The pranks of popes and priests, conjurors and fire-eaters, have comparatively fled before the piercings of the intellectual ray. Witches no longer untie the winds to capsise church-steeples, and “topple” down castles,—they no longer dance round the enchanted cauldron, invoking the “ould one” to propitiate their cantrip vows:—Beelzebub himself with his cloven foot is seldom if ever seen above the “bottom of the bottomless pit;” ghosts and apparitions are “jammed hard and fast” in the Red sea; demons of every cast and colour are eternally spellbound; legends are consigned to the chimney-corner of long winter-nights; miracles to the “_presto_, quick, change and begone!” of the nimble-fingered conjuror; and holy relics to the rosary of the bigot. Amulets and charms have lost their influence; saints are uncanonized, and St. Patrick, St. Dennis, & Co. are flesh and blood like ourselves; monks and holy friars no longer revel in the debauches of the cloister; the hermit returns unsolicited from the solitude of the desert, to encounter with his fellow-men; the pilgrim lays by his staff, leaves the Holy Land to its legitimate possessors, and the tomb of St. Thomas-à-Becket, to enjoy, unmolested, the sombre tranquillity of the grave. Quacks and mountebanks begin also to caper within a narrower sphere; to be brief, the word of command, to use a nautical phrase, has long been given, “every man to his station, and the cook to the fore-sheet,”—worldly occupations have superseded ultramundane speculations. Astrologers themselves, who once ruled the physical world, have long ago been virtually consigned to the grave of the Partridges; and floods and storms are found to be phenomena perfectly consistent with the natural world. We also know that the sun is stationary, that the moon is not made of green cheese, and that there are stars yet in the firmament which the centifold powers of the telescope of a Herschell will never be able to explore.