bills are less. Quære, whether the Quakers, Anabaptists, and Jews, that die in London, are reckoned in the bills of mortality."—Lord King's Life.
ROYAL INCOMES.
The income of the King of England is somewhat more than £400,000. per annum; but its amount does not perhaps exceed, in a duplicate ratio, the receipts of some opulent subjects; and may be advantageously compared with the French King's revenue, a civil list of about one million sterling, free from diplomatic, judicial, and, we believe, from all other extraneous charges. Our late excellent king's regard for economy led him, in the early part of his reign, to approve a new arrangement of the civil list expenditure, by which he accepted of a fixed revenue, in lieu of those improvable funds which had formerly been appropriated to the crown. On the revision of the civil list in 1816, it appeared, that had George III. conducted the entire branch of expenditure with those funds which had been provided for his predecessors, there would at that period have remained to the crown a total surplus of £6,300,000. which sum the public had gained by the change of provision. Quarterly Review.
BRITISH ALMANAC AND COMPANION.
Swift, if our memory serves us aright, compares abstracts, abridgments, and summaries to burning-glasses, and has something about a full book resembling the tail of a lobster. The French too have a proverb—"as full as an egg"—but these home similes will hardly give the public an idea of the vast variety of useful matters which these two Year Books contain.
The Almanac, besides an excellent arrangement, astronomical, meteorological, and philosophical, contains a list of common indigenous field plants in flower, and even the taste of the epicure is consulted in a table of fish in season, at the foot of each month. The Miscellaneous Register includes nearly all the Court, Parliament, and other Lists of a Red Book; and a List of Mail Coach routes direct from London, with the hours of their arrival at the principal towns, is completeness itself: but how will these items be deranged by Steam Coaches? Among the Useful Tables, one of Excise Licenses is especially valuable.