ed for writing upon as the paper which is now used. Much ingenuity must have been exercised, and many previous experiments must have been required, successfully to reduce the cotton to a pulpy substance, and to conduct the subsequent process, so as to render this material suitable to the purposes of writing. After this first great step, the adaptation to a similar use of linen rags and other fibrous materials, called comparatively but for little invention, and it was probably not very long after the general use of cotton for paper, that linen rags were discovered to be a still better material. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES, DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON, one of the best, as well as most illustrious, men of whom England can boast, was born on the 7th of September, 1709, at Litchfield, where his father was a bookseller, in very low circumstances. He contrived, however, to maintain his son for some time at Oxford. On his death, the young student was compelled by necessity to engage himself as usher in a grammar-school. In this situation he was treated in a manner which so wounded his feelings, that it was a subject of painful remembrance to him for the rest of his life. On quitting it he made some unsuccessful attempts to maintain himself by his pen; and soon afterwards married Mrs. Porter, the widow of a mercer of Birmingham, with whom he received a small sum of money, which enabled him to open a boarding-school. In this, too, he was unsuccessful; he abandoned his plan and resolved to try his fortune in London. His first work of any note was his celebrated poem of London. It was published without his name, but soon attracted the notice of the most distinguished individuals of the day. For a considerable time after this, his chief employment was writing in the Gentleman's Magazine, to which work he gave great interest by reporting the debates in the Houses of Parliament under the fiction of "Debates in the Senate of Lilliput.' In those days the machinery of the daily press, by means of which the debates of a whole night are laid on our breakfast tables in the morning, was not in existence; and the public was delighted with discussions full of vigour and eloquence, much of which was given to them by the reporter. In 1747, he published his plan of an English Dictionary, for which he endeavoured to obtain the patronage of the Earl of Chesterfield, so well know for his writings on the subject of politeness. But the intercourse between the polished courtier and the rough scholar, was equally unsatisfactory to both; and Johnson informed the world in his preface, that "the English Dictionary was written with little assistance from the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement or under the shelter of academic bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow.' Chesterfield, on the other hand ridiculed Johnson's deportment and manners, of which he gave a satirical description in one of his Letters to his Son. În 1749, Johnson produced another admirable satire, The Vanity of Human Wishes, and his tragedy of Irene. He now began The Rambler, a work which was not at first received in a manner worthy of its great excellence. Written entirely by himself, and in a very serious tone, it wanted the variety and gaiety necessary to attract the readers of periodical publications. But, after it was collected into volumes, its merit was fully perceived; and the author lived to see it reach a tenth edition. Soon after the close of the Rambler, he lost his wife, who had been his faithful and affectionate partner in all his difficulties and distresses, and whose death he deeply deplored. His Dictionary, the labour of many years, was now brought out, and hailed by the public as a valuable addition to English literature. The profit he derived from it did not, however, remove his difficulties; he had, in fact, been living upon it before hand during nearly the whole time of its preparation. He then began the Idler, a series of delightful Essays, which were published in a weekly newspaper. So severe did his struggles with poverty still continue to be, that, on the death of his mother, in 1759, he wrote the beautiful moral tale of Rasselas, for the purpose of raising a sufficient sum of money to defray the expenses of her funeral and discharge her little debts. In 1762, he received a pension from king George the third; by which, and the profits of his literary labours, he was placed in easy circumstances. The only great work which he produced after this period was his Lives of the English Poets, which was completed in 1781. He died on the 13th of December, 1785, in the 75th year of his age; his remains were interred in Westminster Abbey, and a monument is erected to his memory in St. Paul's Cathedral. Dr. Johnson, as a writer, has never been surpassed in the greatness of his conceptions, and the elevation of his religious and moral sentiments. Living much in the world, and undergoing many of the trials and changes of life, his philosophy was built on experience and observation of human nature; and if his pencil, on the whole, is a dark one, yet there are beautiful lights, as well as deep shades, in his pictures. His views of religion have most unjustly been blamed as gloomy. That he laboured, at times, under a greater fear of death than might have been expected from his christian principles and general strength of mind, is true; but this, with some imperfections of character (of no great moment indeed) is to be ascribed to the diseased state of his bodily frame during the whole of his long life. In his trials and calamities, we find him always resorting to heaven for support and consolation; and, in his writings, while the duties of religion are represented as utterly inconsistent with the slightest degree of vicious indulgence, they are never placed as bars to innocent enjoyment. His style has been made the subject of much criticism, and frequently exposed to petulent ridicule. But it seems peculiarly suited to his turn of thought; and, in his pages, a grand and solemn train of reflexions becomes still more impressive from the magnificent flow of the language in which it is clothed. In private life, Dr. Johnson was not less beloved than revered. He was rough in his exterior, but his heart was full of the milk of human kindness. He has been represented as rude and overbearing in society; but his rudeness will be found to have been generally worthy of a better name, and to have exhibited itself in stern reproof of presumptuous ignorance or unbecoming levity; while his life was spent in offices of kindness and charity, to the utmost extent of his means. Even his ordinary conversation was full of instruction; and Boswell, who wrote his life, has by merely preserving what fell from his lips, produced one of the most valuable books in our language. CABINET OF NATURE. CAVERN OF THE GUACHARO. Baron Humboldt, in his Personal Narrative, gives an account of a remarkably interesting cavern, in the province of New Andalusia, about three short leagues from the convent of Caripe, and called the cavern of the GUACHARO. A narrow path led the travellers across a fine verdant plain, when they turned westward, and were guided by a small river, which issues from the mouth of the cave. During three-quarters of an hour, they continued to ascend, sometimes walking in the water, and sometimes between the torrent and a wall of rocks, by a path rendered slippery and fatiguing by masses of earth and trunks of fallen trees, which they had to surmount. On a sudden turn of the road, which winds like the stream, they found themselves before the immense opening of the grotto. Baron Humboldt states that the aspect of the place was majestic, even to an eye accustomed to the picturesque scenery of the Alps; he had visited the Peak Cavern, in Derbyshire, and was acquainted with the different caves of Franconia, the Harz and Carpathian mountains, and the uniformity generally observable in all these, led him to expect a scene of a similar character in that which he was about to visit; but the reality far exceeded his expectations; for, if the structure of the cave, and the variety and beauty of the stalactites resembled those he had elsewhere witnessed, the majesty of equinoctial vegetation gave an individual character and indescribable superiority to the entrance of the Cavern of the Guacharo. The entrance is a vaulted arch, eighty feet broad and seventy-two feet high; the steep rock that surmounts this opening is covered with gigantic trees, mixed with creeping and climbing plants and shrubs, brilliant with blossoms of the richest colours, and the most varied forms.* These form natural festoons, which hang before the mouth of the cave, and are gently agitated by the passing currents of air. What a contrast between such a scene and the gloomy entrances to the caverns of northern climes, crowned with oaks and sombre larches! But this luxuriant vegetation was not alone confined to the exterior; the traveller, on following the banks of this subterranean stream into the grotto, beheld them with astonishment, adorned for thirty or forty yards * For the sake of our botanical readers, we may state, that among these the Baron enumerates a Dendrobium (family Orchidea,) with golden flowers, spotted with black, and three inches long! A Bignonia, with a violet blossom; a purple Dolichos, and a magnificent Solandra, the deep orange flower of which has a fleshy tube, four inches long. Jon VOL. IV. 3 |