middling circumstances gave four, and the poorer sort contented themselves with the gift of one, exhibiting the figure of any saint, in honour of whom the child received its name. Thus, in the books of the Stationers’ Company, we find under 1560, ‘a spoone the gift of Master Reginald Woolf, all gilte, with the picture of St. John.’ Shakspeare, in his Henry VIII., makes the king say, when Cranmer professes himself unworthy to be sponsor to the young princess:— ‘Come, come, my lord, you’d spare your spoons.’ Again, in Davenant’s Comedy of ‘The Wits,’ (1639): ‘My pendants, cascanets, and rings; My christ’ning caudle-cup and spoons, Are dissolved into that lump.’ The coral and bells is an old invention for baptismal presents. Coral was anciently considered an amulet against fascination and evil spirits. It is to be regretted that, at the present time, the grave responsibilities of the sponsors of children is too often considered to end with the presentation of some such gifts as we have enumerated. It is not to our praise that the ties between sponsors and god-children, were much closer, and held more sacredly in times which we are pleased to call barbarous. God-children were placed not only in a state of pupilage with their sureties, but also in the position of relations. A sort of relationship was established even between the Godfathers and Godmothers; insomuch, that marriage between any such parties was forbidden under pain of severe punishment. This injunction, like many others, had it appears been sufficiently disobeyed to warrant a special canon (12th) of the Council of Compiègne, held so early as 757, which enforced the separation of all those sponsors and God-children of both sexes who had intermarried, and the Church refused the rites of marriage to the women so separated. A century after (815) the Council of Mayence not only reinforced these restrictions and penalties, but added others. ARCTIC HEROES. A FRAGMENT OF NAVAL HISTORY. SCENE, _a stupendous region of icebergs and snow. The bare mast of a half-buried ship stands among the rifts and ridges. The figures of two men, covered closely with furs and skins, slowly emerge from beneath the winter-housing of the deck, and descend upon the snow by an upper ladder, and steps cut below in the frozen wall of snow. They advance._ _1st Man._ We are out of hearing now. Give thy heart words. [_They walk on in silence some steps further, and then pause._ _2nd Man._ Here ‘midst the sea’s unfathomable ice, Life-piercing cold, and the remorseless night Which never ends, nor changes its dead face, Save in the ’ghast smile of the hopeless moon, Must slowly close our sum of wasted hours; And with them all the enterprising dreams, Efforts, endurance, and resolve, which make The power and glory of us Englishmen.