It was only occasionally that the real character of Fourier, the French philosopher, showed itself. "It is strange," said, one day, a certain very influential person belonging to the court of Charles X., whom the servant, Joseph, would not allow to get further than Fourier's ante-chamber--"it is really strange that your master should be more difficult of access than a minister." Fourier, overhearing this remark, jumped out of bed, to which he had been confined by indisposition, opened the room door, and facing the courtier, exclaimed, "Joseph, tell the gentleman, that if I were a minister, I should receive everybody, because such would be my duty: as a private individual, I receive whom I think fit, and when I think fit." The grandee, disconcerted by the liveliness of the sally, did not answer a word. We must even suppose that from that instant he determined to visit nobody but ministers, for the simple _savant_ heard no more of him. ------------------ MECHANICAL TRIUMPHS. The direct and almost instant benefits of Mechanical Inventions to their originators have been thus eloquently illustrated in the _Edinburgh Review_:--"Contributing, as they do, to our most immediate and pressing wants--appealing to the eye by their magnitude, and often by their grandeur, and associated, in many cases, with the warmer impulses of humanity and personal safety--the labours of the mechanist and engineer acquire a contemporary celebrity, which is not vouchsafed to the results of scientific research, or to the productions of literature and the fine arts. The gigantic steam-vessel, which expedites and facilitates the intercourse of nations--the canal, which unites two distant seas--the bridge and the aqueduct, which span an impassable valley--the harbour and the break-water, which shelter our vessels of peace and of war--the railway, which hurries us along on the wings of mechanism, and the light beacon which throws its directing beams over the deep--address themselves to the secular interests of every individual, and obtain for the engineer who invented or who planned them, a high and a well-merited popular reputation." ------------------ THE ELGIN MARBLES. These beautiful relics of Grecian antiquity cost the Earl of Elgin 74,000_l._, of which sum he barely received one-half from Government; so that Lord Byron's imputation to the Earl of a mercantile spirit in the transaction is notoriously unjust. ------------------ RALEIGH A CHEMIST.