The substitution of hydrogen or of coal gas for the fire-balloon, has deprived aërial navigation of its greatest dangers. No good means of steering or tacking a balloon having been discovered, the art has not yet fulfilled the expectations that were at first formed of it: the balloon is at the mercy of the winds; and although the voyagers travel in ease and safety, and often with rail-road speed, yet as it cannot be foretold in what direction the balloon must go, voyages in the air have been as yet only an exciting and not very dangerous amusement.
THE THEATRE.--I approach a subject, on which a great variety of opinion exists, and that is the theatre. In its present state the theatre deserves no encouragement. It is an accumulation of immoral influences. It has nourished intemperance and all vice. In saying this, I do not say that the amusement is radically, essentially evil. I can conceive of a theatre which would be the noblest of all amusements, and would take a high rank among the means of refining the taste and elevating the character of a people. The deep woes, the mighty and terrible passions, and the sublime emotions of genuine tragedy, are fitted to thrill us with human sympathies, with profound interest in our nature, with a consciousness of what man can do, and dare, and suffer, with an awed feeling of the fearful mysteries of life. The soul of the spectator is stirred from its depths, and the lethargy in which so many live is roused, at least for a time, to some intenseness of thought and sensibility. The drama answers a high purpose when it places us in the presence of the most solemn and striking events of human history, and lays bare to us the human heart in its most powerful, appalling, glorious workings. But how little does the theatre accomplish its end! How often is it disgraced by monstrous distortions of human nature, and still more disgraced by profaneness, coarseness, indelicacy, low wit, such as no woman, worthy of the name, can hear without a blush, and no man can take pleasure in without self-degradation!--_Dr Channing on Temperance._
CONSECRATED IRISH BELLS.--Consecrated bells were formerly held in great reverence in Ireland, particularly before the tenth century. Cambrensis, in his Welsh Itinerary, says, “Both the laity and clergy in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, held in such great veneration portable bells, and staves crook’t at the top, and covered with gold, silver, and brass, and similar relics of the saints, that they were much more afraid of swearing falsely by them than by the gospels, because from some hidden and miraculous power with which they were gifted, and the vengeance of the saint, to whom they were particularly pleasing, their despisers and transgressors are severely punished.” Miraculous portable bells were very common; Giraldus speaks of the _Campana fugitiva_ of O’Toole, chieftain of Wicklow; and Colgan relates, that whenever St Patrick’s portable bell tolled, as a preservative against evil spirits and magicians, it was heard from the Giants’ Causeway to Cape Clear, from the Hill of Howth to the Western shores of Connemara.--_Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy._