PHOTOGRAPHIC CORRESPONDENCE:--Clouds in Photographs --Albumenized Paper--Stereoscopic Angles --Photographic Copies of MSS. 501 REPLIES TO MINOR QUERIES:--Lord Cecil's "Memorials" --Foreign Medical Education--Encyclopaedias --Pepys's Grammar--"Antiquitas Saeculi Juventus Mundi"--Napoleon's Spelling--Black as a mourning Colour--Chanting of Jurors--Aldress--Huggins and Muggins--Camera Lucida--"When Orpheus went down"--The Arms of De Sissone--Oaths of Pregnant Women--Lepel's Regiment--Editions of the Prayer Book prior to 1662--Creole--Daughter pronounced "Dafter"--Richard Geering--Island 502 MISCELLANEOUS:-- Books and Odd Volumes wanted 505 Notices to Correspondents 505 Advertisements 505 * * * * * Notes. PARTY-SIMILES OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY--NO. I. "FOXES AND FIREBRANDS." NO. II. "THE TROJAN HORSE." With Englishmen, at least, the seventeenth was a century pre-eminent for quaint conceits and fantastic similes: the literature of that period, whether devotional, poetical, or polemical[1], was alike infected with the universal mania for strained metaphors, and men vied with each other in giving extraordinary titles to books, and making the {486} contents justify the title. Extravagance and the far-fetched were the gauge of wit: Donne, Herbert, and many a man of genius foundered on this rock, as well as Cowley, who acted up to his own definition: "In a true Piece of Wit _all things_ must be, Yet all things there agree; As in the _Ark_, join'd without force or strife, All creatures dwelt--all creatures that had life." It is not, however, for the purpose of illustrating this mania that I am about to dwell on the two similes which form the subject of my present Note: I selected them as favourite party-similes which formed a standing dish for old Anglican writers; and also because they throw light on the history of religious party in England, and thus form a suitable supplement to my article on "High Church and Low Church" (Vol. viii., p. 117.). As the object of the Church of England, in separating from Rome, was the _reformation_, not the _destruction_ of her former faith, by the very act of reformation she found herself opposed to two bodies; namely, _that_ from which she separated, and the ultra-reformers or Puritans, who clamoured for a _radical_ reformation. Taking these as the Scylla and Charybdis--the two extremes to be avoided--the Anglican Church hoped to attain the safe and golden mean by steering between these opposites, and find, in this _via media_ course, the path of truth.