delighted to gaze upon the waters from a safe place on land, but had a horror of living on it even for a few hours. I recalled to his recollection his own lines--'I'm on the sea! I'm on the sea! I am where I would ever be;' and he shook his head, and laughingly declared I must have misquoted his words, or that Dibdin had written the piece and put Barry Cornwall's signature to it.") That Michelet, who wrote a book on The Sea, had a like horror of it. ("I love the sea," he said, "but as in the case of a crowd, I love it at a distance.") That Vathek, that splendid Oriental tale, was written by a young man of twenty-two who had never visited the countries whose manners he so vividly described; and that of all the glories and prodigalities of the English Sardanapalus, his slender romance, the work of three days, is the only durable memorial. That Beckford's father, while Lord Mayor of London, became especially famous for a speech that was never delivered--the speech in reply to the king, written after the event by Horne Tooke, and engraved on the pedestal of a statue of Beckford erected in Guildhall. That Michel Angelo, unconsciously, laid the first stone of the Reformation. ("History tells us that Julius II. gave him an unlimited commission to make a mausoleum, in which their mutual interests should be combined. The artist's plan was a parallelogram, and the superstructure was to consist of forty statues, many of which were to be colossal, and interspersed with ornamental figures and bronze basso-rilievos, besides the necessary architecture, with appropriate decorations to unite the composition into one stupendous whole. To make a fitting place for it, the pope determined to rebuild St. Peter's itself; and this is the origin of that edifice, which took one hundred and fifty years to complete, and is now the grandest display of architectural splendor that ornaments the Christian world. To prosecute the undertaking, money was wanted, and indulgences were sold to supply the deficiency of the treasury; and a monk of Saxony, opposing the authority of the church, produced this singular event, that whilst the most splendid edifice which the world had ever seen was building for the Catholic faith, the religion to which it was consecrated was shaken to its foundation.") That the erection of one of the pyramids has been ascribed to a Pharaonic princess, of great beauty, who, like Aspasia and Thargelia, became ambitious in her intimacies. (The story is that she was one day taunted by her father with the inutility of the admiration that she excited. Pyramid-building was then the fashion in the family, and she vowed that she would leave behind her a monument of the power of her charms as durable as her august relations did of the power of their armies. The number of her lovers was increased by all those who were content to sacrifice their fortunes for her smiles. The pyramid rose rapidly; with the frailty of its foundress, the massive monument