"We read in the Memoirs of Moore," says a writer on M. Guizot, in the London Quarterly, 1854, "that in 1820 he was present at a performance in Paris, of Tarare, an opera of Beaumarchais, which was written in 1787, at a period when the promulgation of liberal ideas, with a certain infusion of science, was the fashion in Paris. Accordingly, while Nature and the Genius of Heat are trilling in a duet the laws of gravitation, Tarare (a virtuous soldier) defends his wife from the assaults of the monarch of Ormuz, who, being finally defeated, kills himself, and Tarare is proclaimed king in his place. Only three years afterward Louis XVI., having become a constitutional sovereign, and Bailly (who had shortly to pay with his head for his patriotic illusions) being Maire of Paris, Tarare was not allowed to be acted in its original form. Beaumarchais fitted it to the altered circumstances, and in its remodeled shape, Tarare becomes a constitutional king. Under the Republic, Tarare was not allowed to be a monarch at all; and when the opera was performed in 1795, the victorious soldier indignantly refuses the crown. Under Bonaparte, Tarare was again recast to bring it into harmony with the delusion of the hour; and lastly, when in 1820 the performance was witnessed by Moore, Tarare, become more monarchal than ever, displays his loyalty by defending the king of Ormuz from a popular insurrection, and ultimately falls with emotion at the feet of the tyrant, who has the magnanimity to restore his wife to him." St. Austin, with his mother Monica, was led one day by a Roman praetor to see the tomb of Caesar. Himself thus describes the corpse: "It looked of a blue mould, the bone of the nose laid bare, the flesh of the nether lip quite fallen off, his mouth full of worms, and in his eye-pit a hungry toad, feasting upon the remnant portion of flesh and moisture: and so he dwelt in his house of darkness." A traveler in Ceylon, who visited the ruins of ancient Mahagam, says that one of the ruined buildings had apparently rested upon seventy-two pillars. These were still erect, standing in six lines of twelve columns. This building must have formed an oblong of three hundred feet by two hundred and fifty. The stone causeway which passed through the ruins was about two miles in length, being for the most part overgrown with low jungle and prickly cactus. The first we hear of this city is 286 B. C.; but we have no account of the era or cause of its destruction. The records of Ceylon give no satisfactory account of it. The wild elephants come out of the jungles and rub their backs against the columns of this forgotten temple, as the naked Indians gamble with forked sticks on the desolate ruins of Central America.