Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/98

28 NOTES BY THE WAY. home news, that of the opening of Waterloo Bridge on Waterloo day by the Prince Regent, accompanied by the Duke of York and the Duke of Wellington, when a salute of 202 guns was fired in commemoration of the number taken in the battle. It is also stated that the steamboats on the Clyde had come into general use and that it was possible to dine on Monday in London and with the Duke of Argyll at his romantic seat at Inverary on the following Thursday; and that the interior and exterior of the new Mint had been lighted with gas. The apparatus, which was on a new plan, was erected within the walls of the Mint. The gas was prepared not by

" distilling coals in retorts in the usual manner, but by means of a cylinder kept red hot and revolving round its axis. The cylinder, upwards of ten feet in diameter, produces during its revolution in 24 hours a sufficient quantity of gas to light 1,600 lamps."

In the November number considerable space is also devoted to an account of the death of the Princess Charlotte, taken from "the newspaper called The Day and New Times"; and in the last number for the year a report is given of the three celebrated Hone trials, when, notwithstanding the severe summing-up of Lord Ellenborough, the jury in each case brought in a verdict of "Not guilty."

Among the many obituary notices we find the death at Paris on the 15th of July of Madame de Staël-Holstein, aged fifty-three. She had expressed a wish that

"for three days her corpse might be attended before being for ever inclosed in its coffin; and for three days, in defiance of the distressing circumstances reflection suggests, Augustus de Staël did not quit the chamber of his departed mother. Her remains are to be conveyed to Coppet for interment."

Her physicians were preparing for her oxygenous air when she breathed her last.

The preface to the second part of the volume, dated the last day of the year, is full of congratulation and gratitude for "the patronage bestowed during the long period of Eighty-seven revolving years," as well as felicitations to "our countrymen on the improved prospects which Providence generously offers to us at the opening of a New Year." It is said that sedition is melting away, that public credit is fresh and vigorous, and that "the comforts of the poor and the education of their children are the incessant objects of the benevolent."