tion that is seen in the portraits of the elder Napoleon. With a genius for mechanics he had also a genius for many other things. The very versatility of his powers precluded his success in life: he was a valiant and gifted Cornishman, with imagination of a high order, but with little self-control.
Like the skeleton at the Egyptian feast stands Joseph Bramah, with his back towards us, his portrait never having been painted, and his bust, modelled by Chantrey, having been destroyed, for what reason appears not, by Lady Chantrey, after the sculptor’s death.
Whence came that name, sounding so like Braham? Was it also in its origin an Abraham, and did it come from the Hebrew tribes in York, with its accompanying artist cunning? He, too, was a many-sided mechanist, one who did the world large service, and who, aided by a good business faculty in buying and selling, did himself and his heirs service also. Very like to his nephew, John Joseph Bramah, is that head in shape, ingeniously devised by the artist from the memory of his kindred. John Joseph inherited the business faculty of his uncle, and his love for mechanism, if not his inventive skill. He it was who gathered together in Pimlico a huge business in railway plant, with the aid and help of the two Stephensons, George and Robert, and subsequently transferred it to Smethwick, near Birmingham, as the “London Works,” joining with himself Charles Fox and John Henderson as his partners; and out of their works finally grew up the Crystal Palace, the Non-such of its time, which faded away also like the other Non-such in the days of old.
Much did these great men invent, unfolding principles that left to others little else but contrivances to follow in the same track. In these days the growth of machine tools has made possible the construction of great machines which were not before dreamed of. There is no longer any merit in workmanship, for the machine does it all, and imagination comes into play only in design. But the existence of the tools tends also to cramp design, for the design is made subservient to the capacity of the tool. There is another evil, too, now strongly experienced by originators. The race of men with brain, and eye, and skilled hand all in combination, needful to original things, is disappearing, and a wide-spread complaint exists that few skilled workmen are to be had: men are only attendants on automata.
But we are yet far from the ultimate victories of invention,—the fish in the sea are more in number than those taken out of it;—and it is to the small number of model-makers that we must look for the cultivated culmination of their cunning of hand. A long list might be made of things yet to do, in which skilled craftsmen will be needed to set the patterns; and in good time they will come.
Some future artist will yet give us the pictured aspect of more benefactors to society at large, including those rare men who, though not conspicuous by large apparent results, yet do as Hampden did in the cause of freedom—men not great in acts or speech, but prophets constantly suggesting to others the true paths of progress, giving the ideas and planning those processes by which others achieve what is called success—success I mean in the eyes of the multitude, which measures men and their results by the stir and noise which they excite.
Grateful are we to men like Mr. Walker, who has thus gathered together in groups the world’s workers, with their images and superscriptions, that men may know their benefactors and render to their memory that justice which was too rarely accorded in their lives.
So, all honour to the work of both the father and the son, the picture and the book, in teaching the men of the present what they owe to men of the past.
FOUND TWENTY YEARS AFTER.
I.
It may be after years have passed away,
’Mid faded relics of a time gone by,
These lines, in some far-off and distant day,
May chance to fall beneath your careless eye!
II.
If then the hand that penn’d them long ago
Lies nerveless in the grave,—if then the heart
From whence this stream of fancy once could flow
Is cold in death!—it may be you will start,
III.
When dwelling in the changes time has seen,
’Mid hopes deluded, ’mid accomplished fears,
When naught is left of all that once has been,
Save the pale memories of happier years!
IV.
If at that hour a shade of sorrow creeps
O’er your poor spirit—weary on its way!
If one who could have cheer’d for ever sleeps—
Lean on the love of a forgotten day!
V.
May be, rank grass will choke a rotting grave,
Where cruel rains beat down, where winds moan past—
Yet feel that love,—that life you scorn’d to save
Was true to death,—was faithful to the last!
USEFUL MONSTROSITIES.
Many of our most succulent culinary vegetables, our most delicious fruits, our most valuable edible roots, and our most important varieties of grain, are, in the strictest sense of the term, monstrosities. They are, in each case, deformed aberrations from the natural habit of the respective plants in their original states. Horticultural skill has found the means of perpetuating such aberrations, either by cuttings from the deformed plant, in which case the malformation always remains of the same degree; or, otherwise, by seed from the aberrating plant, in which last case new varieties of deformity are often obtained. For instance, a certain portion of the seeds, actuated by the peculiar vital principle of the parent plant, will, in most instances, produce plants exhibiting in a greater or lesser degree the same kind of departure from their typical habit of growth, as that exhibited by their immediate parents. The greater number of seeds will, however, in all probability show a ten-
