died before they
were completed.--_Crawfurd's Embassy to Ava._

* * * * *

Valmontone, on the road from Naples to Rome, is a strange but enchanting
spot, enveloped in shade, with magnificent rocks (agglomerated volcanic
ashes) hollowed into caverns, which afford coolness in this burning
climate, and where an incredible number of nightingales make the whole
air musical. The little town rose picturesquely on its rocky pedestal,
with a large building like a monastery inhabited by myriads of swallows,
darting in and out at its sashless windows. A solitary guardian eyed us
through a door a-jar, but did not come out, while we went round the
church, and admired some good pictures remaining on its walls. The
stillness of death prevailed in the town--a sort of unburied Pompeii
through its narrow lanes, up and down zig-zag stairs cut in the rock, we
sauntered alone, and the noise of our iron-shod heels on the pavement,
was the only sound we heard. The rich abbey, it was evident, had
formerly fed the town clustering round it, the inhabitants of which
cultivated its vast domains under a paternal administration. These
domains, it was also evident, had passed into the hands of upstart
speculators, strangers to the people, and indifferent to their welfare,
who did not even know how to make their wealth productive to
themselves.--_Simond's Tour._

* * * * *

ENGLISH AND FRENCH MURDERS.

When will the French nation be able to afford a Thurtell--a man who
could turn his pistol round in his _friend's_ brains; not in any insane
paroxysm of jealousy, or hatred, or revenge, but merely to ascertain
_satisfactorily_ that he had completely effected his business--who could
then walk in to his supper of pork chops, with the same composure as if
he had come from giving a feed of oats to his horse--a clever and acute
man, too, without any stupid insensibility of mind--a man who, when
seized and put on his trial, gets off by heart a long and eloquent
speech, full of the most solemn and false asseverations of his
innocence; not that he clung with desperate eagerness to the hope of
escaping, but that, as there was a chance, it was prudent not to throw
it away--who, when condemned displayed neither terror nor indifference,
neither exquisite sensibility nor sullen brutality, and at the last
swung out of life from the gallows with the settled air of a man who
feels he has lost the ga