romantic interest that sometimes enthrals the mind, testifying the reality, if also the fluctuations, of the author's dramatic power. Another year (1841) and another play. This time it is a comedy, "Old Maids"-illustrating the heart-experiences of Ladies Blanche and Anne, a vivacious couplet, by themselves consecrated to single blessedness, and by circumstances and emotions "over which they have no control," enwreathed, vastly to their satisfaction, in chains of wedlock; so that in the epilogue they make a grace of their defection, and pray to be applauded as comfortable martyrs in the cause for which they had contended with more zeal than knowledge-hugging their chains, and turning With loving faith the links to flowers, Of which the poorest beggars liberty. Sir Philip Brilliant is neatly finished off-the not unnatural and unexampled amalgam of a butterfly in the drawing-room, and a man in the field his nature is of the true stuff; he is a blade of proof in a dainty scabbard you may laugh at the scabbard, but you won't at the blade. A living philosopher has remarked that many instances, during the last war, showed us that in the frivolous dandy might often look the most fiery and accomplished of aides-de-camp; and these cases show, that men, in whom the world sees only elegant roués, sometimes from carelessness, sometimes from want of opening for display, conceal qualities of penetrating sagacity, and a learned spirit of observation, such as may be looked for vainly in persons of more solemn and academic pretension. Such a social paradox is Sir Philip, who, before he has done, contrives to amaze his familiars that a man so slight to contemplate" should realise a " generous manhood so robust in healthy comeliness," and to impel a compassionate lady to argue thus with herself: 66 That man has got a heart and does not know it. Nought of himself, save what his mirror shows him, He sees. Within, where lie his nobler properties; I'll open them, and make a man of him! The comedy is light and heavy by turns-somewhat flighty and extravagant in incident-and at the same time hackneyed in treatment. The wit has a fude lustre, nor does the humour gush with the fresh bubbling effervescence of a newly unsealed spring. Wit and humour there are, notwithstanding; and of a kind more fresh and sparkling than might be looked for from one who had already taxed his brain so many a time and oft. The high-life below stairs, we must add, connected with the episode of dolt-headed John Blount, is but indifferent fooling; and the character of John himself is simply absurd. Harley might squeeze a laugh out of it; but in the closet the part suggests but dreary mirth. The comedy was followed (1842) by a play of the "poetical melodrama" species-"The Rose of Arragon:" which tells how Olivia, a peasant wedded to a prince, saves the realm from sedition and anarchy, returning good for evil to the king and court which had despised and wronged her. Olivia is a bright and noble being, conceived and realised in her author's most genial mood; and worthy of her sisterly love is the magnanimous villager, Alasco-the mouthpiece of some of Mr. Knowles's most stirring eloquence, and a quite inexhaustible source of lofty sentiment. His treacherous friend, Almagro-the foiled suitor of Olivia, and the temporary Regent of Saragossa-is also vigorously depicted, with subtle traits which bespeak study and penetration. He is arrogant, overbearing to the weak, ungrateful, and treacherous. Such is the ambition of Almagro, coupled with a vanity voracious as the hunger that's disease, which, though 'tis gorged full to the throat, cannot stop craving on. "For his own ends he heaps up discontents gainst all above him, to crush them with the weight-not for the hatred he bears oppression, but for envy of it-blaming the grievance he himself inflicts not." One or two of the dialogues between him and Alasco are excellent; that in the dungeon of torture, notwithstanding its "little more than kin" to German horrors and the trap-door accessories of our transpontine theatres, is conducted with the ease of a stage tactician. Villain as Almagro is, one hardly likes to see him sitting on the rackthat couch of groans, of sweat-drops, wrung by dint of agony, of deathpangs, thick and sharp, though lingering. Decline you the fair seat?" asketh Alasco. Why, as Alasco had appropriated the only other "fair seat"-to wit, the block-there was almost too pungent an irony in this grim version of Hobson's choice. But Alasco makes more than amends when he begs off this rascal who can so cleverly smile, and smile, and smile, and be a villain, from the plenipotentiary embrace of the rack, to which the restored king had given him letters of advice. We admire the warm-hearted burst: 66 Spare him! O God! sir, we were boys together. The sunny start all intervals breaks through, The hearty laugh of youth is in mine ear, There are many such tid-bits in the "Rose of Arragon." The Drury Lane management (1843) of Mr. Macready gave another opening for a play by Sheridan Knowles. Again a novel provided him with a plot. The prolific dramatist borrowed a story from the prolific romancist, Mr. G. P. R. James. "The Secretary "The Secretary" is an adaptation of "The King's Highway." It presents the author's favourite subject of a lady stooping to woo one whom conventional restraints forbid to take the initiative. Such a presentment requires great skill in o'erstepping not the modesty of nature, and in keeping up our respect for the lady while touched by her ardour. This skill Mr. Knowles eminently possesses; and though the situation has no "infinite variety" such as time cannot stale, he contrives to invest each successive enactment of it with an individual interest. Wilton Brown, the " Secretary," is the Sir Thomas Clifford, or the Huon, in this reverse system of popping the question; a man with a coat not respondent to his head and heart; low in circumstance and lofty by nature, for A man that owns A noble soul is not an humble man, In the poor sense wherein the sapient world Lady Laura is as generous and impetuous as her predecessors; but not so true to reality, or to art, in the elaboration of her passion. She holds a virtue higher than a grace, and therefore prefers honesty to bashfulness. Let the pillars of society quiver and quake as they list at her masculine procedure-she exults with masculine philosophy in her mens conscia recti-let them exclaim, O, doubtful pass To come to!-for a maiden unenforced To tell her love! What can be urged for her? She is not a whit dumbfoundered by the cross-examination, but replies: Inform'd her; so she knew its handiwork, And worshipp'd heaven in it! An unanswerable position to take up, in behalf of A man to love whom is to boast one's self. The world may utter its "critique of pure reason as it will, and draw up as many systems of courtship, and text-books of etiquette, and logics of matrimony, as it pleases: Lady Laura, meanwhile, refuses to admit logic as a guide, or authority as a law, and resolutely abides by her own intuitions, as indeed most young ladies do in such matters, albeit not with the same practical determination. She erects her intuitions into a science, and puts the science into practice. Colonel Green is the only other character of note; a man who has endured the buffets of the battle of life in sturdy self-reliance, and is sound and hale within. bad man of the play (what an indispensable personage is that! and one that deserves a service of gold plate as much as other indifferent characters in actual life), Lord Byerdale, is a rather commonplace villain, whom one is not at the trouble to hate so much as might be desirable; and the Mercutio, his son, talks an infinite deal of nothing not quite so cleverly as Gratiano did on the quays of Venice. The With "The Secretary" terminated the cours dramatique of Mr. Knowles. Be it true or not that all the world's a stage, and all its men and women merely players, there is no gainsaying the fact that he, in his time, has played many parts-off as well as on the boards. Now a song-writer; now a professor of rhetoric; now an opera librettist; now a schoolmaster* at Belfast; now a dramatist; now an actor; now a theological controversialist; now a lecturer; now a novelist; and nowemphatically now-if the newspapers fib not, a chartered professor of elocution at a Baptist college-himself a professed and duly matriculated Baptist. There is something amusing, and withal serious, in the incompatibility of this, his final vocation, with the report of a monthly contemporary, that Mr. Knowles is now enjoying the curatorship of Shakspeare's house at Stratford-upon-Avon. In which capacity one of his pupils, Mr. Attorney-General Napier, speaks of him with fervent eulogy:-" No man gave so great an impulse to the cause of education in the north of Ireland. His habits were altogether those of a child of genius-hence his discipline was irregular; he was neither our schoolmaster nor our schoolfellow-he was both, and sometimes more than both; but we loved him, and he taught us. . . . I delight," adds the hon. and learned gentleman, "in the simplest tribute to my dear old master, whom I love as heartily as when I hid his cane, or put his hat up the chimney."-Dublin U. Mag., ccxxxviii. CREOSOTING TIMBER. BY FREDERICK MARSHALL. EVERYBODY has had the toothache; consequently, everybody knows what creosote is. Very few people are, however, aware that the clear, watery-looking spirit with which they have vainly scorched and blistered their gums is, though in a different form, a cure for all the ills which wood is heir to. From the days of Pliny downwards, all manner of ideas have been suggested, and all manner of efforts made to prolong the natural duration of timber, by enduing it with an artificial power of resistance to its foes. Lime, salt, corrosive sublimate, and countless other chemical agents have been infructuously tried; their use did not appear to add one single year to the evanescent lives of poles and rafters. Dry rot and wet rot, ants and worms, were as destructive as ever, and there seemed to be no prospect of bestowing on timber the immortality so much desired for it. In 1839, a patent was obtained, by Mr. John Bethell, for preserving wood, by injecting into it oil of tar, commonly known as oil of creosote, from the quantity of that spirit which it contains: the experience of thirteen years appears to prove that the long-sought discovery has at last been made. In the Great Exhibition last year, attested average specimens of creosoted timber were shown, which positively were, after ten or twelve years' constant use, as sound and solid as when they were first put down; while in immediate and most suggestive comparison with them were pieces of undoctored wood which, after one-third of the saem sort of service as their pickled neighbours had performed, presented the external similitude of pulverised hay, or shrivelled honeycomb. Mr. Bethell's invention was mentioned, with strong commendation, in the Jurors' reports, and a prize medal was awarded to him for it. The so-called "creosote," employed in this process of embalming wood, is one of the products obtained by distillation from common coal tar. It is a thick, dark brown oil, rather heavier than water, with which, of course, it will not mix. It is not quite the sort of stuff which one would like to put into one's mouth, even in the delusive hope of curing pain. The spirit which the chemists sell by the same name is distilled, with much more care and elaboration, from a different material. Mr. Bethell's principal works near London are at East Greenwich. They have a wharf frontage to the river, for the reception of the raw timber, which is brought alongside in barges, and is landed and piled into stacks until its turn comes for undergoing the treatment which is to bestow upon it everlasting youth. The timber consists of railway sleepers, piles, telegraph posts, and other articles for use in the open air. Palings, pit-props, and hop-poles, are often sent to be preserved, and the process has even been tried upon waste fish, for use as manure. In the middle of the works stand, or rather lie conspicuous, side by side, two immense wrought-iron cylinders, each seventy feet long, and six feet in diameter inside; with doors at one end, and a tramway running from the river side right into each. Next to them is a brick "drying house," with ovens and flues for drying and smoking the wood. Some large, open, iron tanks, a steam-engine, and a saw-mill, complete the machinery of the establishment. Several thousand "blocks," or double sleepers, lie piled about the ground. Each block is nine feet long and ten inches square, so as to make, when sawn down the middle, two sleepers of the usual English narrow-guage size of nine feet long, ten inches wide, and five inches thick. Semicircular sleepers, of the same proportions, are also sometimes used; but they are more common abroad than in England. The cutting of the blocks is the first process which they undergo. The sleepers which they form are carried from the saw-mill to the dryinghouse, where they remain for twenty-four hours in an atmosphere of dense smoke, at a temperature of 180 degrees; the effect produced upon them is almost exactly similar to the "curing" of herrings or bacon. The whole of the inherent moisture of the wood being thus expelled, and the albumen in the sap-vessels being coagulated by the heat, the sleepers are placed on trucks, and are run along the tramway right into the cylinder. As many truck loads as it will hold are pushed into it one after the other, and when it is packed full, or, in creosoting language, "charged,' the doors are closed and made air tight. A steam exhausting pump is then applied to the cylinder; all the atmospheric air in it is sucked out, and a vacuum is created in it, and in the wood which it contains. The creosote oil is then thrown, by an hydrostatic force-pump, from a neighbouring reservoir, into the cylinder, at a continuous pressure of 180lbs. to the inch, and it naturally and necessarily rushes into the pores of the wood to replace the air which has been withdrawn from them. The force-pump is kept at work for ten or twelve hours, by which time a sufficient quantity of oil (usually two-thirds of a gallon, or 7lbs. weight, to a cubic foot of pine timber) has been injected. The doors are then opened, the pickled wood is drawn out again in the trucks, and a fresh charge" is introduced in its place. The finished wood is reloaded into barges, and is carried off to its thenceforth eternal duties. In cases where it is not considered essential to so thoroughly imbue the wood with the preservative oil, it is simply thrown, after having been smoke-dried, into an open tank full of hot creosote, and is allowed to soak there for forty-eight hours. This less expensive process can, however, only be applied to short lengths of timber; long pieces must be submitted to pressure in the exhausting cylinder; for as the oil enters at the ends, and not at the sides, force is necessary to send it up to any distance beyond four or five feet. As the men at the Greenwich establishment are paid by piece-work, they will sometimes dispense with the trucks and tramway, and will, in order to get a larger charge at once, pack the wood into the cylinder with their own hands; and as they must also, in that case, withdraw it themselves, they are obliged to go right into the oil-dripping cylinder to perform their duties, and have to breathe an atmosphere of tar which, though it almost blinds them, from its effect upon the eyes, yet gives them an amount of appetite which no other known stimulant can impart. Perhaps the chef of some illustrious gourmet will act upon this information, and will invent, as a substitute for hunger-inspiring oysters, a "volau-vent à l'huile de goudron." The action of creosote upon wood is to completely fill up the pores, and to coat the fibres; so that it almost loses the character of wood, and acquires the consistency of pitch. It is, when thus prepared, utterly insensible to the action of air or water; its natural tendency to fermenta |